The Adoptee has noticed something.

Glasgow’s coffee shops are apparently magnificent.

Not mostly good. Not generally decent. Magnificent.

Open Google Maps and the city appears to have solved hospitality. Four-point-six. Four-point-seven. Four-point-eight. Somewhere, presumably, there is a café serving instant coffee from a chipped mug beside a radiator that smells of wet dog, and even that will have 4.4 stars and a review saying “lovely wee place, staff seemed stressed.”

The Adoptee is suspicious.

Restaurants get punished. Pubs get punished. Hotels can lose a star because somebody disliked the pillows.

Coffee shops seem protected by diplomatic immunity.

A café can charge nearly four quid for a flat white, provide one chair apparently designed for interrogation, play music loud enough to loosen fillings and serve a cinnamon bun requiring both hands and a small bridging loan.

Still: 4.7.

And the reviews themselves are extraordinary.

“Coffee was burnt and we waited 25 minutes. Lovely atmosphere. ★★★★☆”

“Staff ignored us, toilet was broken and there was nowhere to sit. Great location. ★★★★☆”

At some point this stops being reviewing and becomes hostage negotiation.

So The Speaker is going to investigate.

Not because Glasgow has bad coffee shops. Quite the opposite. The city has an enormous number of genuinely brilliant cafés, independent roasters and people who know considerably more about coffee than The Adoptee knows about almost anything before eleven in the morning.

But they cannot all be 4.7.

That is mathematically suspicious.

So we are going to visit them properly.

The coffee matters, obviously, but so does everything surrounding it. Is the cake worth what they are charging? Can you sit down without entering somebody else’s Teams meeting? Are the staff lovely because they are lovely, or because Google reviewers have developed Stockholm syndrome? Is there a toilet? Can you actually get into the place? And when the bill arrives, do you still feel warmly caffeinated or briefly consider refinancing?

Most importantly, we will ask the question star ratings seem increasingly reluctant to answer: would we actually go back?

There will be no vendettas, no ambushes and no theatrical outrage because a croissant was three minutes late.

If somewhere is excellent, we will say so.

If somewhere is average, we are also going to say so.

That second one may prove more revolutionary.

The Adoptee has adjusted her sunglasses.

Glasgow apparently has no bad coffee shops.

We’re going to find out why.