WHEN I STOP at a café for a cup of coffee, I'm pretty sure that's what I want - a cup of coffee. But 10 minutes into the procedure of getting it, my befuddled mind is not even certain that I haven't somehow landed at an inquisition in the warmer climes of Milton's Pandemonium.

Coffee, it seems, is not just coffee. It is a huge multiple choice quiz, writ large on newspaper-sized menus and in the voice of the wild-eyed waiter with pen poised ominously: "Will that be regular or decaf, sir? Café crème, café au lait, café Americain, café Australian, café, café like wot they make at Queenie's House of Ladies in Juarez. . .?"

Er. . .um. . ah. . .

"Fine sir," pen scribbling furiously. "Perhaps a latte, or cappuccino, or maybe espresso? How about a filter, or cinnamon? And will that be Colombian or Kenyan or Turkish or Albanian, medium ground, roasted, parboiled, baked, steamed, fried, grilled, or maybe sauteed with just a smidgen of garlic and onions?"

When it comes to plagues, we tend to think of old Pharaoh Rameses II, who didn't know a stacked deck when he saw one. Okay, so Rams had a few quadrillion flies and frogs and locusts on his doorstep - but he didn't face going potty over which of 6,000-odd combinations of coffee to order a cup of down at the Cairo Café, or choosing between 1,600 makes and models of chariots, or which of 200 TV channels to watch the 197th rerun of M*A*S*H on.

The trouble with life in the 21st century is not a lack of choice but altogether too much of it, and it is driving customers to distraction. I walk into a supermarket, my chest constricts, my wallet-covered buttock starts trembling violently and my mental faculties scramble for the exit and the nearest flight to Bermuda.

This is known (by me, if no one else) as "sensory overload," and it stems from being confronted with the more than 40,000 lines of goods that stock the average supermarket. And that's just in Britain, which as I've mentioned before is just about big enough to make a decent-sized parking lot in suburbia Dallas-Fort Worth.

My very English wife Elizabeth is one of nature's born shoppers, surely a dead cert for gold if ever marathon supermarket aisle-prowling becomes an Olympic event. But on her initial venture into a New Jersey megamarket a decade or so ago, she was stricken rigid, not unlike Lot's wife when she glanced back at Sodom (or was it Gomorrah?). Sensory overload, you see.

I am a simple Southern boy who fondly remembers going to the store for a box of cereal and having to choose between Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Wheaties and Cheerios. (Nabisco Shredded Wheat didn't count because it tasted like hay made out of cardboard that the cats had peed on).

In today's supers, the cereal seeker finds himself confronted with box upon box of corn flakes and oat flakes and puffed thingies and rice stuff that makes loud noises and other flakes sponsored by crapper manufacturers, and most of them caked in sugar and chocolate and honey and nougat and, for all I know, pickle relish and truffles.

The Future Foundation did a study of the whole wretched phenomenon for the Abbey National, a British bank, and found that, faced with such a cornucopia of plenty, our decision-making processes are starting to do a Chernobyl en route to a meltdown. Nearly half of all the women and one in five of the men they surveyed said they had trouble simply making up their minds what to have for dinner that day.

"In my day," said one 70-year-old woman, "we just had roast on Sunday, rissoles (British for disguised leftovers) on Monday, shepherd's pie on Tuesday and fish on Friday. Every day you knew what you were going to eat."

And so it was in the Webb household of my youth, when the average month of Sundays progressed through ham, then rice and ham, then ham and rice, then chicken. Boring as hell it was, but at least you didn't risk blowing mental fuses having to decide what to eat.

It's an all-pervasive thing. You want to wash your hair? There's 400, count 'em, 400 bottles of shampoo to choose from. You'd like a book to while away the time? Simple - just pick something from the 200,000 titles you see in front of you. Clothes? Close your eyes, point at any one of six closets - and pray.

Said one 20-year-old woman: "I have so many clothes that I have got nowhere to put them - but I've still got nothing to wear." Meanwhile, my own wife has just added a fourth closet and spends a fair portion of her mornings wandering from one to the next, the lost and bewildered look of a child etched in her face.

"Although we are better off materially, economically, educationally and enjoy better health," says Tim Harrison, of the Abbey National, "life seems more stressful and more complex. This is the paradox of progress - more choices, more things to do, more challenges and more decisions result in more complicated lives."

I have 23 separate channels of television banality to choose from, which by my count is 24 too many - and yet I am considered culturally deprived. Lurking out there in space somewhere are satellites ready to beam me 200 or 300 more channels of stuff - ranging from "The Top 100 Eskimo Recipes for Boiled Walrus" to "How To Build Your Own Swamp" and "Spanish As Spoken in Rural East Tennessee."

Decisions, decisions, decisions - all too much, it is. Oh, for the day when a chocolate bar was a Hershey's (with almonds or without), tea was Lipton's without dreadawful bags, baking soda was Arm and Hammer (also good for cleaning bugs off car windshields) and laundry soap was a choice between Duz (Does Everything) and SuperSuds (Lots More Suds From SuperSuds).

When someone once asked Henry Ford about the available colors for his Model T, he replied amiably, "You can have any color you want, so long as it's black."

That's the kind of decision we need more of.

Thought for the Week: If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

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