One of the things that seems to define life events for me is the smell of fresh coffee.

Sometimes I get to drink it, too. There are a set of dew-laden but mostly warm hackercamp mornings that have been brightened by the handing round of green-triangular Swedish surplus Trangia mugs, while I slurp Yorkshire tea from a Netapp travel mug.

There were a set of ops-team gatherings in the back of Colonna & Smalls where we had gleeful ideas about what this devops malarkey was going to be and how the cool kids in That London were probably doing it better, over a variety of coffee types, while I slurped from a cup of Extra-Bastard tea.

And there was growing up with a huge Corning percolator gurgling on the Aga.

I like coffee.

However, until recently I was fairly sure it didn’t like me. There were far too many times where an otherwise benign mug of something that smelled amazing would render me a quivering heap on the floor. I just assumed that unless I was feeling extra competent and something-or-other, my metabolism was broken and I couldn’t cope with the extra stimulation.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been starting the day with a happy mug of Lavazza. It’s not the spectacular Lavazza Mattino I lived on while on my hols in Brittany far too long ago, but it’s close enough. If one can buy the French gubbins in Blighted Brexit Terf Island, then I would be really jolly keen. Still, here we are.

So I have been wondering what the hell has changed? If anything, I should be avoiding stimulants and sipping fruit teas. What is/was that wired/tired eat-everything anx-AF state that meant I couldn’t cope with coffee and how do I avoid it?

And, last night, I realised … It’s cortisol, isn’t it?

All those times I had to stop drinking coffee? It wasn’t the coffee that was the problem. It was that for one reason or another my life/state had got so fucked that I had got used to the permanent state of anx-and-eat and I could no longer see the wood for the dreadful situation I’d been led into.

And that’s a bit grim when I allow myself to think about it.

Anyway. This is an experiment in mutiple platforms because I want to play with something that isn’t the blue hellsite or the other blue hellsite, and because I kind of want a writer/maker web-presence like it was 2001 or something. Let’s assume the last twenty years were a horrible mistake and proceed accordingly.