I miss drinking tea.
“Well get up and make some you dopey fool!”
Yeah but I don’t feel like it. I haven’t felt like drinking tea for a few weeks now.
Something must be wrong.
I’m English. And like every other scraggly-toothed, stiff-upper-lipped yeoman I like my tea – nay, NEED my tea on a regular basis.
Tea is how we start/get through/end the day as well as react to football matches/deal with strange election results/conclude funerals.
In Britain, people drink an average of 1,550,600 cups a day – just over 7 Olympic-size swimming pools – a stupendous amount of tea. Hooray for India.
English tea consumption, like the mathematical equation Pi, is constant, bankable, and woven into the very fabric of the universe.
So why am I not drinking?
It’s not like I don’t have the right brand. Some people won’t drink tea unless it’s of a very special quality, grown in the magical hills of some faraway third-world country, protected by rebel insurgents and tree fairies, touched only by virgins, transported down to civilization one sack every six months and doled out to the rest of the world on a gold barter arrangement. This tea is usually sipped out of a small porcelain thimble held between the thumb and index finger with the pinky extended as far away in the other direction as humanly possible.
That ain’t me. I also dislike anything that pretends to be avant garde but is actually the product of some unholy union between Earl Grey and a dubious sounding fruit. Bergamot Orange is one such example. It’s as clear as ant’s blood and tastes like mouthwash. I’d sooner use it to scrub my car than let it slip down my throat.
I enjoy the traditional English cuppa, also known as Builder’s Tea, which is strongly brewed Ceylon with milk and sugar mixed in. Forget green tea, herbal tea, or whatever medicinal tea your local shaman alternative doctor is hawking you. They may be able to cure cancer, promote brain activity, and enhance sexual performance but do you really wanna chastise your taste buds to be a virile, intelligent lothario?
Wait, don’t answer that question.
Back to my current tea-totalling (pun intended). Maybe it’s the unbearable Philippine heat? It’s hard to drink tea when it feels like the earth’s been stuffed inside a giant leather jacket.
Or maybe it’s because I tend to drink coffee most of the time at work. Now that I have a real job with real deadlines and a real coffee machine in the pantry with tons of gourmet grains in stock, coffee has become, well, a lot easier to prep and drink, that’s for sure.
I know there’s a theological lesson buried in here somewhere. Maybe if I flip the kettle on and drop a teabag into a mug, it’ll all become clear.
Like Bergamot Orange, only better.