{"id":134,"date":"2012-05-23T20:42:08","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T20:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoots.couthie.co.uk\/?p=134"},"modified":"2025-12-15T10:23:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T10:23:36","slug":"a-double-latte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/2012\/05\/23\/a-double-latte\/","title":{"rendered":"Wis it a double latte yer wanted?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In the 1980s you could still buy ersatz coffee from second-generation Italian caf\u00e9s 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 <em>campagna<\/em>\u2014the literal countryside of smallholdings and hard labour\u2014or 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the 1990s, a mix of earnest independents and confident chains decided that Britain\u2014and Scotland in particular\u2014was 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. <em>Al fresco?<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWis it a double latte ye wanted?\u201d playfully punctures this moment: a gently barbed aside on the incongruity of Scotland\u2019s headlong embrace of global coffee culture as it shuffled into the twenty-first century, clutching its cardboard cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1980s you could still buy ersatz coffee from second-generation Italian caf\u00e9s 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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/2012\/05\/23\/a-double-latte\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wee-updates"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2012\/05\/Hoots-A-Wee-Book-of-Couthie-Humour.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":391,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions\/391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heartsdesirescotland.com\/hoots\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}