A brief history of tea-time

For the best part^* of the first 18 years of my life every morning started with a cup of tea brought to me by mum, or as young English kids say "Mummy". For the first five or so of those tea drinking years it was warm, milky and had a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Which might explain why by age 10 I had more fillings than Shell has filling stations.

One of my earliest memories involved being forced to drink tea as a treatment for shock. It was right after I was dragged out of the back of our family Mini (the original Austin Mini) which Dad had handily rolled into a ditch. He never did get his license, and after that never drove a car again, sticking instead to a motorcycle that was eventually to be the cause of his death. Hence in some bizarre way a hot cup of tea is connects one of my earliest memories and my fathers untimely death some fifty years later.

I think learning to drink tea is one of those things English people do to be grown up. Your parents do it, and you want to do it to. If they'd smoked I'd probably have ended up smoking too. In this case the offer to try tea was daily until I succumbed to it, and finding it warm, milky and sweet it really wasn't that bad. After that I was a three cups-a-day kid for life. It wasn't until I went to university and after experiencing a shortage of fresh milk, that I briefly experimented with various black teas (lapsang souchong, darjeeling, gunpowder, oolong, etc. etc.) and then plumped for coffee which tasted far better black than PG Tips.

After that I was pretty much hooked on coffee and my tea drinking days were over except for trips home and to relatives who really didn't get the coffee thing. Actually I really don't know why I was drinking coffee back then because it was actually a very distant relative to what I call coffee now. It was that nasty freeze dried Nescafe stuff that was warm and black but only vaguely coffee like in smell or taste. In fact when I return to the UK I'm now very careful about what coffee I accept and often as not will go for tea rather than coffee. To be honest, the good old English cuppa is much more constant across the world and far harder to screw up than a cup of joe.

So why all this reminiscing about tea? Well it turns out in the past months since I've been spending increasing amount of time at home, that I've found I'm up to as much as one cup of tea every few days. The afternoon cuppa is almost becoming somewhat of a ritual in my life again filling the gap between the morning espresso, and evening nightcap quite nicely. I think I can blame my cousin Chris for starting this off on her last visit to the West Coast family pile, being a hardened tea-drinker herself, so long as there was something sweet on the side to go with it.

Regardless, I thought I'd share that not only is my soul enduring a tea-time of sorts, so is my body.

^* Obviously not including the first two or three years, but actually quite soon after