The first hurdle

It would be really embarrassing after having made all that song and dance yesterday about how I was going to do this every morning before coffee to have given up on day two. So if nothing else I'm not going to do that. Or is that a double negative? Should it be "if something else I am going to do that"? No, that doesn't sound right either.

One good thing about writing first thing is that the dreams are still fresh in my mind, even if they are nonsensical as ever and prove absolutely impossible to transcribe. Of course it makes perfect sense for us to forget dreams shortly after waking. Some modern theories of dreaming say they're a way for the mind to sort through and process the memories of the day and defrag the brain. If this is true then imagine the confusion if amongst those memories to be processed were the memories of the previous night's dreams. If you weren't careful after a few days you'd end up with dream feedback, and every night you'd experience some kind of combination of a high pitched whine and the Doctor Who title sequence from the 1960s. In a state of high anxiety in the middle of a school assembly with no clothes on and your teeth falling out.

Hardly the recipe for a peaceful night; you'd wake up exhausted.

Not that there was anything like that in my dreams last night - and not that I'm going to bore you with them either. The only thing of any note was the URL www.cioom.com - and I've checked, it doesn't exist.

Doing this first thing also means that I am perturbed to find myself looking forward to having coffee. In the old days I was always a tea fiend and would look down my nose at the coffee addicts. Well, that's not strictly true. There was an element of nose-looking, but I think that's just part of the way I deal with feeling inadequate.

I first remember thinking about this in detail when I was at university. First lectures were always at 9.15am, so at 10.00am we'd pour into the common room and queue up at the counter. I still clearly remember the litany recited by the queue to the woman who worked there: "Coffee please", "Coffee please", "Coffee please", "Coffee please", "Coffee please". The subtext of this of course being:

"I'm such a wild and wacky party animal that first thing in the morning I'm unable to cope without my coffee because I was up until about 5.00am, but I'm enough of a diligent student to turn up to the 9.15am lecture..."

Or maybe I was reading too much into it and projecting my own fears of not being a wild and wacky party animal onto their simple pronouncement. Whatever the case I would take a perverse pride in punctuating this series of demands for coffee with a polite "Tea please".

It's not as if it was even proper coffee, anyway. Back then people made do with a brown powder that was visually indistinguishable from gravy granules. It's only in recent years that we imagine that we've all become connoisseurs of the coffee bean. However this hasn't changed the supplicants' behaviour. You still see them queuing up, now not in the undergraduate common room but at the Puccinos in Brighton station: "Latte please", "Mocha please", "Caramel Macciato please", "Cappucino please", "Espresso please".

Sometimes I am one of them. I'm still not sure whether I'm a wild party animal though.