I was bursting for a cup of coffee this morning. No filters, though – despite the huge range of coffee on the supermarket shelves, they never seem to sell the filters. No problem, thinks I. I’ll strain it through a plastic sieve and the job’s a good’un. Pleased with my ingenuity, I tried to stuff the sieve inside the coffee dripper. It bounced out again. And again. And again.

Okay, let’s try a piece of tissue. The tissue took about 10 minutes to let as many drips through.

A paper mask! That’ll do the job! (Got bloody loads of those.) I artfully arranged it over the top of the dripper, spooned the coffee in, carefully poured the water over it and stood back, holding my breath. Coffee, oh coffee, be mine! With one disdainful upward thrust, the mask disgorged its contents in an ungainly, sloppy, speckled brown mess.

By now, the work surface looked as though a troope of enthusiastic baboons had set out to open a coffee shop but had a massive fight instead then fled the scene in a dozen different directions.

I looked in despair at my cup of lukewarm coffee. All 10 drips of it. That’s when I remembered there was a cafetiere in the cupboard.