Latte: a coffee made mostly of milk. To be ‘supped’ not drunk, according to permanently furious mini-politicos who spit out versions of ‘latte-suppers’ as insults.
‘Supped’: nearly as wrong for coffee-drinking as lattes are an insult to coffee. ‘Supping with the devil’ in more uptight times? Now, from the most negative end of northern unionist negativism, ‘latte drinking appeasers’ is the steaming reboot of ‘Lundy’.
But hey, with the droopiest corner of Ireland slogging towards an election billed as geared even more than usual to precipitate a crisis, why spend 650 words on milk from which coffee flees in shock? Because it’s escape from confronting the prospect of polling day, from canvassers timid and just occasionally full of themselves rather than their candidates, from posters topping lamp-posts whose occupants will be gunked by the polls. And also because a coffee choice has stood in before for rubbishing someone’s politics.
The USA coined it as ‘latte liberals’; libel by milky drink, neither milk nor coffee. Fading memory suggests it was broached in these pages as a swipe at wishy-washy Catholics. Who were decried for a time as ‘a la carte Catholics’. Before they became the majority, and before their sterner co-religionists started comforting themselves that a smaller church would be purer, pilgrim souls shorn of shilly-shallyers and rallied on a high and windy hill.
Back to coffee, by way of fondly recalling the late Father Denis Faul innocently showing off his cappuccino packet with tiny envelope of chocolate to sprinkle on the top. ‘Look at this!’ Still in Dungannon then before his twilight trial in Carrickmore, this was a pilgrim who liked lapsed company - or at least enjoyed poking fun at them.
Latte-supping liberals; Father Faul would have loved that. Now it’s a unionist bad name for those once (born?) orange but allegedly so faded they’re closer to yellow. In other words, the shade of a party reviled as middle of the road, though that is its own main selling-point.
Time to own up. No lattes in this household. Lots of coffee, though before tea-lover hackles rise, alternated with tea of a decent sort. No flimsy bags soaked in water. The rest of the confession is to time spent in coffee-houses.
Many coffee-lovers don’t use cafés and never will, think it’s a waste of money or genuinely can’t afford it. Plus now they’re afraid of viruses.
But in a populace over-given to more damaging drink there is surely healthy charm about public coffee-drinking. The café-habit costs. Most, though, let you stay as long as you want, thinking your stimulated thoughts alone or in company.
Strange to think that once hot chocolate had all the charm. The places in London town long ago that hosted seditious gossip and radical debate sold fierce black-chocolate to drink, and only later new-fangled coffee just as fierce.
Is Belfast, a city that lost its heart to roasted beans at least a decade back, the northern coffee capital? The Caffeine Republic? No, this is a floating treat. There isn’t much edge to Belfast coffee-shops, Derry always edgier without even trying. Newry has at least one small and modest seller of lovely stuff. North Down is a desert.
There’s a sharp new frontage on the Glen Road but you might be hard put these days to find sedition in a Belfast café. And what’s sedition these days anyhow? Although people chivvied back to offices with machines that pretend to make coffee might brew up a little light sedition. For the Whitehall workers who find that Rees-Mogg note on their desks it might be that or spontaneous combustion.
In a big office in the centre of Belfast, a little counter once sold punchy espressos. The bosses closed it. They should bring it back - with the new Northern Irelander who presented his coffee so proudly - from the top floor cafeteria with café in its name but not its soul.
