In the 1980s you could still buy ersatz coffee from second-generation Italian cafés in Edinburgh. These places appeared to have stalled somewhere around 1956: drab pastels, scuffed formica, a total absence of aspiration. Their lack of pretension was, perversely, their charm. Perhaps they had long since severed their umbilical connection with the campagna—the literal countryside of smallholdings and hard labour—or perhaps this was a conscious act of cultural shedding. Either way, what they served was a deviant, over-milked concoction masquerading as a latte: scalding hot, impossible to sip, and certainly not to be trusted. Endearing, yes. Authentic, not remotely.

But change was coming, and not just to Scotland. The coffeehouse had form. Its lineage stretches back at least to fourteenth-century Turkey, from where it spread across Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean as a locus of conversation, dissent, art and intellectual ferment. One is entitled to wonder what Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir might have produced without caffeine and Gauloises to hand.

By the 1990s, a mix of earnest independents and confident chains decided that Britain—and Scotland in particular—was finally ready to re-imagine the coffeehouse. This time it arrived with a vaguely Italianate, al-fresco fantasy: tables outside, sofas within, Wi-Fi everywhere. Umbrelloni bloomed on pavements, briefly accompanied by gas heaters bravely defying thermodynamics. Al fresco? Aye, right. This was still driech Scotland, not Tuscany. Yet the conceit stuck. Cappuccinos were consumed at all hours (had nobody mentioned breakfast?), while lattes proliferated in a bewildering taxonomy of sizes, syrups and moral compromises.

“Wis it a double latte ye wanted?” playfully punctures this moment: a gently barbed aside on the incongruity of Scotland’s headlong embrace of global coffee culture as it shuffled into the twenty-first century, clutching its cardboard cup.