I must admit that I was fairly oblivious to the invasion of the coffee houses, as well known brands like Starbucks and Costa carpet bombed city centres and established an outlet on every street corner. It wasn’t until the invasion was over and the High Streets of the UK had been subjugated that I really became aware of them.My initial impression was why would anyone want to spend up to a fiver on a gigantic cup of coffee when they could make their own with a kettle and a jar of instant for a fraction of the cost, or in my case simply get a free cup out of the machine at work (even though it is questionable whether the stuff out of the machines can actually be described as coffee rather than simply hot coloured water).

Then one day one of the best known brands opened an outlet in our own staff canteen. Each morning I walked past huge queues of people who could now buy their coffee within feet of their desks, still thinking that even though it was subsidised it was still rather a lot of money for a cup of coffee.

But then of course the genius of this latest advance guard for the high street coffee brand onslaught became apparant the next time I had an external visitor – I found myself offering to buy them one – almost without thinking. And of course they accepted, because they had just flown up from London which has been infiltrated by the caffeine conquerors to an even greater extent than Edinburgh, and they were even more used to excess expresso than their Scottish colleagues.

I must say I enjoyed it. I even had two and spent the rest of the day and well into the night wondering whether my heart rate would ever slow back down. But after that first taster, initially I managed to restrict my branded coffee intake to meetings with external visitors.

Then one fateful morning, a shorter then usual queue lured me into buying one for consumption at my desk. That was it. They had me. Their carefully crafted strategies had worked and I was hooked on high street coffee just like the millions who had already succumbed.

One cup a day soon became two and then sometimes three. And on particularly meeting heavy days I have started to lose count of the number of cups I was shelling out for.

Eventually I worked out how much I was spending and I was horrified to find that I had gone from spending zero to £40 per week, at least, on coffee.