Justified outlay for cafe au lait

HOW do you know you have an addiction? For me, it was when I found myself standing in the pouring rain this morning, strapping my small son into his car seat, hoisting my wet dog into the boot and driving into town because I needed coffee.

I say "need" because I guess that's how I feel about coffee. It is essential and important rather than just desirable.

Food on the other hand is more of a "want". I often want lasagne for dinner, but if it's raining and there is no mince in the freezer I'm certainly not dragging the family to the shops to get it. That would be absurd. Especially when Domino's delivers.

The irony is that like many people, I can make pretty respectable coffee at home. I have a Nespresso machine that makes me feel a little bit closer to George Clooney every time I use it. What more could a girl want?

Today, my brain just wasn't functioning. I had a headache, my thoughts were percolating to the surface slower than normal for 9am and even slower at 10am and 11am as my deadline grew closer.

Even though time was at a premium (or maybe because it was), I was braving the elements and the considerable challenge of small children and pets in those elements to pay $4 for something I could have made at home for (almost) nothing.

A quick calculation revealed this daily pilgrimage was costing almost $30 a week, or $1500 per year.

While I never think twice about the cost of coffee, it did occur to me that I could make my own at home or work and do so in a brand new pair of Jimmy Choos each year.

Or with a Louis Vuitton slung over my shoulder. With less glamour, I could even pay my phone or power bill.

But where's the fun in that?

Four dollars a day is a little bit of money for a lot of mental diversion. Because I don't believe it is the taste or even the caffeine hit that drives us from a warm home into the pouring rain, or away from our desk close to deadline.

It is simply that mentally, it makes us feel more able to "get through", be it at home with the joyful but relentless job of being a parent, or at work with the equally relentless but somewhat less joyful job of earning a living.

And if it doesn't make us feel that way, it's at least an opportunity to do anything but the task at hand for as long as it takes us to walk to our favourite cafe and back.

Since nipping out back for a fag is no longer cool, "popping out for a coffee" provides a universally acceptable excuse to stop what you're doing for five minutes and do something else 365 times per year. Coffee is about the journey, not the destination.

When I've already made my daily trek, there are a host of other options available for diversion and stress relief at any given moment.

At home, it is walking to stare at the empty pantry several times an hour. At the studio, it's checking news websites a similar number of times just in case anything even remotely exciting has happened in the previous few minutes. It never usually has, but that's not the point.

The point is that the big jobs of life should be managed in small bites. And large swigs of takeaway trim flat whites.