Suzanne Harrington: New coffee machine has me in a permanent state of hyper-caffeination

Did you hear the dawn chorus this morning? I did. Tweet tweet chirrup tweet. Except it was 4.30am and still dark. I blame the new coffee machine, bought in lockdown after doing the coffee sums and calculating that it would pay for itself within a fortnight of the coffee shops reopening. We have become bean bores, froth afficionados, crema cranks. Our kitchen has become Central Perk, except without the sofa or the glamour.

Thanks to this wondrous new addition, the household is now in a permanent state of hyper caffeination - accelerated heart beats, staccato sentences, a keen yet involuntary acquaintance with birdsong in the middle of the night. And racing thoughts. So many racing thoughts. Mostly about the Euros. 

Poor Mbappe. Bad luck Muller. Go Raheem. Who will get through? Why are England fans so eternally vile and unmannerly? And yet what a great young team. Could Jordan Pickford be the Angela Merkel of goalkeepers, reliable as a handbag? Is Southgate a tactical genius or a purveyor of ploddy park the bus football? Am I having pre dawn palpitations?

Actually that buzzy feeling could be full body schadenfreude at the fury of Mrs Trump for not getting on the cover of Vogue, as Dr Biden just did. Dr Biden had the word Love on the back of her jumper at the G7, while Mrs Trump famously wore that coat stating I Really Don’t Care Do U while visiting the small children put in cages by her husband on the Mexican border. 

Maybe that’s what swung it for Anna Wintour’s cover choice; the editrix, famous for her unfluffy froideur, is clearly civilised enough to recognise a actual First Lady, rather than the trophy wife of a reality television presenter. I wish I hadn’t had that third bucket of espresso quite so late in the afternoon. It seems to be giving me tinnitus. Is that a blackbird? Is that daylight? Can I get up yet?

A few hours drive away, someone else has been awake all night too. She’s pushing her way through new territory, squashed in tight as a bog-snorkeller. Very soon she will emerge into bright light, away from the familiar comfort of where she’s been hiding out for months now. 

All around her are anxious adults, exhausted and probably quite stressed from all the squeezing and shoving and pushing and the sheer insanity of how it all happens. The camel passing through the eye of a needle has nothing on this. Nevertheless, she is persisting.

It's not quite dawn yet, but I’m checking my phone, checking and checking. Nothing. All the terrifying vocabulary jangles through my head like cutlery; prostaglandin, oxytocin, pethidine, episiotomy. (Surely they don’t do those anymore – do they?) Is it too soon to call? What did people do before mobiles? That blackbird is making a right racket.

After an eternity, the phone beeps. There she is. Out in the world, tiny and perfect. A newborn niece. I go downstairs and load up the coffee machine.