chokesputtergasp!!!

Oh dear. Now, this is NOT a personal, caffeine-powered assault on my Fellow BloGGee, though it might come out sounding that way in bits. Fact is, one of the several million words BANISHED from my lexicon practically since the day I learnt to speak, is Decaf. Banished for the next 10 millenia at LEAST.

I am passionate about many things, some of them entirely incomprehensible even to me. Snails, for example. Coffee. My collection of trolls. Coffee. My chin hairs. Coffee. (...shhhh...I'm trying to be subtle here and just slip the coffee in subliminally so nobody notices.)

Any form of Java abuse (and you must know Decaf is the most heinous of the lot), raises my hackles and causes me to take refuge in Righteous Indignation.

Of course, everyone has a right to choose Decaf over Java. But conceptually, I don't get it. I mean, coffee is about caffeine. Take the caffeine away, and what are you left with? You get my drift, right? It's like taking the cocoa out of chocolate. The fat out of butter. The fibre out of bran. The chicken out of the soup. The brain out of a head. I mean, I could go on.

I've heard stories from World War II (no, I was NOT around then) about ersatz milk, made from flour and leftover bits of shoelace. Ersatz eggs, made from extruded corn and earthworms. Ersatz chocolate, made from old brown shoes. And yes, ersatz coffee, made from roasted almond shells.

Okay so I might have got some of the ingredients mixed up, but the important thing is that all this stuff was trying to be other stuff, which it just intrinsically wasn't. I suppose you could call it impostering.

Those days, during the war years, they had good reason to make stuff that looked like stuff that it really wasn't because nobody could get hold of the real thing but everybody lusted after it anyway. Those were times of serious deprivation, pretty much the way life continues to be for millions in the "Third World" (which, coincidentally, I originate from) ...

So anyway, back then, they were probably getting rather tired of extruded corn and such, and one fine day decided to call the whole goopy mess "scrambled eggs." Similarly, somebody must have looked at a pile of almond shells after the almonds had been roasted, and thought "aha, extension-of-use chocolate substitute possibility!"

Now, when you raise gustatory expectations to such elevated levels, the mind will get fooled into believing anything. Call it auto-suggestion, mass hypnosis, whatever. Evidently, it worked.

In fact, it worked so well that even the kids and the soldiers at the front were fooled. And we know how discriminating that lot can be. But, "by golly! they even TASTE kindoflikeeggs/chocolate/whatever it's masquerading as!!!" was the standard refrain. They actually ATE the stuff, instead of pretending they had a stomach-ache and needed to go to the loo.

To get back to my original point, which I seem to have briefly lost along the way: Decaf is NOT coffee. It is un-coffee, piggybacking on the whole coffee-as-legend appeal of "the real thing". So trying to retain even a nebulous connection by tracing back lineage to the noble coffee bean is just a low-down trick. Everybody realizes this. As a result, people have finally stopped ordering Decaf Coffee. Today, they just say, "Make mine Decaf." I guess it's a "More-Aligned-to-the-Truth" kind of thang.

So now you see my point?? It seems the Decaf is finally out of the coffee and will go down in history as just another aspiring wannabe. In some countries, they SHOOT aspiring wannabees.

Be right back, I need my gun.