Hobson’s choice on Galway’s immoral dilemma

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

What foul modern skulduggery is this?   I enter the hotel room to find myself confronted by a miniature model of an alien spacecraft. This sleek chrome and black construction is nothing more than one of those pod coffee machines that millions use every day, all over the world, but to this ageing scribbler, it presents two challenges.

First I’ll have to suss out how to use the damn thing, while also trying not to feel like that old bloke on social media, filmed trying to start his hoover by repeatedly yanking the electric lead, thinking it worked like a lawnmower.

I laughed my socks off watching him, but now I’m the no fool like an old fool, incompetent, worthy of mocking.

Paranoid and thirsty, I try to make a cup of tea.

Alongside the rows of multi-coloured sachets of fancy-shmancy coffees on the tray below sits a pile of teabags on strings in packets.

Surely they’d not be so cruel as to taunt me, were a cuppa not possible?

How hard can it be?

Take off this plastic jug on the back and fill it with water. It doesn’t really click back in place quite right, but it’ll do, I hope.

Now take the teabag and what? Put it into the mug, Adley. Keep it simple. Then place the mug on the little metal platform and just run hot water into it.

At the back I find the power button and the machine comes alive. An under-lit glow of Nineties Nightclub Blue appears, while in front of me three flashing white lights offer a tiny, a medium and a big cup.

How big is their big cup?

Is that bigger than this mug?

Is there now a universal size of coffee?

A Grandee Tallee Muchico, or somesuch?

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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