Before the preview of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel I attended began, the audience was treated to one of those on-screen celebrity-quote-and-quiz features devised by marketing firms to distract people from fretting about the time spent waiting. Brad Pitt, one of the movie’s stars, was cited as having said, “I’ll take wisdom over youth any day.”

If there’s anything harder than trying to explain a joke to someone who doesn’t get it, it’s trying to explain to yourself why you laughed at something that you suspect you shouldn’t have.

You don’t have to drink the stuff to know that in the past two decades the market for coffee has expanded in a way that your parents would never have imagined. And if you are a coffee aficionado, you know that our developing palette has made us willing to spend more and more for a cup that best suits out taste. If you still have a jar of freeze-dried crystals in the cupboard, it’s either for emergencies or guests you don’t particularly like.