Ok, I admit it. Much like the romantic poets and possibly the chap who penned ‘Alice in Wonderland’ I like to work under the influence of a drug. NOT Laudanum like Byron however and certainly never opium likes his peculiar friends. Coffee is, I have been told, a drug. My younger brother (a supercilious creature who is probably destined to become a lawyer) regularly upbraids me for my weakness and tells me that unless I kick the coffee habit my life will spiral down into a dark pit of gloom and disorder and that he jolly well won’t be bailing me out. He has also described to me in gruelling detail the sad decline of people who pass from coffee to cigarettes, from cigarettes to joints and from joints into lunatic asylums. According to him the line that separates the single morning coffee from the deranged life of shoving heroin needles up one’s arm is a thin one and I play with it to my incalculable danger. Such are the charming conversations we have around the dinner table to the immense horror of my extremely elegant and refined mother.
But as I commence work on the third draft of my novel, an ambitious love story that requires a broad range of research ranging from Roman battle strategies to the ramblings of Nietzsche, I find he has a point. It is simply nauseating to have to admit that such a worm as a younger brother could be right about ANYTHING, but sadly, he is. The drug of coffee IS progressive. Not to cigarettes as he predicted so darkly, but rather to more and more coffee. I swear, each draft of the novel seems to increase the intake of coffee. I have moved from one cup to six. I have tossed away the French Press for an espresso maker and I am drinking so much of that that it may now be neutralizing my calcium intake (another terrifying fact, apparently). My brother continues to stare disapprovingly at me as I sit growling over my morning cups of coffee but strangely, these days he keeps silent. Perhaps it is the wild, primitive look in my eye. Or maybe it is the way I hiss that the coffee is SO hot and would REALLY hurt anyone it got accidently spilt on. Then again, it might simply be that all people in the final and darkest stages of their addictions are known for violent behaviour and my brother has decided not to antagonize me until the last draft of the novel is finished and I rehabilitate myself to the single cup of French Press. For a worm, he can be surprisingly astute at times.
So there you go, I write under the influence of drugs. Now pass the coffee please, I have a chapter to finish.