Liquorice and Coffee
Coffee and salt liquorice shouldn’t work. But somehow, they do. And perhaps some of the strangest combinations in life are the ones that make us feel most at home.
There is a combination of flavours that makes very little sense.
Coffee and liquorice.
A good espresso is bitter, dark, intense. Salt liquorice is something else entirely. Sharp, salty, sweet, almost medicinal.
They don’t seem like they should belong together.
And yet, I often find myself wanting a piece of salt liquorice with my coffee.
Perhaps it is because I grew up in Denmark, where liquorice is not simply a flavour but part of the landscape of childhood. It is something familiar. Something that belongs to home.
And perhaps it is also because I love a good espresso.
Somewhere along the way, these two very different things became connected in me.
Not because they make sense together.
Because they feel right.
That made me think about the strange combinations we carry through life.
The things we like that don’t quite belong together.
A song that reminds us of a particular summer. A smell that takes us somewhere we haven’t been in decades. A particular meal eaten in a particular place. A phrase someone once said that stayed with us for no obvious reason.
From the outside, these connections can seem arbitrary.
From the inside, they can feel completely true.
Perhaps that is one of the things it means to be human.
We are made from layers of places, people, memories, cultures and experiences. Things that were never designed to fit together somehow become part of the same person.
We don’t assemble ourselves according to a coherent plan.
We accumulate.
We absorb.
We connect things.
And sometimes the most unlikely combinations are the ones that make us feel most at home.
There is something here that interests me in relation to artificial intelligence, too.
AI is extraordinarily good at finding patterns.
It can tell us what usually belongs with what.
What combinations make sense.
What is likely to work.
But perhaps some of the most human things are precisely those connections that don’t make sense.
The things no algorithm would have a reason to suggest.
Coffee and salt liquorice.
A childhood memory attached to an adult ritual.
A strange preference inherited from a culture we didn’t choose.
A piece of music that makes us feel safe for reasons we can’t explain.
Maybe our irrational connections are not noise in the system.
Maybe they are part of the system.
Perhaps they are some of the small, peculiar coincidences that make each of us irreducibly ourselves.
So I have my espresso.
And my piece of salt liquorice.
It shouldn’t work.
But somehow, it does.
And perhaps that is enough.
