Tea Times

Last year, Martha and I spent three months living in London. I’m not a huge fan of the city. Don’t misunderstand. London is one of the world’s great cities, but it’s too similar to American cities. Which is fine and all, but not really what I wanted during my sabbatical abroad. London is basically fancy Milwaukee. A fine place, but it lacks the romance and mystery of Rome, where we’d spent the three previous months. Now Rome, that’s a city (chef’s kiss emoji, meatball emoji).

One thing I learned about the British during my stay there is they really do drink a lot of tea. It’s more than a cliché – their tea consumption is both a point of fact and a point of pride. They love it. It gives them purpose. Something to do while contemplating any troubling subject or enduring any particularly British unpleasantries, such as having a conversation. Tea is a social drink and a solitary drink. It’s a morning drink and an afternoon drink. In its herbal varieties, it makes a fine nighttime beverage as well. It is a drink suited to settling the troubled mind. I have been drinking a great deal of it of late.

In fact, I’ve just made myself a large mug of the stuff. My taste in tea, like my taste in most things, is basic, bordering on the banal. I prefer a black tea, not too strongly flavored. An Early Grey, perhaps. Or an English Breakfast. If you want to throw a Lady Grey my way or an Irish Breakfast, I won’t complain. When we start getting into oolong, however, I may require some girding of self.

I like a splash of milk but no sweetener. Of late, I’ve been sipping my tea from an industrial-sized mug emblazoned with my daughter’s name. I got it for her as a Christmas present per her request, but she didn’t bring it back to school with her so I get to use it and think of her while I sip and consider how I am going to retain possession of the mug when she tries to resume custody.

A mug as big as my head. Just as God intended.

Tea originated in China around 4,000 year ago, give or take. From there, it spread around the world. I was always under the impression that the British began drinking tea after colonizing India, but in fact it’s the other way around. The Dutch began importing tea to England in the 1600’s, where it was first greeted as a novelty and then as a drink for the well-to-do before eventually making its way to the hoi polloi.

The first British tea shop was opened in 1706 by Thomas Twining. The Twining name still graces the box of my preferred tea, Twining English Breakfast Tea, which I order in boxes of 100 because to buy it in smaller quantities would be an insult to King Charles. By the early part of the 18th century, the Brits had adopted tea as their national drink (after beer, which they like even better than tea because it gets you drunk and goes great with football hooliganism).

Tea’s calming effects are well-known. Why a caffeinated beverage should settle the mind instead of setting it racing is a bit of a mystery to me. Perhaps it’s just the placebo effect of sitting down with a warm beverage and taking the time to sip as it cools. A good cup of tea, in my opinion, should always be a little too hot to comfortably drink. One should have to navigate a cup of tea, the way one navigates a sailboat on a small lake. In both cases, one isn’t trying to get anywhere, merely enjoying the journey.

Some people think the caffeine combined with tea’s naturally high levels of l-theanine give the brain a little boost of clarity. L-theanine is, apparently, an amino acid associated with attention networks and brain waves. I’m not really sure what amino acids are in any real sense, other than they have something to do with something involved with something else. I hope that helps.

I’ve never been a coffee drinker, so I don’t really know how to compare the effects of the two beverages. I find coffee too acidic, too bitter, and it gives me stomach problems (extra pooping). To me, coffee is a symbol of the American go-go culture while tea represents something a little more laidback, a touch more genteel. It’s the lazy man’s hot beverage and I am nothing if not a lazy man.

Over the last week, I’ve drunk more than my share of calming, medicinal tea. I can’t say it’s made me feel any better about anything, but it’s given me something more to do than stare out the window wondering if RFK Jr. will be staging any more bear murders in the years to come. We all have our small rituals we rely upon to make ourselves feel like ourselves. T.S. Eliot wrote he measured out his life with coffee spoons. For me, it’s desiccated tea bags. I like it when I wake, and I like it when I write. And I like it when I’m bored and need an excuse to eat a cookie.

As we stumble to the end of 2024, we know already that the new year will bring a tempest. We don’t know yet know its nature but the winds are already picking up. It will be best, I think, to ride out the storm indoors, a fresh kettle of tea at the ready. We will ride out the winds together, you and I, our industrial-sized mugs acting as amulets warding off the worst of what they storm brings to bear. Also, they can be swung around like fucking battle axes if the need should arise. Nothing feels quite so bad when accompanied by tea.