The Vendetta List is Lengthened.

Following a two week trip to France and 18 consecutively alcofrolic days out on the town (ah, the stress surrounding relaxation), I have developed quite a penchant for drinking coffee of a morning.

Living in Brighton and working in London as I do, it is nigh on impossible not to wake up with a hangover every morning. Fact. Every morning I am up at 5.30am, and following a ricochet up the corridor to the shower there is the hour and a half train ride to get to on time at 7am. Needless to say, by the time I finally rock up at work with said hangover surrounded by stinking, selfish, foot-stamping commuters, I am feeling a special kind of hatred towards every other human being on the planet and probably desperate for a drink by 10am at the latest.

So begins the vicious cycle. I am hungover so I drink. Which of course follows suit to the next day, and the one after that - and by the time I finally coast through to the end of the week, private prayer sessions have been opened in a bid to save my liver from hell's soup.

And that is where the coffee idea came in. I have noticed that although a coffee will not entirely satisfy an aching head as much as a hair of the dog, it does in some way provide damage control - no excessive crying scenes, still-drunk activity, lengthy periods of space-staring, and so on.

In France of course, this is a straightforward purchase. Un cafe, s'il vous plait. You get a coffee. Un cafe au lait, s'il vous plait. You get a coffee with milk. What happens when you walk into a place like Costa coffee?

- Small, medium or large?
- Skinny or regular?
- Americano, mochachino, latte, frappawotsit, or mochachocachinolattewotsit?

And that's only scratching the surface, because frankly I ran away screaming before I could learn anything else.

Why they would have to complicate the act of getting a coffee to such extreme levels is beyond me. Especially when you consider why you're buying a coffee: you are hungover and want to sharpen your mind, because you can't think straight.

The particular icing on the cake for me was that the guy got my order wrong. I said I didn't mind and would have whatever he'd made, he said 'ok' before proceeding to throw the cup's contents down the drain.

Deep, cleansing breaths are the only thing that saved his life that day.