Coffee in Vietnam is COFFEE. Full blown, mind altering stuff it is. It comes in cafes: dedicated coffee houses that understand addiction and have no intention of weaning you off the hard stuff. It comes in cups little more than an inch across and the same deep, with handles that defy the delicate Vietnamese pinkie. It comes with conversation and reading. It comes as it came in the 60s on the Left Bank, intense (if the Vietnamese can ever be described as intense) focused and ready for action – at least that is how it feels… This is the coffee of the smell that precedes it: coffee that keeps that, to often unfulfilled, promise.

Cigarettes, Conversation and Cell-phones peripherals to Coffee in Ha Noi

There are still a number of the old coffee shops in Ha Noi; rooms in which the nicotine coat has measurable depth, which started life in shades of brown, and which have steadily 'sombred' ever since; and seem as though ever is forever. Brown art works high in the (high brown) rooms of tropical Ha Noi vie with the walls for anonymity. These are caves where the shadows of ideas can play before we return to the real world. Backgrounds to make the flashes of inspiration gained from those small cups all the brighter. Tables huddle by the walls. Low Vietnamese tables: crude poor sorts of things. Solid surfaces of stain and burn enhanced by each new customer. The three available sides of the table offer a place for three stools; at most 12 inches high. Strangely awkward ashtrays may wait vainly to be preferred to the floor. So much for furnishings.

These coffee houses are for ideas. Ideas spoken, or read, or written or brushed in old 'nom' characters. Ideas bantered in conversation following a most ancient art. Ideas gleaned from the papers that vendors bring every few minutes for those that are alone, or wish to withdraw. Ideas for those who stare at that point which is nowhere. Or for ideas to pass to others somewhere far away on the phone as couples sit adjacent 'doing it alone, together' as Dory Previn wryly notes in her song. The couples and trios and quartets are most often of men, but not always so, and not misogynistic-ally so, as they were in old Scottish Bars. Partly this is a matter of money: the price of these tiny cups is the same as breakfast; and anyway women still have less money than men, and anyway they should be out busy getting husbands and not idling with mere ideas! And anyway with coffee go cigarettes and women do not smoke in public in the towns. The men try to redress this damage done to the tobacco giants: cigarettes dangle from mouths of drivers, group members turn aside to light up, the careful hand-worker at last solves the problem of smoke rising to his eyes by setting its source to burn the table's edge. Smoking is still part of life here as it was with us in the 50s.

Another Coffee-House in Contemporary Ha Noi

These are havens for the young and their communion. Coffee is not for us older mortals. Few here can remember four decades back, for such deep memories can no longer cope with the ensuing sleepless nights that Vietnamese coffee heralds. We have to save up our tokens of rest for the delight of a few minutes; sacrifice a precious night to the moments it takes to sup a minute cup. We wish we were young again, and again could look with puzzlement on the old who complained that coffee keeps them awake. Now there will be little sleep for two nights. But it is worth it.

Those are diversions. There are no diversions in the coffee houses of Ha Noi, no frivolous petit comforts, no nibbles to tide you over, no nourishment beyond the sugar you add to your drug. Your hosts are dedicated people who focus on the job and are not to be distracted by the whims of fashion, or fancies of mere dilettantes in the art of coffee drinking. Water yes. Water as an addendum, a foil to the bitter, bitter-sweet heart of the matter. A cup to refresh your palate for the next onslaught. Or water as ice in a long milky drink for those that like their caffeine cold and superficially emasculated.
The coffee comes. A tray of cup, saucer, and tiny teaspoon to stir up the glue of condensed milk from the bottom or stir in the extra sugar which is in a separate cup. It is hot, very hot, tantalisingly too hot. Black like the hair all around. Opaque as the conversations I long not to hear for then the mystery would be blown open. And that smell at last to be redeemed. So we wait, acutely aware of how short the delight will be, we put it off, as we put off that other main delight of life. Toy with ourselves. Fain disinterest. And then give in. Thick as Turkish coffee but with no rough texture. Like syrup it slips over our tongues, barely a mouthful in the whole cup, a few short seconds. The bitterness like chilli offers to shrive us, we emerge cleansed, relieved of the passing discomfort, we feel refreshed and ready to go.

Milk Coffee and Black Coffee – two sizes of diminutive cup in a Ha Noi Coffee-House

The cumbersome lists of life's tasks dissolve. The daunting prospects become happy pastures. And new fresh ideas shoot forth; a mycelium like growth, fast forwarded; weaving interconnections in the sharp blue light that bathes us. Here ideas rule. A world where abstractions are all, where there is the interplay of expression on insight, the excitement and enthral of the chase in pursuit of a lost concept which eludes one (and so often all) of its hunters. Concepts thrown up by the coffee, thrown out by the coffee, scattered like confetti, no, no far more dynamic, like bees beavering, can bees beaver? And so we follow our tails, or tales, and tell stories. And isn't telling stories near the heart of human consciousness? Isn't consciousness itself the archetypal story? Coffee…