Torture by Coffee Article

This article has been killing me by name-dropping different London neighborhoods- Westminster, Charing Cross, St. Paul's, Chancery, and best of all Covent Garden (delicious market). Of course I am reading it while downing my first Starbucks doubleshot of the day. I never knew that London "consumed more coffee than anywhere else on Earth" at one point in time. I thought that the coffee wave needed to crash on London, but apparently it did a long time ago. Gloomy and gray, London would be greatly enhanced by coffee I thought. To be honest, the coffee house I frequented most was Starbucks on the corner of Pentonville and Gray's Inn, or Clerkenwell, because there weren't too many places to get a decent cup besides Pret... The drink is now tea so obviously something has happened in the course of history where the market shifted from coffee to tea. I don't know for sure, but I bet it has something to do with the stretching of the British colonies to places like India and other tea infused territories. All I really know is that several times a day one of your coworkers will ask you if you fancy a cup of tea because no one else is keen to get an iced coffee- if they even know that exists.

ANYWAY, enough of my rattling on about how I obviously miss my time at S&S. The really juicy- or shall I say soberintoxicating- part of the article is about the function of coffee-houses. These "vibrant and often unreliable sources of information" served as discussion places where one could stay abreast of the most current developments in a wide range of fields. What's most interesting to me is that "in theory, coffeehouses were public places, open to any man (since women were excluded, at least in London)...Patrons were expected to respect certain rules that did not apply in the outside world. According to custom, social differences were to be left at the coffeehouse door; in the words of one contemporary rhyme, 'Gentry, tradesmen, all are welcome hither and may without affront sit down together.'
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'Coffeehouses were centers of self-education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation, and, in some cases, political fermentation. But above all they were clearing houses for news and gossip, linked by the circulation of customers, publications, and information from one establishment to the next."

I guess what really gets my womanly emotions going into overdrive about this is that all were welcome and social differences were to be checked at the door. Clearly, this is not so. What's especially interesting is that these establishments were breeding centers for gossip- a hideously female act. Okay, so maybe the breakdown of social fences actually did happen, since gossiping must have made men degenerate and 'turn' and become effeminate. Oh yeah, this makes sense, women did spend time in coffeehouses because by all of the gossiping that the men did turned them into women... so it was open to all...