On caffeine

Whilst waiting for the kettle to boil on Wednesday morning (to make tea) I happened to be listening to Book of the Week on Radio 4 when I was suddenly thrown a life line, or so I thought. Progress with some writing I'm currently engaged in has been painfully slow and I hear the reader recounting that French writer Honore de Balzac ground out novels for 18 hours a day on the back of coffee. (He infact cranked out 5 or more sizeable novels per year for over 20 years). I listened more intently. The reader went on with an extract from Balzac's “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee.” (translated from the original french) :

"Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army ... memories charge in .... the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons ... sharpshooters sight and fire ... the paper is spread with ink".

Perhaps this is the answer. So on with the Italian Hob Espresso Maker. Then more from the radio ...

"I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach."

Perhaps that's rather extreme ... I let the coffee maker glug, glug.

It's now Friday and I'm on 3 cups of milky coffee a day and I must say that my literary output has increased ... thanks to Balzac and Radio 4. Hang on ... someone on the radio has just mentioned chocolate ...

Footnote: The French writer Honore de Balzac died of caffeine poisoning in 1850 at the age of 51 -- he was said to have consumed on the order of four dozen cups of coffee a day.

Radio 4 Book of the Week: At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist By Anne Fadiman, abridged by Kirsteen Cameron, read by Teresa Gallagher.

The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee by Honore de Balzac