Tea: the best drink of the day

Its beauty is its inexorable ephemerality

You can listen to this piece in the style of a “talking head,” by clicking above.

Things annoy me that don’t work as they should. Like they’re supposed to. Designed to. Meant to. By me, if no one else.

I mean, if you go to the blessed bother of actually looking for, considering, purchasing, acquiring, taking home or having delivered by PostNL something for a particular purpose, then it would be quite nice if it actually did the thing for which you’d done all that and, what’s more, for which you’ve parted with hard-earned cash.

I don’t mean things that wear out, or that get broken because I’m a clod with butter-fingers who couldn’t catch a cold let alone anything hurtling to Earth at the speed of gravity. I mean things that just don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Like tea lights.

There’s a fire drill in one of the Fawlty Towers episodes—heaven only knows which one, and there were only ever 12—in which Basil rails at a fire extinguisher, which sits there ready for action for all that time and then, when there’s actually a fire, blows up in his face. Actually, it squirted water, which is pretty much what a fire extinguisher is supposed to do, but it didn’t take much of anything, water or otherwise, to get old Basil rattled.

And it doesn’t, on reflection, take that much to get me rattled either. Tea lights. I first encountered them as Teelichte, beloved as they are by the Germans, who seem on the whole to have a far more easy-going relationship with these diminutive candles than I do, given they tend to use an awful lot of them to lend ambient atmosphere to a romantic interlude.

Of course, to fulfil its original destiny, a Teelicht needs first to be inserted into a Teelichtbehälter, before it will do what its conceiver and designer intended that it should do, which has got nothing at all to do with lighting or with romance in the bathtub, but rather with keeping the beverage tea in a state of warmth and palatability. It’s a function that, furth of the Teutons, is fulfilled among the British by a tea cosy. These are woollen, generally home-knitted, suitably holed covers for teapots, the best of which allow the handle safely to be gripped and the tea to be poured from the pot’s spout without the necessity of removing the sheep-shorn lagging.

But use of a tea cosy in conjunction with one of the aforementioned Teelichtbehälter samt Teelicht introduces into the whole equation a certain danger of conflagration (the oblique reference to fire extinguishers—preferably in working order—hence not being entirely untoward) as well as a mildly hazardous balancing act as one attempts to delicately re-centre the teapot’s equilibrium, brimming as it is with its scalding hot contents, upon the Teelichtbehälter, whilst ensconced in its insulating woollies. In my particular case, while not actually being of wool composition, the cosy does offer copious insulation, such that, if correctly centred and not sending its scalding contents flowing over my writing desk and computer keyboard—heaven forbid!—the pot will not only retain heat within the contents of the pot but actually augment it to the point of needing foundrymen’s gloves to actually lift it and pour a quick, tasty top-up into the cuppa.

Before trying the Teelicht/tea cosy combo heat-retention method, a number of other heat-preservation methods had been deployed. There was the scout flask, dating from scouting days of yore, and probably about 50 or 60 years old. It was retired after shattering as I carried it in a backpack whilst riding a racing bike down a severely cobbled road in rural Belgium. The flask would be replaced by a metal one from the el-cheapo shop, which, given its entirely metal construction, baffles me as to how it keeps things warm  Put simply, it doesn’t do as good a job as the glass one that shattered on the rural country road did, but there’s no good crying over spilled tea.

The microwave oven has its practical bent but can have the unfortunate side-effect of warming not only the cup’s contents but also the fine china cup, to the point of searing off the drinker’s index finger. Tea re-heated in a pan on the stove is so infra dig as to induce a curl of the lip (not helpful when drinking hot tea …).

Then there is the just make half a pot method, whereby I … just make half a pot; and, when it’s done, I return to the kitchen, re-boil the kettle and make the other half. Part of the problem here is that half a pot is usually enough refreshment and, by the time it comes to matching the other half of the pot with adequate thirst to justify making it, one just throws out the old tea bag and starts anew. And it irks that the old, thrown-out teabag was used only to make … half a pot.

Besides which, when the first dash of hot water lands on leaf tea, it’s as if its entire flavoursome outpouring is exhausted in that initial wetting and any subsequent re-wetting of the left leaves leaves one bereft of what one might call the tea experience. Just as a Teelicht will never relight with the full force and effect it had before being doused half-way through its illuminative mortal coil, so a tea bag will never rebound with the same rejuvenating glory it exuded when first acquainted with the partner in crime with which it gets into such carefree hot water.

The cup of tea, with a dunked teabag, is simply pure waste: navvy-style compromise, and not the way life ought to be, even if you’re laying a railway line. It’s mildly permissible with infusions, which are really only ever intended to be made in a cup, and not, as the Germans and Danes would have it, in a glass, which always struck me as placing style, if style that is, above practicality. The Germans are especially amusing when they not only remove the teabag but, no doubt with the café’s tariff boldly imprinted on their mind’s eye, then squeeze the bag out into the cup before consumption of the beverage. This is all accomplished on a heated winter patio with water that wasn’t truly boiling at any time in its existence, so that, by the time the cup comes into contact with the lip, tepid is the best one could describe a refreshment that no American would regard as either hot or iced.

My housemate has the greatest talent for making tea that he alone will drink. He puts the teabag along with the water into the Thermos flask, where the brew becomes more of a stew, as the water draws the tannin into the drink, and the drink draws my cheeks into the middle of my palate.

My father announced once that he’d seen on telly a comment about the old Queen, who insisted that her tea was made with water at 80° centigrade, not boiling. I would be tempted to venture a question as to how the old Queen actually knew the tea had been made at 80° C, but my knowledge of the lady is such as to persuade me that, however she knew, she certainly did know. The perhaps more pertinent question is how those who actually made her tea knew it was made at 80° C: I have images floating around my head every time I make a pot of tea, of thermometers being inserted into kettles to ascertain the precise temperature of the water prior to its union with the tea leaves. Quite honestly, I can only assume that her footmen had nothing better to be getting on with.

The best I have kept till last, however: the Japanese. For the Japanese, tea is a love affair, imbued with gravitas, duty, vows of fidelity, and respect. The tea leaf is hallowed, and the marriage with the water is holy. Tea and water are introduced with blushing modesty, not crashed into one another like at some disco rave: the genteel display of sense and sensibility in which the Japanese oblige tea to curtsey before the mighty quenching water is performed with the attendance of a high priestess as chaperone. The tea is drunk in calm and tranquillity, in an ambience of beauty and zen-ness. Nothing is kept warm for later; nothing is bottled in a flask; nothing is dunked with workaday impropriety. Instead, the golden brew is sipped demurely and reverently. And, then: the paraphernalia of this drug-like ritual is carefully packed away to await the next tea ceremony. For, the joy of tea lies not in the beverage itself, but in the peace of mind that it instils in those who partake of its catechism.

All of which goes to show that one can rail as much as one wants: in the end, by not working as one expects, the tea light works exactly as it should.

Image: a pot of tea balanced on a Teelichtbehälter samt Teelicht, and a well-balanced Czechbook.