Today is National Coffee Day. An invented holiday if ever I heard of one. Still, if it means there is a chance of bagging a free coffee somewhere then I’m all in favor of it.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as National Coffee Day until this morning. And I don’t really understand why there is, because coffee is just coffee. Sure, it’s a great drink, but worth having a whole day dedicated to it every year?

Coffee as a drink has been with us since the 9th century when, so the story goes, an Ethiopian goat herder called Kaldi noticed his goats eating coffee berries and acting strangely afterwards. They were effectively caffeined up to their eyeballs.

And so to present day when 600 billion cups of the stuff are consumed every year. And it gets its own day dedicated to it in the U.S.