You know, this kind of codependent, emotionally stunted...sitting in your stupid coffeehouse, with your stupid big cups......which I'm sorry might as well have nipples on them.
In 1629 the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on Arab and Turkish models, popped up in Venice, and the first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish immigrant.
" There you go." Sitwell saw him: A solid-looking African American man in jeans and a leather jacket, raising his glass of tea in a mock toast from the coffeehouse patio across the street.
(Tea, too, started out as a little helper for Buddhist monks striving to stay awake through long stretches of meditation.) Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up in cities across the Arab world.
Charles II, worried that plots were being hatched in coffeehouses, decided that the places were dangerous fomenters of rebellion that the crown needed to suppress.
In 1675 the king moved to close down the coffeehouses, on the grounds that the " false, malicious and scandalous Reports" emanating therefrom were a " Disturbance of the Quiet and Peace of the Realm" .
London's coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities.
It's hard to imagine that the sort of political, cultural and intellectual ferment that bubbled up in the coffeehouses of both France and England in the 17th century would ever have developed in a tavern.