Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
I first tasted it in a coffee shop north of Leicester Square and west of Chinatown. Thought it was in a league of its own, unlike anything I'd ever tasted. To be honest, I've never been able to reproduce the impact. Bought a sack-cloth bag of it in Jamaica on my one and only trip there so far. But it didn't match up. Bought another tin of it last Christmas at the atmospheric Martyn's coffee shop in Muswell Hill, North London (home of The Kinks - let's chuck Waterloo Sunset in the pot, both as a song and an experience, while we're on the subject) - Martyn's with its aroma of roasting coffee beans, its wooden floorboards, fancy goods, unchanged Edwardian interior - but again it didn't live up to that first experience. So I go on searching for the next magical cup. Meanwhile... back in Jamaica, simple pleasures included buying 45s from the record shop where the shopkeeper played you what was hot on discs with no or wrong labels; the view from Noel Coward's living room window, a window with no glass, widescreen; an outdoor dance on the night of my friend Nigel's wedding, featuring the roots reggae of Sizzla; the first humming bird I'd ever seen, outside Nigel's folks' place in Ocho Rios; Wray & Nephew's white rum, pretty much the only spirit I like and haven't written off through a binge that ended in tears (which reminds me I love that line in The Life Aquatic where Bill Murray's Steve Zissou invites anyone who cares to do so to join him "on an overnight drunk"); and swimming in the sea with baby Noah, about 9 months old.
