The Daily Musing

Where I live, in the so-called world donut capital, Tim Horton’s is up there with hockey, poutine, and backyard ice rinks, a staple of winter, and, for that matter, every other season. Tim’s caters to them all - strawberry tarts in spring, iced capps for the hot and humid months, and who could argue that autumn smells even better with the aroma of hot maple danishes?

You see, I’m a sucker for every hyped-up morsel and slurp.

Now, McDonald’s… well, that’s the all-American outfit that I usually try to avoid. I can say without hesitation that I have never eaten a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder, not that I don’t like hamburgers, I like them as much as the next glutton. For me, it’s the condiments I don’t like - mustard, relish, pickles, onions… because McDonald’s has a knack for slopping the rainbow-ish goo on until it becomes a condiment sandwich with a sliver of meat between two buns.

But there’s always a but.

It used to be that I waited in the morning queue at Timmy’s, perhaps too lazy to park the car and walk in to yet another queue, so I gave up altogether and headed to Starbucks (with at least a tenner in the wallet) for a regular or decaf coffee. (I’d write the proper name for the coffee company’s drinks, but my memory has all but obliterated the cool monikers with which Starbucks sucks us all in - grandé this and frappuccino that. All ersatz coffee, if you ask me.)

After I drop Steph at school at 8, I pass a line-up of cars, their eddies of exhaust whirling like smoke out of chimney pots as they tail each other to Tim’s coveted drive-thru window. (Success, at last!) Immediately beyond is Starbucks with its seemingly dissimilar crowd - the suit and briefcase types. An hour later, around 9, Starbucks will see the “just dropped off the kids” moms, fresh from school parking lots, and the business sorts who’ve arranged meetings over decaf, low-fat, extra espresso, hold the whipped cream and chocolate shavings Grandé Lattés, followed by the metrosexuals and university kids.

Is Starbucks more about being seen with the “it” crowd than schlepping great coffee? You decide.

I couldn’t tolerate it any longer. Starbucks wasn’t about coffee - it didn’t have that pungent fresh-roasted aroma that I remember from the Welsh Bracchi (Wales’ Italian-immigrant cafés) or the shop in Muswell Hill where they roast with the same antiquated machine they used in the ’60s. These early memories of espresso resembled nothing of the Seattle-based coffee merchant’s all-about-fashion blends.I finally got to the point where a one-time coffee and scone at Starbucks depleted my coffee budget for the week; just in time for Tim’s budget-friendly siren calls enticing me back into the fold I’d once deserted. I would, I determined, instead save the pennies to buy my two teenagers the hankered-after Starbucks gift cards I usually stuff in their Christmas stockings. Teenagers like to be seen at the over-priced cafés - not for coffee, God forbid, but for the chi-chi flavoured drinks with whipped toppings and extra doses of sugar.

But back to the drift of my original musings now that I’ve rambled on about long drive-thru queues and over-priced upstarts. I realized, about three weeks ago, that McDonald’s has damned good coffee. No longer the Higgins & Burke variety, this newer blend is a bona-fide cup-o-joe, and a bargain to boot: Under the golden arches, a cup of coffee and a tasty (large) muffin goes for $1.39.

Not bad!

So, until I tire of this latest find, it’ll be McDonald’s in the morning, with the queue-less drive-thru and friendly servers handing me a free copy of the day’s Standard.

Don’t you deserve a break today?