His record - two cups within six months of his appointment, a domestic treble in his first full season, a second title in 2005 and reaching the last 16 of the Champions League - set the context for a rueful but masterfully understated parting comment: "I'm sure those people who look at the facts will say that during a period of downsizing, I was reasonably successful".
The report said sales at the big coffee chains rose 10% to £2.1bn last year with around 11m cups of coffee drunk in, or carried out, each week.
Three cups of tea is strictly three cups of water from now on!
He went to a Hawkwind gig, he explains, and loads a YouTube video for me to watch, before popping back out to make us strong cups of tea and collect print-outs of the day's referrals.
In Grangefield community centre, a roomful of women with cups of coffee talk to Harman of how they feel, what they know and what they need.
We have so little control, it appears, that the small things we are given control over (like that bit in Friends when they throw a surprise party for Rachel, and Monica puts Phoebe in charge of "cups and ice") we will run and run with.
I read that you started off as a foundation but now you're for profit working with big brands in an innovative way We started off Not Impossible as a non-profit and I joked that I was going deaf by the sound of the rattling of the tin cups.
And then they announced that they would be energetically investigating allegations of corrupt practices in relation to the contracts for the next two World Cups.
I remember catching the vaporetto down Venice's Grand Canal, gazing up at the obviously more affluent tourists sipping prosecco in glasses (not plastic cups) on palazzo terraces (not windowsills), and I think I actually sighed.
"In that time, I am doing a hell of a lot of internet shopping, navel-gazing, picking away at my partner, sharing several cups of tea with whoever turns up…" But the day has to be more organised than it once was – children make one "conservative" and she and her partner, Jacob Krichefski, an actor, have two (Jesse, aged nine, and seven-year-old Mabel).
