THE latest intelligence suggest that chaps are meeting their fellow chaps in coffee houses now rather than bars.

So once more, inadvertently, I find myself keeping up with the trends. When I first made the suggestion of meeting for an afternoon coffee rather than an evening pint, consternation was widespread among my platoon.

But I was adamant, and now I think we all prefer it. We rarely have more than one coffee, where we'd never, ever have just one pint. We never get arrested or into fights or wake up in the arms of farting women with no teeth.

The conversation brews along nicely and reaches its natural length of about 90 minutes, instead of being repeated several times over till closing time. Nobody gets argumentative or sullen and - a small point but still, I think, pertinent - nobody vomits on you.

The choice of locale is simpler: you meet the same person in the same venue. Chap A likes trendy cafes, chap B chain coffee shops, chap C department stores.

I am chap C. I feel there's more chance of being among normal, unthreatening people in department store cafes and less risk of encountering edgy zeitgeist-fondlers in shorts looking all absorbed in their laptops.

That said, I also meet a pal in Embra's Easter Road, where I enjoy sitting among the young foreign people, who seem so tasteful, artistic and full of hope.

The only problem in such places is the unlabelled food. The staff must be asked 300 times a day what it is and still won't succumb to signage.

Sometimes, of course, we men of the world even visit each other's homes for a brew. There can be unease here about using instant coffee or cafetieres and so forth. I tend to go with instant out of anti-snobbery.

That said, I've just recently dug out my old coffee maker and am ambivalent about it. The reason I stopped drinking tea was that I was far too busy to wait for the bag to brew.

Now I wait while this contraption bubbles and froths. However, on the plus side, it always reminds me of a late, lamented news editor on my old local paper, who showed us how to make a brew that had the consistency of tar and made our ears spin.

We had a terrific news team, fuelled entirely on caffeine, the gods' choice of drug.