My Cup of Tea
I am not a coffee drinker. I have tried coffee, many times, and it’s just not for me. I know it is a popular beverage, guzzled by the gallon or sipped in Italian cafes at eye-watering strength, loaded with flavoured creamers and sugar or stomached black and bitter, but while coffee smells absolutely delicious, it tastes very much to me like a soggy rug. I cannot imagine why someone would wish to begin their morning by drinking a cup of dirty molded carpet out of a car recently returned from the Outer Hebrides, but to each their own.
But tea? Tea is…well, my cup of tea. Every morning, I get up and fill up the kettle, choose my mug, drop a tea bag or strainer full of leaves into it, and wait for the water to boil. My kettle reminds me of a spaceship - it’s round, and glows blue while the water heats up. Then I wait for the tea to steep - this is a persnickety process. Some varieties, like the decaffeinated Earl Grey I favour in afternoons, are pitifully weak and need to steep for a long time, unless I want to drink a sad, grey cup of hot water, which tastes as though someone in the next room said ‘tea’. But the loose-leaf chai that usually starts my morning is powerful stuff and needs a scant few minutes to produce a robust, spicy, warming cup, perfect for the chilly days of winter. Now that the temperatures are rising, I still reach for tea, but more often I am reaching for haystack, or Earl Grey, or white tea, or genmaicha, a Japanese green tea that is mixed with popped rice, which has a toasty, slightly sweet flavour reminiscent of caramel and popcorn.
I started to drink tea as a kid, sipping ‘baby tea’ - essentially, quite a lot of hot milk with a bit of tea - with my mother. Since then, tea has become a panacea, an all-purpose potion. It soothes sore throats, sadness, and social interactions. Someone coming over this afternoon? Tea. Sweating in the summer heat? Tea (iced, of course). Working in a chilly office? Tea. Need a break from that work? Tea. Heavy-duty chats with a friend? Tea. Meeting an acquaintance at a coffee shop? Tea. Tea does it all - wakes you up, calms you down, warms you, cools you, busies your hands, stills your mind. Tea, it seems to me, answers all questions.
And that’s only the drinking. The making of tea presents a whole world of possibilities. Filling the kettle, preparing your cup, pouring the water, watching the tea steep, adding milk, curling your hand around the mug - what a beautiful, day-starting dance! To say nothing of choosing your mug or cup. Should it be the novelty owl mug, which holds a bathtub’s worth of tea? The demure botanical print mugs, with matching green tea pot, passed down to me from my grandmother? Or the even more delicate china cups, rimmed with pale blue flowers? The mug brought home from that trip with that friend? I reached for the art history mug when I was grading papers as a teacher, and now I favour a book-emblazoned cup when I write. But no matter the mug, I know that the ritual of making tea, and then of drinking a cup (or two, or three), will set the world to rights and give me whatever comfort I need. You could say it suits me to a tea.
Jennifer