Waking up and smelling the coffee

Life is too short to drink poor coffee, dammit at my age it’s too short even to drink mediocre coffee so I sure as hell aren’t going to faff around with jars and granules, no matter what their clever marketing tells me. Make Your Moments Matter? Not with instant coffee, Nescafe!
We love our coffee machine so much it has a little shrine in the corner of the kitchen where we leave offerings of coffee and chant. OK, we don’t chant, but we hum a merry tune.
Up until now, our coffee has come expertly ground to the specifications of our machine, direct from a shop in that there London. I’m sure we can get decent coffee in Yorkshire, but these guys came with personal recommendations, so that was good enough for us. They even sell tea, first flush Darjeeling, the Champagne of tea. Sometimes there are little treats tucked in the packaging, like jars of jam, or posh teabags, that’s London for you, it’s a can of mushy peas and jar of mint sauce in Yorkshire.
With no skiing or summer holidays thanks to #bastardcancer and the pandemic, we reckoned we and our coffee machine deserved a treat, something that would bring a smile to our faces every single day. We wanted a decent coffee grinder. Not just any coffee grinder but one which came with instruction in Italian first and has a dial that goes up to 20, eat your heart out Spinal Tap.
The delivery, packaged in what was destined to be the latest cat bed, coincided with the complete disappearance of the my sense of smell and taste. Up until that point, I’d had none of the classic covid symptoms so typical that I should tick that box just as the grinder and 2kg of the finest beans arrived, blimey I might just as well have been drinking Mellow Birds (which didn’t make me smile).
So a few days of Noel grinding beans and me sniffing hopefully. No, I said on more than one occasion, can’t smell a thing. Pity, he replied, it smells and tastes delicious. Oh good, I said, not meaning it.
Of course all my senses quickly returned and that first coffee was divine. It was immediately followed by a second, then third, which were equally excellent. I was soon bouncing off the walls with caffeine overload, but that was a small price to pay by making up for all the coffee I’d missed.
The lockdown continues and those beans and the delicious aroma of them grinding make us happy every day, I told you we were simple souls. Noel and I have been humbled by all the kindness and support from friends near and far while we’ve had covid. We had a mild dose, Noel’s cough lingered a little, but once he could, he was lacing up his running shoes and off for a run, with me huffing and puffing behind him, just like I usually am.
I think it’ll be a while before we’re normal, our normality disappeared 18 months ago now, but we still have good coffee, great friends and cats who ignore us most of the time, but that’s cats for you.
I had a message from the NHS today via the app, saying that as I’d tested positive, would I be willing to donate plasma to help with research? Absobloodylutely, I said, but just make sure the coffee is good and the biscuits are chocolate.