Your Cuppa Is Good Enough

"I always fear that creation will expire before tea-time." – Sydney Smith

I love tea. No offence is intended to coffee drinkers, but I prefer tea. As long as you don’t consume too much caffeinated tea, it becomes a great way to relive stress and enjoy one of life’s affordable luxuries.

That is, if you let it.

One of the most stressful things about living with my ex is that he sniffed at my lack of preference for tea rituals. We were both homeless most of our relationship (what there was of it) and I was foolish enough to be grateful for any cuppa we could get our freezing cold hands on. You can get rid of a lot of daily stress by enjoying what you have — if you truly enjoy it. Don’t let anyone else tell you that you wouldn’t enjoy it so much if you knew about luxury brand X.

And don’t let them make you do silly tea rituals if it doesn’t make any difference to the taste of your tea.

So, I Like Tea Bags

My favorite tea is regular black tea in tea bags. Although I enjoy drinking a wide variety of tea (when I can get it), I always go back to this basic. In America, where I’ve spent most of my life, this is really the only convenient and affordable way to get your tea.

In England, however, my ex (even when we were homeless) always went on and on and on about how great loose leaf tea was. And then how great Darjeeling tea was. And then how great Darjeeling loose leaf tea was. So after a couple of years of this, he stunned me by actually bringing back to the camp a bag of new loose leaf Darjeeling tea.

And it was crap. No offence to all of you who go into raptures at the mere thought of a cuppa Darjeeling, but it just tastes like hot water to me.

And before I actually tasted loose leaf Darjeeling (made in a proper brown pot), I let my ex make me feel inadequate for enjoying to drink low class tea like Quickbrew or PG Tips. "Common as muck," he said.

Warming The Mug Ritual

Until I moved to England, I didn’t realize that in order to enjoy a "proper" cup of tea, you had to first pre-heat the mug with hot water. While I was homeless and living with my ex, this is what I would have to do in order to get him a proper cup of tea.

Find firewood
Carry it back to camp
Saw it into choppable pieces with my bowsaw
Chop it into even smaller pieces with my felling ax and hatchet
Make a fire
Set kettle to boil
Fill kettle with water that took me a mile round trip walk in order to bring back
Wait until kettle started to smoke
Pour a little bit of smoking hot water into his mug
Put kettle back on campfire
Swirl smoking hot water around mug
Toss water out
Make tea

You can see why we really didn’t get along. I know in previous posts I’ve gone on about his cheating, his stealing and his alcoholism, but really it was this warming the tea mug thing that really popped my cork.

But seriously, if it doesn’t add to the flavor of your life, you are just making things harder for yourself. You don’t need the stress. Just dump the wacky boyfriend, get a box of tea bags (or whatever it is you have to do) and get on with your life.

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