As you can see, my domestic life now is one of joyous fulfilment. Should you ask me how this has come to be, I would quote the words of one of The Muppet Show’s greatest acts, Marvin Suggs & The Muppaphone. As Suggs plays “Witch Doctor” on the Muppaphone—a living xylophone made of Muppets, which he repeatedly bashes with small hammers, eliciting screams—he talks about the public reaction to his act.

“People ask me—what is your secret with the Muppaphone?” he says, in his strangulated, high-pitched voice. “And I say—MUTUAL LOVE AND RESPECT.”

For me and Pete, it has been much the same. And so we sail on in the deep blue bliss of marriage. But it has not always been like this. I came from a radically different background. In many, many ways, my early life resembles Angela’s Ashes, or A Child Called It. This searing account of what it was like to reach adulthood having never had a cup of tea amply illustrates the deep mental scars I still bare, bravely, today.

Note how the piece dates from a time when one still paid for the Evening Standard, and how accurate my assessment of its future proved to be. I am like some kind of media scrying bowl.

CAFFEINE—LIFEBLOOD OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

As I write this, I’m sipping at a lovely cup of tea. Obviously, in many ways, this is the least print-worthy sentence of the week. A brew is not news. Everyone drinks tea. Of course they do.

Except, until recently, me.

Yes—until last summer, I had had three cups of coffee, and maybe ten cups of tea, in my life. My whole life. I know. I know. Reading my words must be like reading the musings of a Moon Man from Mars. But what can I say—hot drinks never really happened for me. I guess I never met the right person to introduce me to tea. Or perhaps I never really felt confident enough in myself to believe anyone would want to make tea for me.

Last summer, however, we had a new kitchen put in, and as the kitchen is also where I work, I had to decamp for five weeks to the coffee shops of Crouch End with my laptop. Being sensitive, I noticed that it was the custom of these places not to ask for “a big cup of tap water, please,” but to drink their expensively vended tea, or coffee, instead. Within two weeks, I had gone from a caffeine virgin to someone who could easily knock back four lattes and as many teas in an afternoon, and I tell you this: it made me see everything in a whole new light.

Friends, we live in a caffeine world. We think in a caffeine way and we live caffeine lives. Our problems are the problems of people addled with popular hot beverages, and our thoughts are half our own, half the product of our cups. So many aspects of modern life I’d never understood before—things that had completely baffled me about society—suddenly became obvious, once I’d spent a month off my face on tea.

Take, for instance, headaches. Until I became a tea addict, I presumed that people saying “I have a headache” was simply a euphemism for wanting to opt out of an impending activity—like my father saying “I can’t—I’ve got a bone in my leg,” when I was little, and wanted him to play hide and seek.

Enter the world of caffeine, however, and you live in a world where your skull suddenly becomes very weak and porous, into which vexing low-level pain can seep at any minute.

Likewise, insomnia. Usually, my average span between “lights off” and dreaming of Doctor Who was under five minutes. Late at night after a busy day = going to sleep. It seemed quite basic. Now in the post-tea world, however, any cup after 4 PM provokes an unwelcome wakefulness in the center of the brain, present long after the non-caffeinated would be woozily stumbling to bed. When found in conjunction with caffeine problem three—low-level anxiety and restlessness—and what Thom Yorke of Radiohead once so accurately described as the “unborn chicken voices in my head” can cluck on until 1 or 2 AM. Just from tea! I tell you, it’s put me right off the idea of crack.

The main thing I’ve noticed, however, is how unreasonable, self-absorbed and permanently outraged caffeine has made me. The bottom line is, hot drinks turn people into pigs. Simply walking along with a take-out coffee in your hand turns you into a belligerent fantasist. You really feel like you’re a vital cast member of Sex and the City or The West Wing—when, of course, really, you’re just a schmoo with a brew heading for H&M. Knowing all this doesn’t make me any more pleasant. In the last few months, I have started arguing with people in my head.

Instance: yesterday, at Oxford Circus, I wanted to buy an Evening Standard, but only had coins. As I hovered to the side, counting my change, I had an absolutely apoplectic row with the newspaper man— but wholly and solely in my mind.

“What you giving me all this brahn money for?” he asked me, in his cockney way, in my imagination. “I’ve got a wallet—not a sack.”

“This is exactly why The Standard is going out of business!” I shouted back, as interior monologue. “This is fifty brown pennies more than I’m paying for The Metro, or the London Paper. I work for a newspaper! I know which way the wind’s blowing! It’ll all be online in three years’ time, treacle, and you’ll be in a cardboard box being wee’d on by foxes! Screw you, man. SCREW YOU!”

This furious spat was cut short by, in the actual physical world, me giving the Evening Standard man 50p in loose change, and him saying “Cheers, love,” and giving me my paper.

I had had three lattes before 11 AM.

There is a plus side to caffeine, of course. I’ve lost over ten pounds, can write a blog entry in nine minutes flat, and feel a previously undiscovered connection with the world, simply by being able to say “I could murder a brew. Tea, anyone?” to a room full of nodding people. Indeed, I would say that this feeling of finally being like everyone else is the most attractive aspect of having become a caffeine drinker. Irritable, tired, anxious and sporadically unable to see out of one eye due to migraine, I finally feel normal.