Many years ago, Catherine and I, and our friends Lisa and Stephen, set off from Charlottetown to drive Stephen to the train home to Ontario.

For reasons of whimsy, we opted to drop Stephen at a flag stop in northern Maine; for reasons of lateness we split the trip in two, camping just the other side of Moncton halfway.

These were the days when Catherine was a serious coffee drinker and I was not a coffee drinker at all, and so when we woke up the next morning it was vital for Catherine to get coffee in a way I didn’t understand at all. At my assholish insistence, we drove all the way to Saint John—about 90 minutes—before coffee was secured. It was almost the death of us.

Now that I am a serious coffee drinker myself, in retrospect I take Catherine’s side of that divide. And so I was sure to acquire coffee to take with us for our weekend cottage stay in Georgetown Royalty.

Starbucks “Via Instant” turns out to be significantly more than palatable instant coffee, leaps and bounds better than the instant of yore. Boil water, add packet of “microground” coffee, stir, drink.

If only such innovations existed in the mid-1990s.