Tea
Tuesday, 13 February 2007. Life.
Alex wrote on Facebook recently about the aesthetically and gustatorally (sic) perfect cup of tea.
Boil a kettle of water. Warm the pot. Put three Lapsang Souchong teabags in the pot, and fill with boiled water. Stand for four minutes. Pour into a plain, white china teacup. Add a small teaspoon of honey, stir, allow to cool and sip.
Apparently he is using a Mexican honey at the moment, because his personal favourite "Orange Blossom honey", seems only to be available in the summer.
Alex is a man who is probably at home in a cravat, in fact I am sure he not only owns his own cummerbund, but also knows that the word was originally Persian, "kamarband" later nicked into English from the Hindi word meaning "loinband" in 1616. And he probably knows that without having to look it up on Wikipedia!
My point being that Alex is a true Englishman, who likes his tea. There have been many such men, my own personal hero is this field is the fictional Arthur Dent, the hapless protagonist in the comic science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. He is a man who, faced with the destruction of the Earth, (twice), God's final message to his creation, and a 15 mile-high statue of himself, simply desires a cup of tea.
Tea is very important to me, I start my day with it. It's one of those British stereotypes I actually live up to. I get through quite a few cups per-day, and actually feel down if I don't get enough of it. I think it is an addiction. So I feel like I am betraying Alex, Arthur, and indeed Stephen Fry, (Twinings), when I go to the vending machine at work, and get myself a cup of "machine tea".
Although it tastes almost like tea, you can hold the cup up to your ear when it comes out of the machine, and you can hear it "fizzing"... which I don't see as a good sign. I spoke to Gary about this, and he recommended the Cappuccino or Chicken soup. I'm gonna stick with just tea for the time being, partly because I prefer tea, and partly because I've seen the troll that refills the machine and it looks like his mucky fingers don't go near the tea, but they do with the soup.
In 1999, after describing how to make the perfect cup of tea, Douglas Adams closed the subject with:
Drink it. After a few moments you will begin to think that the place you've come to isn't maybe quite so strange and crazy after all.
Rest in peace Douglas.
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