As I sit down to write this I am sipping away at my 6^th coffee of the day. This one has been made using my brand new coffee maker I received as a birthday gift. My kitchen is like a fragrant, noisy, caffeine infused version of Breaking Bad. I love coffee and in the midst of the sleep deprived rabbit hole that the arrival of a 10 week old baby brings, I need it.

The stronger the better is my motto. I’m not content until I am kept awake for nights on end, with just the sound of my grinding teeth and vibrating eyeballs punctuating the silence. My job as a comedian means driving, endless miles on Britain’s motorways, with late night diversions that take me forty miles out of my way, plunging me tired and emotional into the heart of the Derbyshire countryside. The thought of doing this caffeine free is unthinkable.

I often take a coffee with me in the car, even though the cup-holders are shockingly woeful in design. I have to make the choice between putting a coffee in the holder and changing gear, which is awkward. The diameter of the cup is also such a tight fit that I often pull the top of the cup off and spill coffee all in the car and over my jeans. On more than one occasion now I have had to drive, partially naked from the waist down, with my jeans drying over the heaters.

Coffee is a passion; for me it’s a bit like a good bottle of wine.  I like my coffee to have a story. I’m not interested in some freeze dried, corporate, mass manufactured bastardization of that beautiful bean.  It needs to have a soul. I want my coffee beans to be exotic, to have been grown from seeds first passed through the digestive system of an ageing mountain goat at high altitude. It should have a caffeine content that borders on the illegal and a body smoother than a chat up line from an Italian waiter who has took a shine to your wife. It should be gentle with a finish so long that you could watch the Lord of The Rings box set and still be able to taste it. Afterwards I want that lingering smell to permeate through my entire house like a plug in air freshener and every time you inhale you experience that magic all over again.

I heard recently that in many university campuses the planners now are choosing to avoid the sticky floored boozer and are opting instead for a coffee shop, with leather sofas and free wifi. At first I was stunned by this statistic, I mean how many student liaisons were nurtured near the jukebox in a sweaty union bar on a wet Wednesday night, where a snake bite and black was only £1? I include myself in this group. I met my wife in freshers week and I dread to think what she would have really thought of me if all we had swimming round our bellies was a soya chai latte with a hint of cinnamon. However now I understand, coffee is big business.

Coffee culture exploded into the UK in the mid-nineties and we have never looked back. I’m old enough to remember a time before there was a Costa or Nero’s on every street. The Gold Blend coffee adverts, where viewers where captivated with a blossoming romance happening over a cup of instant coffee, showed how we regarded the drink at the time. We brits were not seduced by the fancy coffee shop culture of our French or Italian cousins. My dad still to this day secretly prefers the instant variety, he thinks the freeze dried granules are the nearest us mere mortals will get to consuming foods made for astronauts. He’s convinced that the best cup of coffee he has ever tasted was served in a polystyrene cup out of a van at a rainy car boot sale in a field in Doncaster in 1989. Although this may have something to do with the fact that it was 25p and came with a free Club biscuit.

During my childhood there were very few options for coffee enthusiasts. You had two main choices, a flask or a greasy spoon café. I even to this day remember my mum and dads flask in great detail. An old Stanley Thermos Tartan printed one, with a screw top. It never poured properly and it had a removable cup that the whole family had to share. Our summers seemed to be on repeat. We always seemed to go to an airshow, it always rained, I was always in a cagoule and I always had the last go on the cup from the flask.

No one ever sat down and relaxed in a coffee shop back then, we always seemed to be on the move. We did go to a greasy spoon café on a Saturday afternoon in Wakefield before going to see an afternoon matinee at the cinema. With chequered table cloths and a big plastic tomato sauce holder in the middle as a rudimentary paperweight, the place was a bit of a dive. It had a glass window with water running down it, I used to think it was quite a stylish addition, looking back it was probably a creative twist on a leaking condensing pipe. I would have a steak Canadian and a calypso pop (the E numbers kept you going all day) and my dad would have an egg butty and a cup of tea. Everyone seemed to drink tea back then; rumour has it that we won wars on tea. My wife’s family are huge tea drinkers; my father in law was pushing fifteen brews a day when he used to “work” for the council. When he first met me he offered me a brew, I refused (as I didn’t really care for it at the time, I preferred Ribena) he looked at my wife as if to say, “not sure about this one love!”

A visit to a coffee shop is part of our family routine every weekend now. The people who work in these places are proper cool; I think I’m ever so slightly in awe of one of the dudes in our local establishment. I use the term “dude” deliberately. They are like the kids at school who had a motorbike at sixteen, smoked roll ups and could play the guitar. With a quiff in the hair, a t-shirt with rolled up sleeves and those things that the youth put in their ears now which make the lobes look like the eyelets in a tarpaulin or camping ground sheet, it’s the job I would have wanted when I was younger.

It’s interesting that the coffee shops never really suffered during the recession. It’s the one luxury we are not prepared to forfeit. I worked out recently that I’m spending on average ten pounds a week on coffee, that’s over five hundred quid a year on beans! Even Jack wouldn’t have gone with that deal and he got a beanstalk out of it. But, I don’t begrudge it, particularly if it’s going to support the independent guys of the coffee world. I won’t mention the corporate giants; let’s just call them “Tarducks” who attempt to make a connection with you by asking your name to write on the cup. It didn’t wash with me, I used to say “HMRC” and then quickly take my coffee and leave.