I tend to listen to In Our Time when I’m having trouble sleeping. Or, at least, I listen to it to the end when I can’t sleep. There is this bit at the end of the podcast version where the producer pops in to offer the guests a drink. I think mostly because the academics would happily go on all day if not. Anyway, at some point insomnia drove me to start noting down the drinks they chose. Then it became a thing and I felt obliged to continue, not really knowing why I had started. Lockdown has freed me and the producer from that obligation, and I am in possession of probably the world’s most useless dataset:

• Papal infallibility - coffee, tea
• Pheromones - Tea, coffee, black tea (weak)
• Irish Famine- tea, coffee, tea, tea
• Frankenstein - tea, tea, tea, tea
• Bergson and Time - tea, none
• Inca - tea, tea, tea, tea, coffee
• Sir Thomas Browne - inaudible
• The Mytilenaean Debate - none
• Doggerland - coffee, tea, tea
• Venus - coffee, coffee (black), tea
• Augustine’s Confessions - not recorded
• Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow - coffee, tea, coffee
• Dorothy Hodgkin - inaudible
• Coffee - coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee
• Catullus- tea, tea, tea, coffee, tea
• Siege of Paris - tea, tea
• Alcuin - tea, tea, tea, tea
• Battle of T forest - Tea, coffee, water
• Treaty of Limerick- Tea, tea, tea
• The Valladolid Debates - tea, tea, tea, tea
• The evolution of horses - none, none, none, none
• The Covenanters - tea, coffee, water, none

(Pleasing that coffee got a full sweep for Coffee though).