The wind howled through the streets last night Shaking trees, throwing rain against windows and skylights Bullets of water hurled onto panes of glass in the darkness until suddenly Silence – the calm after the storm.

I hardly ever drink it these days but tmo's recent posts^[1] about swapping to instant reminded me of when I used to, early on in my coffee journey. The peculiar pleasure of opening a new jar of instant. Twist the lid and beneath is a golden foil. Crack! A short, sharp blow pierces the foil and out wafts that heavenly smell. Breathe in, breathe deeply – don't let that first coffee scent escape unloved and unnoticed! The world pauses for a moment in silent appreciation. OK, that's enough – make the coffee now!

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

I guess it started at some point in the late '80s (or maybe early '90s) with painstakingly typing in lines of BASIC on a ZX Spectrum +3, for the dubious reward of a simple Pong style game. I was a curious child, always wanting to know things. Typing all that code didn't lead me to a lifetime at the command line or a shadowy teenage life as a hacker but it was my first experience of looking beyond the standard Graphic User Interface (GUI) kindly presented to the world by mainstream computing.