I did not know what coffee really was until I was 14 years old. My first taste of it was a great revelation, and I have never got over it.
Now I can hardly find the real thing anywhere outside my own kitchen.
Just as proper music has been driven out of our lives by guitars and drums, proper coffee has been displaced by a bitter ocean of headache-inducing espresso on one side, and a great lake of instant brown liquid on the other.
I drink these things because they are better than nothing.
Drown the espresso in a bucket of milk and it can be bearable, under the right conditions. Instant coffee is all right if you don’t think of it as coffee, but as a different drink, something warm, wet and inoffensive to punctuate the livelong day.
Until 1965, I used to drink a lot of the tinned powdered instant version of the time, disgustingly sugared. My brother and I, in our provincial, suburban ignorance, thought it faintly sophisticated. Those were also the last days of ‘frothy coffee’, served in glass cups and saucers in pretentious fake-Italian cafes, and tasting roughly as you might imagine a donkey would taste.
Powdered instant was certainly better than the bottled substance, also known as coffee, which my grandfather mixed with boiled milk as his mid-morning refreshment. Amazingly, you can still get Camp Coffee. And I noticed some years ago that its once-imperialist label had been radically altered to suit the multicultural times.
They might perhaps have been better occupied reforming the contents. I don’t think I would drink it now.
'Until 1965, I used to drink a lot of the tinned powdered instant version of the time,' writes our columnist, but it 'was certainly better than the bottled substance' such as Camp Coffee
And then came the great discovery. I had won a scholarship to school and my parents generously asked me what I would like to do to celebrate it. I knew immediately.
We must go, I insisted, on the Golden Arrow, from Calais to Paris. The Golden Arrow, long before Eurostar and the Chunnel, was a beautiful way to go to Paris by super-comfortable train. The best bit came after you had picked your way across the tracks at Calais, and been through the freezing French customs shed (it was December). There we were given a compartment to ourselves, in a beautiful old-pre-war blue and gold Pullman car (not the ludicrously perfect type you get on the Orient Express now).
As the train steamed (it did steam then) towards Paris, we were served a feast of beautifully cooked food. And after the apple tart came the coffee, each cup with its own battered metal filter. And at that moment I was seduced by France. I had never tasted anything like it before and I have spent quite a lot of time and effort since, trying to reproduce that first delight.
The rest of the meal had been superb, as expected. But this coffee altered my entire view of the world. If I could get hold of it again, and keep doing so, my life would be transformed for the better.
I knew for the first time what coffee actually was, or at least what it was supposed to be.
The word had altered its meaning in the internal dictionary of my mind. How can I explain it? It tasted the way freshly ground coffee smells. It was not bitter, or weak. I could have drunk it black, but preferred it with hot milk.
Peter Hitchens says a trip to Paris opened his eyes to proper coffee for the first time: 'Each cup had its own battered metal filter... I had never tasted anything like it before'
There were many good things about that first visit to Paris – a thing nobody ever gets over. We were there smack in the middle of Charles de Gaulle’s first proper election since he had seized power in 1958, and his mischievous visage, with its enormous nose, hung over everything. So I should mention here the great man’s own view on English coffee.
Brought a cup of it at the Foreign Office after he had arrived in London for the first time in 1940, he is supposed to have asked: ‘Ah, is this perhaps the famous English tea?’
It is wholly believable. Whether he was joking or not, there simply was no relation between proper French coffee, as it was then, and the fluid served under that name in England. Like all brief visions of wonderful things, this one has spoiled me.
When we returned to Oxford, my home town, it was back to the Rule of Nescafe.
One tiny outpost among the spires was the now-vanished Elizabeth Restaurant, much favoured by rich Leftists. Its staff were able to conjure superb coffee out of an amazing apparatus like an alchemist’s retort, all gurgling tubes and glass spheres.
But there was no room in my house for such a machine even if I could have found or afforded it.
As the years went by, I found proper coffee roasters, learned to grind the beans myself, experimented with complex devices, and occasionally hit the target. On repeated visits to France, I noticed a severe falling-off in quality. Then came the Starbucks revolution, and there is now almost nothing, anywhere, but espresso coffee.
But since the Starbucks revolution, the quality of coffee has been severely falling off. Most of the time it is either too strong or simply doesn't taste of much
Why has this happened? For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. But most of the time it is just too strong, and if it is not strong, it does not taste of much.
Even Americans can make good coffee if they grasp that it is no good making it feeble and thin (as they often do) as the great Lou Mitchell’s in Chicago, home of the world’s best breakfast, demonstrates.
There are long queues outside in winter, presumably made up of Americans sick of the scratchy brown fluid they call coffee over there. Turkish coffee is good.
Even Soviet coffee could be superb, but there was usually no milk, so I learned to marry it with the excellent local ice cream. It was never hot, but it was always delicious.
But eventually I found out a simple thing. All you need for good coffee is good beans, properly ground (preferably by hand) and a good solid jug.
Pour water that has just boiled on to the grounds, stir them, leave until the grounds have risen to form a sort of crust on top. Then, after a minute or two, pass a cold spoon through that crust, wait till the grounds have sunk to the bottom, and pour.
Do not then put cold milk in it. It will ruin the taste. Heat your milk gently, and it will be far better. Or, if you are not an obsessive hater of fat, as so many deluded people are these days, try actual cream.
You will not need sugar to soften it. It will not blast your skull or make your brain buzz or jangle. You do not have to swamp it with great vats of steamed, skimmed milk.
It has no pretentious Italian name for you to mispronounce. It is just coffee, and when I drink it I am back on the great soft cushions of the Golden Arrow again, bound for Paris for the very first time.