A promise about tea… PG Tips
Almost five months ago, maybe more, I had promised my friend thanfiction that I would, in memory of his friend Brittany, share my experience with some tea she had ordered just before she was murdered. I did not know her intimately; we must have exchanged fewer than 20 words on Facebook before she died, but I was planning a journey to the United States to meet the local DAYDians, and of course she would have been there.
Life being what it is, I had no time to spare writing about tea, lost friends or anything else in those five months. We moved less than a month ago, and now that my love is busy recording DAYD for an audiobook at the other end of the house, the best I can do is to leave him alone and, at my own end of said house, quietly write about tea.
I started with PG-Tips. Just like Brittany, black English tea is the default blend here. My sweetheart is British, and although it’s not PG-Tips, we drink more English Breakfast tea than water. I prepared it the right way, with water boiled in an electric kettle and still bubbling, poured directly onto the bag and lump of sugar, and milk once it had steeped long enough, in a very silly mug. My love once said the British added milk in their tea to compensate for the bitterness caused by leaving the tea bag or leaves to steep for too long; that may be true, but that’s how I like it. Tea is a panacea, it cures sadness, anger, tiredness; it warms you up when you are cold, refreshes you when the weather is hot, hydrates your dry throat. Tea, whatever the circumstances, makes life a little bit better.
And my first impression was that I did not like this tea. It has a bitterness, an almost metallic aftertaste that I hope is due to the fact that it stayed in a plastic bag for a long time, not to the tea itself. I’m used to a slightly stronger, more pungent but also, curiously softer on the tongue kind of tea, and that one surprised me in the wrong way. The smell, too is different. However, it is so definitely tea, “default”, ordinary black tea, that the only impression remaining is that of the comfort tea gives to the drinker. I understand why Brittany liked it and drank so much of it, just like I do. Tea is liquid courage, and she had a lot of it; liquid enthusiasm, and in the pictures of her that I saw, she was a lively person. Had I met her, I can perfectly imagine us chatting or maybe bickering, a mug of tea near at hand, redesigning the world to be a better place, because that is what tea does. Tea is not just a beverage; it is a way of leaving your life.
Right now, what is left in the mug is cold, which means I have been procrastinating, taking my time, and all in all, life, just now, is nice and quiet, and somewhere behind the closed doors, I can hear the love of my life reading DAYD aloud, drinking his own mug of tea in between paragraphs, to brace himself to the task ahead, and I wish Brittany could have listened to this.