More PSPO Zones please
I Hate Deadlines
Chasing the Flavour in Coffee
So, for anyone who doesn’t know, I review beers, and I’m fairly good at picking out individual flavours.
That’s why I got a bit excited when my wife bought me a Ninja Luxe Café bean-to-cup coffee machine last Christmas. I liked the idea of doing the same thing with coffee. You read these descriptions and they sound incredible. “Mild chocolate with a juicy blackcurrant sweetness and a hint of lime.” or “Rich dark chocolate, sweet honey, and bright tangerine.”
I genuinely wanted to taste that.
But I can’t ... everything just tastes like coffee.
I’ve tried the usual advice. No milk, no sweeteners, no sugar. I’ve read that the drip method, or the Luxe function on this specific machine, as apparently this is one of the best ways to bring out those more delicate fruit flavours.
Still nothing.
So now I’m going to treat this like I would a beer review, but slower, and a bit more methodical. I’m going to test strength, grind size, temperature, and even the water I’m using.
I’ll keep this post updated as I go. If I crack it, great. If I don’t, at least I’ll know it’s not for lack of trying.
A Story 35 Years in the Making!
I’ve probably carried this idea around for more than 35 years.
It started with a lad I used to work with. I’ll call him Chris… mainly because that’s his name. He always said he had a novel in him. To be fair, most of us think that at some point. The problem, at least for me, is pulling enough connected ideas together to actually make a novel work. I tend to land on smaller ideas. Short stories feel more natural for me to write, that and I can be realy lazy, and writing at least 40-50,000 words is a bit much for me.
Chris had this very simple concept. A man dies, and at his funeral the people there slowly discover who he really was. That was it. Not much to go on I know, but it stuck with me.
Over the years, I’ve kept coming back to it. I’ve often pictured that man as me. The mourners talking, sharing bits, slowly building up a picture. The good things, the missed chances, the ideas that never quite made it. Almost autobiographical, in a way.
But if I’m honest, I don’t think my real life is interesting enough to carry a story like that. And it had to be about me because that's how I've always thought about this story, and tbh, the stories I’ve written recently, and another that I am currently working on now, they all start with something real in my life, a small truth (the crow corner I drive past almost every day, or the old Victorian doll/ghost my wife and I saw at a window one day, a grain of truth that drifts into the story.
And in my head, this story was always the same.
But because I'm not interesting enough, over time the character became someone else. Still rooted in that original idea, but more interesting, more layered, more worth writing about. In Chris’s version, I’m sure the twist was that the mourners started off disliking the man, then came to understand him, maybe even like him.
I could never quite make that wor for me and it always felt a bit flat.
But something clicked this morning.
I’ve got the twist now, and it flips the whole thing on its head.
This isn’t a story where people come to appreciate the man.
It’s the opposite, and I'm kinda looking forward to writing it.