Coffee and its scientists

How bad can it be?

The Observer, October 2005

I began writing this article after five cups of good coffee, and it turned out to be one of the best articles I had ever written. It had fluency and style, and a narrative drive that gripped the reader from the very beginning and wouldn’t let go until every fact had been digested and every bon mot admired.

Unfortunately, when I read it again after another four cups, I couldn’t be bothered to go on with it, and in fact I could hardly concentrate on anything. I was just irritable, and I began to dislike the people I was sitting with in my local Starbucks, all those au pairs with their whiny kids and people writing their novels on laptops. It was 3pm. I wanted to trip up those rampaging children, I wanted to go to the toilet, but above all I wanted to sleep. I could have slept for a while despite the caffeine, but I would have woken up a few hours later in a sweat, so I stuck it out for the day, looking for someone to snap at. Coffee does that to people: the sudden high, the brief period of delusory creativity, the plunging low, the tiredness and anxiety and headaches. And then it does it all again the next day.

The reason I had drunk nine cups – some of them double-shot varieties, which nudged the total to as much as 1,500mg of caffeine, three times my daily intake and about one-seventh of the fatal dose – was in the interests of health journalism. I had begun to feel bad about the amount of coffee I was drinking, and wondered whether I should cut down. I looked at the dregs at the bottom of my large cup and thought, ‘That can’t be good.’ My teenage children had also begun to have the occasional cup at home, so I began to worry about them.

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