Anatole! Amenez-vous les pâtisseries, s'il vous plaît

I went for lunch in the canteen today. First with a heavy heart, soon with a heavy and unhappy stomach. As I tucked into my spaghetti and unidentified flesh with little cheer, I realised what was odd about the day's dining experience.

In the metal box of cutlery were the usual assortments of battered institutional knives and forks, bent and twisted. Yet amongst these humble, proletarian items was a mutant fork, small, delicate and strangely thickened along one edge. It seemed familiar, a mute reminder of autre temps, a suggestion of a place and time when food wasn't a commodity to be shovelled down in obscene quantities before the 'taste' assaulted your senses, yet I couldn't place it.

The madeleine-moment struck once I was seated and attempting to enjoy my repast. This curious utensil was… a pastry fork. No, really. A lone survivor of the days in which different foods required customised tools, a distant relative of the fish fork and the grapefruit spoon.

How does such a nostalgic curio reach the canteen of a tired and abused institution like The Hegemon? Is there a secret dining club, a cabal of plump managers being fed dainties by bow-tied flunkies? I now dream of turning a corner in some obscure campus building and finding my senses assailed by the aroma of fresh pastries, meringue, tarte tatin and fine pain au chocolat. A kindly gentleman will relieve me of my marking and my paper cup of unconvincing peppermint tea ('not today, monsieur, not today') and guide me to a plush armchair with a side-table groaning with delicacies on fine Staffordshire china. As Debussy wafts gently from the quartet in the corner and the flunky offers me a choice of periodicals, my cares and waistband ease.

Oh well. A vole can dream.

(Anatole is the temperamental culinary genius of the Jeeves and Wooster novels, by the way).

Milk with your icecap?

OK, it's not as bad as driving an SUV or flying off for long weekends, but your coffee habit is killing polar bears:

The carbon footprint of a cup of tea or coffee:

21g CO2e: black tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need 

53g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need 

71g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling double the water you need 

235g CO2e: a large cappuccino 

340g CO2e: a large latte

Some of my colleagues consumer loads of expensive lattes through the day. What damage do they cause over a year?

Three large lattes per day, by contrast, and you're looking at almost twenty times as much carbon, equivalent to flying half way across Europe.

It's mostly the milk - which I gave up a while back, though not for environmental reasons. Every pint you waste drinking it could have made cheese!

I also gave up coffee - several a day at work meant I was completely spaced out in the morning, then felt ill and exhausted in the afternoon - more than once I crawled under the desk for a little snooze. I really hurt my head on the underside of the desk, waking up in a hurry when someone walked in during last summer. 

Now I mostly drink mint tea. At the moment, it's as environmentally friendly as possible: I use mint leaves torn from my own plant. 

This Friday's conundrum

A nice one this week.

Who are your fictional heroes? With whom do you identify or admire? I'm opting for Arthur Dent ('I seem to be having trouble with my lifestyle'), who fruitlessly and accidentally travelled the universe in search of a decent cup of tea, which is disastrous. He also sported a fine dressing gown, as I have been known to, loved cricket and was pretty decent.

I've been accused of resembling Mark Corrigan too. It's true that he (and David Mitchell) is right about most things, worries about ordinary human decency, comes from Shropshire, wears a good dressing gown and the actor shares a birthday with me, but I'm ignoring all that. (Some people say Mark's conservative - they're wrong. He's just not a liberal). My university ID card has a photo of Mark on it. Nobody has ever challenged me.

(Today's xkcd cartoon is a lovely typography one - don't miss the mouse-over. Did you know I went to watch a film about Helvetica and own several books on fonts?).