“So What?”

“This is a deep dark and very, very rich coffee, its smoothness is a delight, its silkiness is to savour. This is a celebration of many espresso cupping’s to find a perfect blend.”

 

This is Steve Leighton’s description of the Toba Sulawesi Espresso Blend that I’m drinking as I listen to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. I watched a programme last night about 1959 the year that changed Jazz. “So What” is the first track on the album.

 

 

 

The coffee deliciously mingles with the So What chord. Apparently the So What chord is “a particular rootless 5-note chord voicing employed by Bill Evans in the “‘amen’ response figure“^[1] to the head of the tune “So What“.

 

Hmmnn last year during my training to be a coach I was introduced to the use of the question “So what?” to challenge and jolt in a coaching session. I have been amazed by the effect of playing this short sharp riff – So What? to bring about so much change. So often people are stuck and immobilized by all kinds of blocks – then faced with hearing “a particular rootless 5-note chord voicing” relax and smile….yeah So what!

 

I think it was and still is a powerful stimuli for change….

 

Enjoy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TbrgIdm0E

 

 

 

Enjoy just bean!

 

I was reading Steve Leighton’s hilarious posting – Strange Things is Coffee Sacks (Wednesday Mar 18, 2009) http://www.hasblog.co.uk/  where he describes some of the unusual and strange things he’s discovered in coffee sacks.

 It got me thinking about how we strive to understand what lies behind these odd occurrences. Only a few weeks ago we were meeting up with some old friends. As we settled into an enjoyable lunch, we heard that the day before, when she was unloading her washing machine our friend discovered to her amazement amongst her laundry was – a coffee bean!

 

There was no explanation for its presence, wracking her brains she could come up with no fathomable reason for it to be there. Then a revelation! She could only make sense as to its appearance due to the fact that she was meeting us the next day! Apparently to them as I’m closely associated with coffee –  it was a sign – a portent of our imminent meeting. I made sense of her unexplainable experience – a human bean!

As I drank my morning coffee I mused upon “How we try to read meaning into inexplicable experiences – what does it all mean? – Can a bean have meaning?”  

What strange experiences have you had that you believe have been signs?

We live in a world where we think we are in control and everything should make sense ….I looked deep into the distance and  became aware of the radio…..the news.. I could make no sense of what was happening…. I drank from my cup of coffee (Columbia Organic Cauca Tierradentro – fruit, nut and honey flavours peach nectar almond butter roast notes.)

At that point I decided to let go and just enjoy bean……

  

“I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun”. Katharine Hepburn

 

Kneading to know

We’d been running for about fifteen minutes – about halfway on our usual short route around Regents Park – and I found myself thinking about making a loaf of bread. Nigella Lawson http://www.nigella.com/   (I love her recipes – she writes from the perspective of somebody who loves eating not about concocting testosterone-fuelled show-off recipes that are like sporting fast cars) … anyway where was I……she writes about kneading the bread… “When you’ve kneaded enough you’ll know the difference, it suddenly feels smoother and less sticky, it’s a wonderful moment”. For the real Zen and the art of making bread I recommend “Bread Matters” by Andrew Whitley http://www.breadmatters.com/index.htm who says that only by mixing by hand will you experience the whole process of change as it occurs.

 

I’ve always maintained that however much I have been in training or how long I’m about to run the first 20 minutes or so are hard… bumpy and lumpy as my body starts to get in sync… It’s like the kneading of bread….after working the dough it suddenly shifts into a smooth, silken sequence…my groaning body is transformed into The Flow.

 

It occurred to me that I’ve found some coaching sessions are like this also… there are a number of initial probing questions to get the change under way – finding our way – clarifying the issues….. These can feel a bit “lumpy” & disjointed, however by keeping the momentum going with a respectful sense of purpose, if things go well we switch into a dialogue which flows, is focused and on track and so it is…acknowledging the process of kneading to know!

 

 

 

Coffee & Love

Friday February 27^th 2009

 

Monmouth Coffee, Covent Garden

 

27 Monmouth Street

Covent Garden

London

WC2H 9EU
tel: +44 (0)20 7379 3516
http://www.monmouthcoffee.co.uk

 
Monday to Saturday – 8.00 to 18.30
closed bank holidays

 

By Mac E. Arto

 

The date for breakfast had been in our diaries for weeks. We were looking forward to meeting up with our friend and her baby.

 

We generally don’t do breakfast out so when we made the date we didn’t even have to suggest where to meet, it would have to be Monmouth.

 

Monmouth is not so much a coffee shop as a place of worship… for followers and devotees of coffee….not the stuff you get in milky Starbuckets but Coffee. Monmouth doesn’t muck about…. it’s all about the coffee:- “In our sampling room you can try any of our single estate and single origin coffees before buying beans to take home. We have a range of pastries and cakes from Villandry  www.villandry.co.uk and Paul www.paul.fr  to have with your coffee, to stay or take away. We also sell the things you need to make a single cup filter coffee at home including filter cones and papers. During winter, we sell chocolate from Pralus www.chocolats-pralus.com , as well as chocolate truffles from Sally Clarke www.sallyclarke.com.”

 

Basically there are only about 15 seats in the shop and that depends upon how big you are and whether you’re happy to share, which in fact most people are. The seats are set out in three booths, a six seater, a four seater, a sort of four seater corner booth and there’s even a tiny one seater booth.

 

We queued – happily – the mark of a true fan, not the fine weather fans that only go to the game when the team’s high in the league or the game’s at home. Several people left who were in the queue behind us, we smiled, we understood, biding our time, waiting for the call, and when it came we surrendered into our booth and waited for the mother and child to arrive.

 

The mother and child arrived, hugs and kisses baptised our breakfast gathering, the child was secreted away beneath a large winter coat but popped out wearing, according to doting mother, her Guantánamo Bay jump suit, and when the baby was duly presented and handed around for inspection she did indeed wear just such an orange jump suit.

 

We ordered Fazenda Barreiro from Brazil (sweet chocolate with full body and cherry acidity) and a cappuccino.  We had been salivating over the counter heaving with pastries as we queued and now we ordered the pear and almond tarts. Mother ordered a Nilgiris Tamil Nadu from the Balmaadi Estate India (caramel and spice notes with medium body and acidity). The baby chose not order at this point. Serenely she gave herself up to our devotion.

 

During our time at Monmouth we shared our booth with five others, two sets of couples and one lone worshipper. The devoted clutch of staff  were chatty and attentive, eager to serve up the dark elixirs – I had a second cup of Fazenda Barreiro…

 

It had been a while since we’d met so the conversation was fast and free ranging, fuelled by the dark stuff. We got to talking about food and recipes; I mentioned hearing that somebody’s mother had said how your state of mind will affect your cooking, for example you need to be in a calm state to  make fresh mayonnaise otherwise it curdles. This revelation caused the mother to recall the memory of a book (and film) Como agua para chocolate  “Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies. It’s about the feeling she pours into her cooking that then affects the people who eat it; the magical qualities of food when you put love into the cooking.

 

When we eventually left to re-enter the secular world of Covent Garden we were aglow, warm with the feeling of being loved. Monmouth Coffee. Amen.

 

Painting by Olha Pryymak  http://olechko.org/tag/monmouth-coffee/

 

 

 

Another day

Another day, another week, and yet another coffee! Today it’s Nicaragua El Limoncillo (a taste of toffee apple, sweetness of caramel, juiciness then a bite of green apple acidity).

 

Change by KMcCollumBlair

 

Sipping my morning coffee I have been musing upon what drives my fascination with change. When embarked upon the adventure of roasting coffee at home I read that there are two types of people, those that like to achieve consistency, the same quality guaranteed every time and then there are those that enjoy exploring the difference, the unknown, the new. I guess I fall into the second category. I’m a baby boomer, born in 1950, the year of the Tiger. I grew up with change, I expect change and I enjoy being a part of the change and shaping it.

 

When I was a kid there were only three colours of ice cream – white, brown and pink (taste was yet to be invented), I remember us getting television and it wasn’t until I was a teenager we got a telephone. Oh yes  and at the end of the film at a cinema they’d play the National Anthem and you were expected to stand!

 

I don’t know what memories stick out for you as experiencing significant changes which are now a norm? Not just technological advances, new gadgets, but being witness to the shock of new ways of thinking and doing! Hey we now have civil partnerships, same sex marriage and female priests!

 

It may seem quaint and surprising now but I remember the scorn and derision surrounding the introduction of the term “Ms”.

 

I remember watching the first Moon landing. I was working night shift in a bakery, the live screening was on in the canteen, I was fascinated that there was quite a large group of guys who refused to watch on the grounds that it was an American hoax and had been mocked up in a studio.

 

The London Marathon originally refused to allow wheelchair entrants.  

Things do not change; we change.  ~Henry David Thoreau

 

As The Demos pamphlet “Eternal Youths” http://www.demos.co.uk/files/thenewold.pdf   

 

Baby boomers have transformed every station they have passed through and show no sign of stopping in old age. As a result we must confront the conceptual framework we use to think about ageing.

Although perhaps a little too much a stereotypical image is of a generation that rebelled against the establishment and existing social order by taking to the streets and which produced the founders of a range of social and political movements from the feminist to the environmentalist to the civil rights movement.  

Contrary to previous generations and myths associated with older people, baby boomers like me are uncompromisingly militant as consumers, more anti establishment, more non conformist, less deferential, less trusting of those in authority and more hostile to organised religion.

 

I’m also curious as to what stops us making changes or accepting change. The enemy of change is often the paralysis of “should”, our cage of presumption of how things should be. I’m now 30, 40, 50, 60 and “should be/have”…..married, have children….settled down… a career… “made it by now”…retired… It’s not just fear of the unknown but a conceptual prison of our making as to how things should be, a construct of our lives before we even live them. Change is about challenging our limiting self beliefs about how things should be and clarifying how we wish them to be.

 

Hmmn so now what coffee shall I try next?

 

 

 

Coffee (and change) we can believe in….

“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered, coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle”. – Honoré de Balzac (1799-1859)

I took a deep draught of my morning coffee (Guatemala Finca Entre Rios organic – fruity smoothness combined with rich dark chocolate). For the past two weeks we’ve been struggling with colds and laryngitis so we haven’t been exactly springing into the New Year, it’s been a groaning, moaning slump under the duvet… until now.

 

Somehow the New Year is here… maybe we have been stirred by “Change we can believe in”…earlier this week.

 

I also realised it’s a year today that I bought my iRoast2 home coffee roaster.

 

When asked by our little gathering of friends and family on Christmas Eve “what had been the best thing about 2008?”- it was generally agreed that it had been a miserable year all round – I said “roasting coffee at home”.

Where can one buy a home roaster? As you would expect Steve at Hasbean not only supplies a great range of green beans but also roasters. He will soon have the iRoast2 in stock again. Here is a review of this roaster -

http://www.sweetmarias.com/prod.hearthwareiRoast2.shtml

 

It’s not that expensive to buy, especially, it’s small and compact, I don’t find it too noisy or smoky and I have a tiny galley kitchen. I’ve now programmed a  roast profile I like so I just measure out the 150 grams of beans (enough for two of us for three days), empty them into the roaster and switch on  - hey presto some 15 minutes later .. Freshly roasted coffee!

 

Why am I so enthusiastic? It really is easy – to buy the beans on the net (a modest saving on roasted beans), the roasting and the rewards – the freshness and fun are great!

 

Coffee suppliers like Hasbean are dedicated to sourcing beans from speciality coffee growers around the world. They use importers who they trust, who have relationships with farms and farmers. Steve writes “By working on a trust basis, I know that the whole chain is getting a fair deal”; read the Hasbean ethical policy at https://www.hasbean.co.uk/pages/Ethical-Policy.html     

 

So if you enjoy coffee and maybe at the moment you recognise the benefits of buying roasted beans and grinding them at home I would seriously urge you to think of roasting your own…  2009 could be the year you have Coffee you can believe in…….

 

All in good time

 

I was sitting on the Northern line tube this morning on my way to Waterloo and became curious as to what the tube driver kept saying as we left a station.

 

I tried hard to picture in my head how to spell the words I was hearing, “Minadawes?”

 

“Mind the doors” had changed, slowly over period of time, the repetition and London accent was reducing these ritual utterances into becoming synonymous with the very sliding action of the doors. So as the doors would rumble close simultaneously this smurge of letters and sounds were wiped off his lips; it sounded like with the back of his hand.

 

I recalled reading Bill Bryson’s ‘A walk in the woods’ http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/billbryson/walkInWoodsHome.html  where he contemplates the action of a mountain stream…” the geologist James Trefil calculates that a typical mountain stream will carry away about 1000 cubic feet of mountain in a year. …At such a rate it seems impossible that it could ever cart away a mountain, but in fact given sufficient time that is precisely what would happen. Assuming a mountain 5,000 feet high with 500,000 million cubic feet of mass, roughly the size of Mount Washington, a single stream would level it in about 500 million years.”

 

I wondered how long it would take for the tube driver’s words to become one flattened smudge of sound. Would tourists in 2012 look anxiously at each other as the doors closed  accompanied by  “mmmmeinnnnnnnnooorreeessssssssssssssss?”

 

During the early stages of my coaching experience (www.davemartin.org.uk) I’ve often been curious as to people focusing upon making changes but seemingly making no progress. They are clear as to their goals, what they want, what they need to do but somehow struggling with any shift taking place. It seems like nothing’s happening – but then the factor of time plays its part… when the time’s right… maybe just a few days later…maybe weeks even months later, it all fits and the circumstances are conducive to the changes taking place and hey presto  - action!

 

Nowadays we are so accustomed to instantaneous results – at the press of a button, a click on the mouse, we get what we want… it’s good to remember… all in good time…

 

 

“Even when nothing’s happening, there’s always something happening”
John Cage

 

 

 

“I never laugh until I’ve had my coffee”. – Clark Gable

 

This morning I was ruminating over another enjoyable breakfast…I simply love my first cup of coffee… today it was accompanied by scrambled duck eggs on toasted home made bread…mmnnnn! I roasted the beans only yesterday, supplied by Hasbean they are Bolivia Machacamarca-Mario Andrade, award winner in the Cup of Excellence 2007. As the “cup description” states, “it has body, big bold body with a spicy after taste”.

 

For me breakfast wouldn’t be the same without coffee… coffee starts the day… its not just an accompaniment to food, whether cereal, toast, muffins or eggs.. eggs are the best…but for me it’s the coffee that makes it.

 

Which is why I’m so surprised that coffee hardly gets mentioned as an important part of people’s breakfast although we drink such a lot of it. In fact as noted in an earlier posting (November 10^th) “While most of continental Europe still believed coffee dried up one’s brain cells, London  was the cafe capital of the world. This was about 1680.” However by the 1750’s, because we didn’t have any coffee producing colonies we traded opium for tea,  and so tea became the nation’s drink of choice.

 

Reading the very entertaining and informative reviews in the truly excellent London Review of Breakfasts http://londonreviewofbreakfasts.blogspot.com/  almost none mention drinking coffee with their morning meal ,indeed even the tea only gets a passing mention.

 

So here in deference to the LRB a review of :-

 

Friday 9^th January 2009

 

My Bolivian Brew

 

by Mac E. Arto

 

The day had yet to begin.

 

I cut into the toast purposefully, anticipating the mouthful of fluffy scrambled egg bouncing delicately on the crisp, light cushion of bread.

 

Outside a pigeon hunched his shoulders, our eyes met, man it looked cold. It was still, nothing moved, my view of the garden seemed to be cut and pasted into the window.

 

I turned and took a sip of coffee; instantly my mouth became alive, filled with the rich, bold taste. This is the moment my day started, like a tide rolling in with flavour oily, chocolate aromas washing around my tongue, crashing through the edge of sleep and anointing my mind with consciousness.

 

Coffee is the impresario introducing me to the tastes, flavours, textures and aromas; eager for me to experience, transporting me, rejuvenated into the new day.

 

The freshly roasted, ground beans just brought everything together, perfectly orchestrated… the egg, toast, me, the day… it’s all about relationships… and coffee makes no judgements it just makes it all possible.

 

 

Happy New You?

 

 

The New Yorker

 

It’s that time of year again when people think of changes they’d like to make for the incoming year. According to Wikipedia – A New Year’s resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a project or the reforming of a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous. The name comes from the fact that these commitments normally go into effect on New Year’s Day and remain until fulfilled or abandoned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year’s_resolution .

 

The New York Times had an article yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/fashion/01change.html?_r=1     which referred to John C. Norcross, a clinical psychologist at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who has studied such resolutions. He had found that after six months, only about 45 percent of the subjects managed to stick to their pledges.

 

“Most of us think that we can change our lives if we just summon the willpower and try even harder this time around,” said Alan Deutschman, the former executive director of Unboundary, and the author of “Change or Die,” a book that asserts that even though most people have the ability to change, they rarely do. “It’s exceptionally hard to make life changes,” Mr. Deutschman said, “and our efforts are usually doomed to failure when we try to do it on our own.”

In my brief experience of working with folks who wish to make changes www.davemartin.org.uk   it’s helpful to work through the desire to make changes with somebody… plan realistic ways to bring them about, be held accountable but most of all have a goal rather than just making the change. So if you’re gonna stop drinking… what’s the real goal? And what are you going to do with the cash saved? How will you celebrate and feel good about achieving this goal? 

As for me I’m giving up a lifetime habit of making lists everyday, this is why…….

A Happy New Year and a Happy New You! Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

We need Liber-ageing!

I’ve had some recent conversations with colleagues and co-conspirators about… “So what would bring about significant changes in the way we think about older age?”

 

A common concern is the focus upon older people as a “group”…who are they? Am I one? Why should we think about older people separately at all, they’re just people!

 

Time and time again when I’ve listened to people consider reports or discuss policies dealing with older people say, “What! 50+ ! You are kidding! I’m x years old and I’m not old!”

 

Senior officers, civil servants, elected members as well as Members of Parliament still continue to display extraordinary ambivalence and indifference to the ageing society and its older citizens. Many seem to be in denial of ageing themselves.

 

One action which might change the way that we think about older age is to require each author, local government officer, civil servant, elected member and Government Minister of any policy document to publicly declare their personal attitudes towards their own ageing.

 

 

 

 

Check out this great personal ageing story  by Dan Hanna – The daily photo ageing project   http://www.danhanna.com/aging_project/p.html

 

 

There is no template for ageing in later life nowadays. We’re creating a new footprint both as a society collectively as well as our own individual experience.

 

“We need urgently to invent a collective story about the value of growing older….

It is a paradox of our ageing society that many of us seem increasingly obsessed with the idea of youth…..Rather than regressing to its youth our ageing society might do well to reclaim some of the benefits of growing older: wisdom, finesse and accumulated experience.”

 Eternal Youths Demos  http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/eternalyouthsbook

 

We need to change the current attitude to ageing

 

We need Liber-ageing!!!!!…..