I've recently discovered that I'm able to drink coffee again, which is very pleasant. For about six years now, as long-time readers may recall, I've been hypersensitive to caffeine to the extent that a cup of decaff has been able to give me something resembling a normal coffee buzz, whereas a cup of fully-caff has been known to send me into a gibbering panic attack or something close to it. However, recently I've been finding decaff isn't doing it for me any more, so one day when I was particularly sleepy I risked a cup of proper coffee in a spirit of experimentation, and it did its job and didn't have any ill effects. I still have to be a bit careful if I'm already in a jittery mood for other reasons, and I still wouldn't drink coffee late in the day for fear of trouble sleeping, but a nice cup of coffee of a morning now appears to be an option which is once again open to me. This is a good thing.

(Another option I thought of today, if I'm feeling cautious, is to mix decaff and caff half-and-half. This only works sensibly with instant, of course, but since my jars of decaff and caff instant at home are both the same brand, it works particularly well there.)

Less good is that I've been drinking quite a lot of alcohol (well, by my standards at least) as a means of coping with the stressful process of house-buying, and it's been starting to faintly worry me; so now that the seriously scary stuff is out of the way and it's mostly just hard work from now on I think I'm going to call a halt and stop drinking for a couple of weeks. When I actually manage to move in, an alcoholic celebration of some sort will probably be in order, but until then I'm taking the precautionary measure of staying off the booze.

Accordingly, in the pub this evening I drank non-alcoholic stuff. My usual non-alcoholic pub drink is orange juice and lemonade, but in a spirit of experimentation (yes, another one) I had a go at lime and soda today, which seemed to work rather well in that it had the refreshing citrus nature but unlike OJ+L it wasn't obviously chock full of sugar. If anyone can suggest other nice and not-excessively-sugary pub soft drinks to me, I may experiment further.