Tea. Good stuff, tea. Drink of gods, champions and kings, stuff of
life, sweetest of the sweet nectars, fuel of genius, cheap for the poor,
sophisticated for the rich, warming when you’re cold, cooling when you’re hot,
calming when one is fraught, invigorating when one is sluggish, etc etc, and so
on and so forth. Like I said, good
stuff.
And everyone likes it their own
way, be that strong, weak, milky, not milky, whatever. And of course, since that is the way you like
it, it stands to reason that it is the best way to have it, and other people
only have it their own way because they’ve not tried it in yours. In the excellently titled ‘A Nice Cup of Tea
and a Sit Down’ (a book which, it must be said, spends far too many pages on
biscuits, and not nearly enough on tea and sitting down), it is pointed out
that this tea arrogance results in people making tea for others in their own
way. There may be token queries as to
how much milk, and no-one from any kind of civilised society would ever add
sugar to another’s tea without asking first, but basically tea is made in the
way the maker best sees fit.
At work, I am part of only a
small team, consisting of myself and two others, and when we make tea, we make
it for the others as well. I should add
that normally I am a supreme tea snob, and at home I make it using loose leaves
in a proper tea pot, and drink it out of a cup and saucer. However, this would be impractical, not to
mention somewhat pretentious-seeming, in an office setting and so I lower my
standards and drink tea made with a tea-bag.
My main consolation is that I get to use my Spiderman mug; the one with
a spider symbol on the side that changes colour when hot liquid is poured into
it. It’s the little pleasures that make
the day bearable.
All that being as it is, one of
my colleagues, when they make tea for the rest of us, makes it quite
milky. The other, when they make it,
makes it very strong. I tended to make
it somewhere in the middle, although possibly slightly stronger than not. However, having read the book named above,
and knowing of the phenomenon of ‘tea arrogance’, I have attempted to
extrapolate how they like their tea and prepare it accordingly. For the one who makes it milky, I make it
milky. For the one who makes it strong,
I make it strong. For myself, I make it
the way I like it. In this manner, I
hope to give them tea that they will enjoy as much as I enjoy mine.
Neither of them has commented on
this, I’m not even sure they’ve noticed.
Possibly they both assume that they have won me over to their way of
doing things, and that now I enjoy milky or strong tea far more than my previous
misguided delight in medium-strongish tea.
Certainly neither of them has reciprocated and started producing tea in
a manner other than that which (I assume) they enjoy, so it seems that I may
rather have shot myself in the foot with my own consideration. Or maybe I’m just over thinking the whole
thing…
Still, do as you would be done
by, bless those who curse you, and make nice tea for those poor benighted souls
who haven’t yet realised that the way you like it is just outright better.
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