La Bolsa
Drinking lovely coffee is the easiest way for me to pretend that I live a much more sophisticated life. The reality is that I spend great chunks of my days slithering around the lanes and the river bank with Bruno, our labrador. I am invariably mud-spattered and red of nose, and I frequently find myself layering waterproofs with a down jacket until I look like a Gortex clad marshmallow from neck to hips. I have worn Dunlop wellies (£7.99 at an agricultural suppliers) at least three times a day since November and I sometimes visit my boxes of high heels in their resting place at the bottom of the wardrobe, just to indulge in a moment of nostalgia for the years when I went to work wearing pretty dresses and elegant shoes.
Coffee is therefore my route into a fantasy land where I can spend a few sips living in Paris as a writer and a teacher. I would, of course, live in a roof-top apartment in one of the stone mansions of the Haut Marais, buy cheese at Fromagerie Jouannault and drink cockails at Candelaria. Today, my day dream began with a single origin Guatemalan bean in my old Bialetti. I chose ‘La Bolsa’ because of the description on the back of the packet: “A medium bodied coffee, hibiscus, red fruits & grenadine, with orange marmalade & sponge cake.” I have no idea how coffee can contain marmalade and cake but I tipped the freshly ground coffee into the pot that lives in the fridge and I have spent the rest of the day with the empty packet on my desk, sniffing the remnants when ideas stall.
Teachers are often told to guide students to show not tell when delivering creative writing lessons. This can feel incredibly difficult when facing a bunch of students who just seem to be counting the minutes until you allow them back to their phones and the electronic worlds to which they are portals. But coffee is also a portal and it can help me to teach ‘show not tell’. This packet of La Borsa might inspire us to find Guatemala on Google maps. Then we could have a think about ecologically minded, Fair Trade coffee production and what an RFA certificate actually means. We could locate the Huehuetango region on satellite images and borrow a geographer to help us understand microclimates and the socio-economic identity of Guatemala. Perhaps we could even trade a (very small) mug of La Bolsa with a historian in order to glean some facts about the Maya.
More than anything though, I would want the students to sniff the coffee and write. We would start with a character drinking coffee. And I would get a lot of these ‘telling’ sentences: “Dave made a coffee and sat at the table.” Or, “Dave got a coffee from Costa.” From here, we could experiment with ‘showing’ together. So …
Dave made a Nescafe and sat the table that he bought for a tenner from the charity shop.
Dave got a cappuccino from the cafe at the end of the street and added so much chocolate powder that he sneezed when he took his first sip.
Dave made coffee in a mug printed with Santa Claus and some faded reindeer. He tipped sugar into the mug without bothering with a spoon.
Dave found a cafetiere at the back of the cupboard and emptied the last of the coffee from a crumpled packet marked ‘Columbia’ into it.
Dave chose not to look at the menu but barked, “Caramel latte” at the bloke by the till and then felt guilty for not adding ‘please’ to his order.
Lucy (it is high time we had a female character) clasped her hands around the mug and watched as her cold blue tipped fingers began to warm back into pink.
Students get the hang of this fast. They love generating awful sentences — Lucy didn’t like coffee — just to make me scowl but they rise to the challenge of adding two adjectives. Then they can work on a textural adjective (cappucino froth) and a sight adjective (chipped mug). And then they can add colour (pouring a swirl of snowy milk into the black coffee) and even taste (the bitterness of the scalding coffee began to loosen the grip of her hangover). And if they are really fired up — or full of coffee — they will start to notice optional extras like the movement and sibilance of “a swirl of snowy milk”.
