I have succumbed. Given in. Surrendered. My wife wanted a shiny piece of metal and plastic that buzzed and shook until she was in ecstasy. And I let her have it. Indeed, I’ve begun to use it slyly on the side myself.

After all, the Nespresso machine was made for sharing.

Everywhere we went over Christmas, everywhere we’ve been since the new year, there has been the gurgle and plop of the Nespresso. Like the iPod a couple of years ago, it’s a gadget that has gone from recher-ché stylishness to ubiquity in just a few months. For those of you yet to acquire this little slice of Torinese sophistication (cheaper than a Ferrari, but much more reliable – indeed much more reliable than anything else Italian) I can only say, get down to John Lewis before it’s too late.

Most of us, I know, will have found the whole business of making coffee at home dispiriting over the years. The percolator and the cafetière are all very well, but the liquid that they produce has none of the intensity of a proper, café-pressurised, espresso. Using cafetière coffee to make a cappuccino is like making a martini with Volvic mineral water – it looks OK from a distance, but the taste is as bland as Geoff Hoon’s haircut and the whole thing has as much bite as a day-old lamb.

Trying to make a proper espresso at home has been almost impossible for all but the wealthiest, and ponciest, of us. Given how expensive and fiddly Gaggia espresso-makers are, the only people likely to have them are those who are so rich that they need never work again, not least because they’ll need all their time to clean and maintain this steam-driven monster. Now, however, the Nespresso machine brings espresso-quality, indeed ristretto-strength, coffee within the reach of millions, with minimal inconvenience. All you need to do is plop a little capsule into the machine – like slotting a cartridge into a shotgun, or a battery into a torch – then press and wait, for about ten seconds. And then you have a near-perfect draught of the darkest pleasure.

For my wife, the Nespresso brings not only a welcome whiff of her Italian childhood into our house, but it also provides regular treats throughout the day which, unlike most of the treats that normally sustain me, will fit in with our new, sugar-free, January lifestyle.

However, while both of us are now deeply attached to the thing, it is not nostalgia for my childhood that espressos produce, but rather a curious sense of being part of a revolution. When I was a child “proper” coffee was still faintly exotic, the sort of thing that was available only in hotels after Sunday lunch, when a funny plastic hat would be put on a teacup and the Rombouts dripped into the china in much the same way that the rain dimpled the muddy earth outside. Every other meal either ended or was accompanied by tea. A curious liquid called Camp, apparently made from chicory, or a powder almost indistinguishable from Bisto was sometimes used to generate cups of something warming at church coffee mornings, but the relationship between that drink and anything that you would sell as a coffee today was as loose as the relationship between a peat fire and a plutonium rod.

I now drink coffee at a rate that probably has me get through as much of the stuff in seven days as my parents did throughout the whole of the Seventies. It scarcely takes me a week to fill up my Caffè Nero loyalty card – and that’s only my prebreakfast intake. I don’t know what the long-term effects on me of this regimen might be.

Perhaps the fact I’m writing this at 3am on Monday might hold a clue.

I do, however, have a theory about the effect on the life of the nation of a massive transfusion of Dr Starbucks’s patent pick-me-up: I think that it’s made us a little bit tetchier. Consider the queues in any one of the obvious coffee outlets – the foot-stamping, the texting or mobile-phone calling even as the order is being made, and the impatience if the cup isn’t forthcoming molto presto. Consider the epidemic of cutting-up, tailgating, light-jumping and overtaking on the inside that characterise driving in London. Or the way in which M&S’s Simply Food stores have accelerated their check-out system, or the fact that no story in Metro or London Lite requires more than ten seconds to absorb, or how we now discuss 90-second spoofs on YouTube (such as the downfall of Sheffield United) with the same degree of passion that we used to devote to proper hours of made-for-TV drama. All of London appears to be on a permanent caffeine rush. And now the Nespresso means that you’re never more than ten seconds away from your next hit.

As with so many revolutions, the great caffeinisation of modern Britain is probably irreversible. We now automatically associate a cup with a treat or break, the coffee house having sold itself as a haven or retreat, but this is the break from routine that ends up driving us farther away from true relaxation. The coffee shop is only a haven from the hurly-burly in the way that a First World War trench was a shelter from slaughter – it provided a temporary respite from attrition, but was really at the heart of the whole problem. The dilemma for me is that I now just love the intense, deeply bitter, jolt of dark, strong Italian coffee more than any other taste (apart from, perhaps, martinis). And now it’s there, whenever I want it. I am destined, therefore, to almost permanent grouchiness from now on. It’s probably just as well, however, that I’m an opposition politician. Because, apart from being a directory inquiries operator, there are few other jobs in which tetchiness has become, over the years, such a valuable qualification.

How a tear united the PC brigade

A year ago I argued that Barack Obama was an Apple Mac kind of guy (funky, left-field, smart) and Hillary a PC (mechanical, dour, lacking creative soul). Like most observers last week, I thought that Mac-style politics (cool, informal, user-friendly, accessible) was set to triumph over the duller PC approach of sticking rigidly to the programme. But Hillary’s comeback forces us to reexamine the division. And it may be reassuring for those of us (as I said at the time) who are pure PC.

Most of us are PCs. We may have special talents, but we’ll never be exceptional. PCs get on with working hard and earning respect for their reliability. And that is part of Hillary’s appeal. Even though her campaign for the presidency has sometimes suffered from her aides assuming that the Oval Office was Clinton territory by right, she projects the personality of someone who knows what it’s like to be taken for granted and so takes nothing for granted herself. The sense that she’s a get-it-done-and-damn-the-glory type appeals to many. So her teary moment struck a chord with those unsung figures who do the work and never become Prom Queen, but occasionally find the hoopla surrounding the matinee idols a touch wearing. For those of us who understand why Dolly Parton’s Jolene has such resonance, the tears were a turning point.

Scottish Dolly

Talking of Jolene reminds me that growing up in Scotland in the 1970s meant that you were as immersed in country music as anyone raised in Nashville . We had our own stars, such as Sydney Devine (Broken Engagement, Long Black Limousine and Nobody’s Child). And I’ve never lost my affection for heart-wrenching ballads. But did Sydney get the recognition he deserved? Was one of his records ever chosen for Desert Island Discs? Does his name mean anything to anyone under 40? If Sydney fans can let me know what heights he may have scaled, I’d be delighted.

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath.

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