Polly Vernon
THIS WON’T be news to many of you, but I’m going to hell.
Not for any of the multiple reasons that just sprung to your mind, but rather because I do this one deeply immoral thing you don’t know about ( yet) every damn day, and I know I should stop because it’s, like, really, really bad – ethically bankrupt, totally indefensible and (worst of all) totally unnecessary – but I can’t. I shan’t. I mean: I might. I should. Ah, who am I kidding. I won’t.
What is it? Only the greatest contemporary lifestyle sin available to middle- class woman! I’ll confess all, but you’ll have to come closer – I only dare whisper the words for fear of attracting the opprobrium of le tout internet. Right. Here goes. (Don’t hate me. Promise you won’t hate me?) The terribly bad thing I keep doing, even though I know I shouldn’t, is: I drink coffee from disposable coffee cups. Since they were decreed unrecyclable ( last week? The week before?) ergo nothing more than a vile, environment- debilitating landfill variant that didn’t even exist 20 years ago, drinking from disposable coffee cups has become the Now equivalent of eating foie gras. Smoking while pregnant. Not illegal, but very frowned upon. Every time I do, I am basically responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world – melting ice caps and the whale calf that died in Blue
Planet II at the very least. I tense in case a stranger takes it upon themselves to do whatever the anti- coffee- cup activist equivalent of throwing red paint at the mink- clad is. And yet: I keep doing it.
Why? For terrible reasons! Because I like how it looks; because I was raised on American cop shows in which nails-hard mega-glam lady cops stayed sharp on stakeouts by sipping whisky-laced Americanos from disposable coffee cups. Because I prefer the way it tastes. I’ve tried it through the rubbery rim of a colour-block reusable mug, but it tasted like coffee through a sippy cup. I’ve tried it from china, but it seemed impersonal (I am so enamoured by the warm, caffeinated-kiss of coffee-via-cardboard, I get take-out cups when I’m staying in). And because this is what passes as decadence and screw-you defiance in my life these days. There was a time when decadence ’n’ defiance meant drugs, nicking side plates and spoons from fashionable restaurants, dalliances with married men… Now? I take my thrills in the form of an illicit drinking vessel wrapped around an overpriced flat white.
I know it’s an unconscionable practice. I know my days of indulging it are limited. But I’m just gonna do it one last time, OK? Maybe one time after that.