The Tyranny of Coffee

What went before?

The following passage was found in the back pages of an abandoned notebook. Other entries suggest the author served in the British Army in the late twenty-tens.

There once was an Army that ran on honest and clumsy conversations between lunchtime beers and evening port. There would be some ramblings about technical stuff that leaped between arrogance and embarrassment, depending on the audience. There would be jokes. Always at someone's expense, but that was the price of family-like loyalty in an existential profession. The only enemy was Them. Unless the Russians turned up, and even then it was ambiguous.

I've read about such an Army in books.

This? Oh, there are no bars. Not without a risk assessment anyway. Honest conversation? No, that's all gone. Still clumsy, mind. If you want anything outside of a minuted Skype call you will need to have a rendezvous at Costa Coffee. They service something similar to that fraternal nectar known as alcohol, except it's purely for the God of 'Efficiency'. If you go to the alter of coffee you can moan about appraisal reports - not your soldiers though, only your own - and you can reference it in articles critiquing 'time-based' policies and fantasising about utopian meritocracies.

End the cult of coffee. Make Alcohol Great Again.

The Ten Minute Halt (1908) by William Wollen.