Coffee

Coffee;  A dark ambrosia of joy.  Each morning, I make coffee , it is a ritual.  The rite is for both Paul and me, first the coffee beans tumbling into the coffee grinder, till they become granular, and then the sweeping of this into the filter, hot water and the slowly dribble of the water through the filter.  My coffee pot is a royal blue, the old one which I used with Paul was red but it had an accident. Then I take my Derby coffee mug, a beautiful turquoise with a light gold band on the edge.  Turquoise is my favourite colour, matched with pink, for some unfathomable reason.

I was reminded of this by reading "Beyond the Fields we Know" blog, she had woken up with a migraine and had made herself a thick expresso to knock the headache out.

It reminded me years ago of a Turkish student I had had from the language school, Turkish coffee is something else.  He would make it in some tiny cups for us, he was a lovely gentle giant of a man.  Studying textiles at Manchester university later on.  He bought the coffee cups and a tiny jug to top up the cups back from Turkey.  He once wanted to have a go on my spinning wheel, but without any one in the room watching - chuckle.  

His sister would phone him up, and as I answered the phone she would greet me with 'goodbye', I explained several times that you said 'hello' when greeting someone on the phone but it was so funny at the time.

I had many students to look after, some were easy, others more difficult, creating a lot of stress.  Some from rich parents had been tipped out of English boarding schools straight into language school before going on to university.  Young men who had little knowledge of looking after themselves.  Other were older, doctors or teachers.  I still have photos of some, the Japanese man who wanted to live in Bath, the Swiss who stayed on for a couple of weeks more and constructed a zip line for lego creatures down from the top attic to the garden, me worried sick that my son would fall out of the window.  

Davor who was always near tears if things weren't as he wanted (the school sent me the most difficult students).  I remember that first day he arrived, taking him for a walk up on the downs and he rather truculently saying his previous host family had taken him up there also.  The stirring and then sipping his tea from a spoon, and his face contemplating that little bit of fat rind round his pork chop, apparently his mother always took it off for him (he was 27). 

A phone call from the school would alert me that he was on the way home upset by something.  The funniest moment when he came home one day and I found him in his bedroom weeping into a towel whilst a three old Tom jumping on the bed singing to him 'poor, poor Davos'  Now I suppose today his emotional upset would have triggered a whole host of response from experts but in those olden days we just got on with coping.

Coffee has led me down a memory lane, back to a garden I loved dearly and incidents that still bring a smile.