Stealing someone's coffee is called 'mugging'

I'm not a fan of coffee. Don't get me wrong, I see that it has potential as a social drink, as a stimulant, as a thing to be analysed and discussed, yet for me the taste and temperature will always be off putting. Unlike the seventeenth century European, I, as a twenty-first century European, do not require coffee as an uncontaminated drink. For those Early Modern Europeans, coffee was regarded as the antithesis of alcohol - I would be interested to ask the question today of which beverage people could choose if they could only have one: beer or coffee?

As I sit typing at my desk in the Middle East, it is appropriate to note that coffee originated in the Arab world. Coffee had reached Mecca and Cairo by 1510 and became a social drink, sold in the markets and offered in dedicated coffee houses, the Starbucks of the times, and respectable people could come together in these places. Interestingly, religious law found coffee hard to place - it wasn't alcohol, but it did kind of intoxicate a person - there was even a big meeting of religious leaders in 1511, Mecca, to try to answer the question, (based upon the Arab's modern love of coffee, I guess the answer was that coffee was 'legal').

Continuing from their Arab roots, coffee houses triumphed in seventeenth century London and continue to triumph around most of the world. In my home city alone, there is a Starbucks, Cafe Nero, Cafe Rouge, Boston Tea Party, Coffee Mocha, Carwardine's, Bird and Carter... each of which is less than 100m away from the other... in many cases less than 20m! Coffee has become part of a greater social culture - for businessmen and women, for mums, for students, for tourists, and many more.

In Ethiopia, where I visited last week for Eid, they have a coffee ceremony, taking time to roast the beans and then pour out the coffee in prearranged porcelain cups. The ceremony gives the participants three cups of coffee each. Though coffee is a stimulant that speeds up life, I feel that this ceremony is a nice way of slowing life and allow one to ponder...

Ponder things like, "How fast can a coffee powered car go?"