cob

An acronym for "Council of the Bean", Cob refers to any willing group of people who regularly meet with a purpose, in any local coffee-house of their choosing. (*Costa excluded) Traditional Cob rituals included member aliases, which include their real name, and an alliterative prefix/suffix which is coffee-house related, replacing the coffee-house and caffeine with a club and some alcohol at least once a month, and having the designated driver veer off the road at least twice on the way home from Cob. New members are initiated with a piping hot double espresso, while members who wish to be stricken from the Council list must ingest two spoonfuls of used coffee grounds. Founded in a small coffee-house, lost to the mists of time, in Glasgow, Scotland, Cob's have since sprung up all over the globe, reaching from the caffeine-rationing suburbs of Tokyo, to the dizzying heights of the Space Needle's Starbucks in Chicago. Whether Cob is just a temporal fad, or whether or not it will stand the test of time, remains to be seen; we can however be certain that it will never be forgotten.