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Icon of the month: Tea
This article was first published in Third Way in August 2002.
After Arthur Dent survived the destruction of Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he had a mission: to find a decent cup of tea. The ship’s computer crashed trying to work out ‘why the Earthman wants dried leaves boiled in water’, eventually deciding ‘he’s an ignorant monkey who doesn’t know any better’.
Which is plausible but wrong. Tea, as a more sophisticated computer would have understood, is the taste of home. How better to evoke the little comforts of everyday life? According to the myth, ‘Never mind, I’ll put the kettle on,’ is the line that got our grandparents through the Blitz.
The consolations of Camellia sinensis will work better for Brits than for dispossessed Earthlings in general, of course. A friend from Greece on first coming to London was baffled and faintly appalled to see healthy adults drinking stuff that at home was reserved for sick children. Tea is an icon of Britishness. As anyone who reads foreign newspaper cartoons knows, all British men, unless they are football hooligans, wear a bowler hat and carry an umbrella and a cup of tea. And though T. S. Eliot and I may have measured out our lives with coffee spoons, it is tea break and teatime that are the rhythm of our communal life.
The national drink unites us across classes, sexes and political affiliations better than the Jubilee or even the World Cup. There is still nothing so classless in our society: a cuppa in front of the telly typifies how the one half live as perfectly as high tea on the lawn does the other. Whether it’s Darjeeling in Royal Doulton or Tesco’s own in a Man. United mug, we who are many are one because we all partake of one cup.
All of which makes it seem a little ironic that tea is an Asian product that cannot be grown in Britain. It started to become popular here less than three hundred years ago, after maybe 5,000 years of tea-drinking in China - a result of eighteenth-century globalisation. It makes one realise how few generations it will take before chicken tikka massala and rice is ‘an English’ and not ‘an Indian’. (However, although tea grew wild in India there is no record of natives drinking the stuff before the British started farming it to break the Chinese monopoly in 1835, so it is not all that Indian either.)
Tea’s status as one of the innocent pleasures of life is also of more recent origin than one might assume. For a century it was frowned on by the British religious and medical establishments, facing punitive taxation of up to 119%, while beer and even gin were cheaper than water; and, although the evils of the gin craze were obvious, it was beer not tea that was held up as the innocuous alternative.
John Wesley gave up tea (temporarily) in 1745 to set the Methodists a good example in not wasting their time, health or money - not so eccentric when you realise that it was often blackened with lead, and that for a pound of it you could have bought 360 pints of ale (hence tea caddies usually had locks). In fact, tea and beer have almost exactly swapped places in national life. On going cold turkey, by the way, Wesley suffered a three-day headache, drowsiness and amnesia.
It was tea tax that famously triggered the American Revolution in Boston, though they have celebrated their independence by turning it into a cold drink.
These days tea illustrates consumer silliness as well as anything. While most of us would not know Assam from English Breakfast, and just want a nice cup of char, we buy an unfathomable range of brands and varieties - round, tetrahedral, with bits of string, one-cup, superstrength, decaf.
Fair trade and organic teas are more recent and welcome additions to the supermarket shelves. But by their very benevolence they raise a disturbing spectre of guilt. If we need to buy specialist brands to avoid financing exploitation and pollution, then tea, like so many of the contents of our trolleys, entangles us however unwillingly, in the global conspiracy against the poor and the planet that is international trade.
That such otherwise blameless comforts implicate us in vast institutional evil is, I think, the most perfect illustration of the myth of the Fall. If, as Paul says, we cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too, then heaven help us.
whether it’s Darjeeling in Royal Doulton or Tesco’s own in a Man. United mug, we who are many are one because we all partake of one cup