For reasons purely related to vanity, I’ve had to give up coffee. It’s not for ever, unless it takes me for ever to get my teeth whitened, so I’m not minded to wean myself off caffeine entirely. But it’s not for a short enough time that I can simply stop whining and weather the low-level headache, the mental sluggishness and the frankly unbearable taste of water.

No problem, I thought: I will survive on energy drinks. What’s embarrassing about that? What could possibly be shameful about going into a Tesco, picking up a black and neon green can of Monster Energy, its name in a satanic font, at 8.05am? What could conceivably make anyone give me the fish eye, that I’m setting off the age-verification flashing light, and a dude is having to come over and attest that I am indeed over 16? All of that social opprobrium was before I’d even opened an energy drink and had to taste it.

There’s a gap in the market, entrepreneurs, for energy drinks that look like kombucha and taste like fizzy water – for middle-aged people who don’t want to walk around announcing that their lives have taken a terrible and mysterious turn. You won’t get this idea into production in time for it to be useful for me, so just take it and do what you will.

Instead, I turned to Pro Plus, the caffeine pill that was famous when I was at school. The kids who used it hadn’t slept at all, but they were 15 so it wasn’t really a problem – the Pro Plus just gave them an edge. It was an edge of lunacy; it made your eyes all bright and wild, and your sentences make no sense.

To replicate the conditions of a triple espresso using only Pro Plus, you’ll probably have to take at least four, though the makers are clear that you shouldn’t take more than two in three hours. And that’s if you only used to drink one coffee a day, which I absolutely never did. Still, I love it. It’s making me feel 15 – too young to buy a Monster, never too young to feel like you’ve just drunk three.