SECURITY PROTECTED

Spotting this one flummoxed me a tad when I spotted it on my jar of coffee after I'd got it home from Morrison's last weekend.

We'd really just wanted one of those "refill packs" that we normally get to top up the jar that we already had, but they didn't have any of those on sale, and so I had to bite the bullet and invest in a brand spanking new "top of the range", more than six quid a pop jar instead, not realising that I was moving into the realms of fancy goods and luxury items of the type that are coveted enough to have become eminently "nickable…"

After all, I'm used to things like electrical goods, CDs, and bottles of spirits having security tags on them, but jars of coffee…?

It must be a sign of the times we live in, I suppose… and they'll no doubt be tagging the beef and the premium range sausages next, as well as the tomatoes, just to appear to not be being vegetablist.

Meanwhile, I'm fairly sure that all you "real" coffee drinkers will be hugely disappointed in my desire to buy the instant variety, of course, but then I've got to the point where the "proper" stuff is far too strong and does horrible things to my metabolism if I down too much of it.

And then there are the headaches, of course, and I really ought not to undo the "good" that the blood pressure medications are supposed to be doing to me.

Still, I do still appreciate a half decent cup or twelve of joe each day, and, as the latest advice revealed only recently claimed, coffee might be good for you in the battle against diabetes, despite having been declared bad for you in so many other ways.

These guys know nothing…

As apparently do I, when it comes to the small matter of "proper" coffee…

I'm sure that many of you real coffeenistas would find that the brown fluids that I choose to guzzle down like there's no tomorrow would quite happily park themselves under the general heading of the "barely bloody drinkable…"

Not that I can argue with that…

Nevertheless, the various coffee-making devices that we have accumulated about the place over the years all seem to have become far too much of a faff when it comes to both brewing up and cleaning them out afterwards, so they sit about the house gathering dust and a film of grease which only serves to make them even more of a bothersome exercise to start wrangling them… unless, of course, it's a "special occasion" and, well, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't have too many of those nowadays.

Anyway, here we find ourselves, harking back to those Georgian times when the Coffee Houses were the place to go to take a cup of this exotic and luxury item, and where the great and the good of the business community would gather and eventually come up with ideas like the formation of the London Stock Exchange which is just the sort of brilliant idea that led to people not being able to afford to buy the coffee in the first place, and which means that it now needs to be "Security Protected…"

Funny olde worlde, innit…?