In Praise Of ... Tea

Now being married to an American, I admit to being a morning coffee convert. One might even cite the Boston Tea Party as a metaphor for shaking off the colonial yoke of British rule.

However, the current century to date has seen British high streets taken over by chain coffee shops in a full-blooded assault on our national drinking habits. Sure, you can still order a lonely teabag in a cup of hot water, but who wants that when you can start the day instead with a double-shot expresso skinny frappe latte freshly made to your personal specifications by a ‘barista’ who even writes your first name on the takeaway cup?

However, come the afternoon and in British workplaces up and down the land the tables are turned. Drink that coffee in the afternoon and your work colleagues will look pitifully in your direction, as if to say, “You might want to think about reducing your caffeine intake”.

Not least, we live in a networking age and the afternoon tea ritual is  social one. Who's gasping for a cuppa? Shall I make us a brew? According to the UK Tea Council, the British drink 165 million cups of tea daily or 60.2 billion per year. 98% of British tea is consumed with milk and 96% is brewed from tea bags. Tea has less caffeine than coffee and contains beneficial antioxidants, helping to destroy free radicals (which can damage DNA) in the body.

Tea fuelled the urbanisation that led to the world’s first industrial revolution – boiling water for this process helped to stem outbreaks of disease and made living and working in high density on a mass scale possible.  Not least, factory workers were made more productive during their long shifts thanks to the invention of the tea break.

More recently, establishments catering for 'afternoon tea' have become cautiously fashionable again, as people seek a traditional alternative to the coffee shop invasion.

And the picture at the top of this page? It’s Grey’s Monument in Newcastle upon Tyne, dedicated to Charles Grey who famously gave his name to Earl Grey Tea, a drink flavoured with bergamot supposedly to offset the taste of lime in the local water at his family seat in Northumberland.

One of my son’s school friends was extolling to me the other day about his love for Earl Grey Tea. Now fatherhood has taught me some truths that I hold to be universal, including the fact that all kids like cheese, tomato ketchup and ... tea. Suffice to say, I think that our tea drinking habits may be safe for another generation.

Paris In The Fall

At this time of year, let's not overlook the fact that the second stanza of the famous song 'I love Paris' is 'I love Paris in the fall'. Paris is not just for lovers of springtime.

The BBC points out that more French people now live in London than in Bordeaux, Nantes or Strasbourg. French citizens laughing about the British weather, shaking off their umbrellas, peeling off their raincoats and making London France's 6th biggest city on their way to the bar. However, the reality is, as smart six-year city kid Eloise will tell you, that 'Paris raindrops are larger'. The reality is that, underneath all the bluster about being a magnet for French people, London hankers after that certain Parisian panache that only Jean Paul Belmondo in a rakishly angled trilby and Jean Seberg in a New York Herald Tribune t-shirt can muster.

On a trip to Paris exactly one year ago, I witnessed a male cyclist wearing a long white raincoat and no helmet weaving between several lanes of traffic, all the while happily puffing away on a Galoise cigarette. The modern incarnation of Jean-Paul, guilty of a number of health and safety breaches all at once that any modern Londoner would eschew. But in a city where the skulls of past inhabitants are piled high in catacombs as a reminder of the fate that awaits us all, there's something to be said about living life in the present that's life affirming. Joie de vivre if you will. As Jean-Paul Belmondo's anti-hero in À bout de souffle states, 'Being afraid is the worst sin there is.'

P.S. One of my current muses is listening to the latest downloads from Brolin, whose USP is the fact that all of his songs have the name of a city in the title - 'NYC', 'Reykjavik', 'Lisboa' and his latest track 'Portland'. He has yet to get around to making 'Paris', but it's surely only a matter of time.