I pride myself on making a good cup of tea. I like the cups of tea I make; they are normally strong, and milky. I personally have a couple of sweeteners but others don’t. And I know people have different preferences, but TW likes tea the way I make it, and the MiL often says that I make the best cup of tea she’s had. My own parents prefer a weaker cup of tea, but they are wrong. So, all in all, I’m pleased with my tea-making performance.
Unfortunately on Tuesday night - and it’s really only now that I can bring myself to talk about this - I made a bad cup of tea. It wasn’t just slightly off, it was exceptionally bad. In fact, I hope it might be the single exception that proves the rule (that I make a good cup of tea). To be fair, looking back on it now, there were a combination of circumstances that conspired together against me.
I had just come home from work, and TW was just heading out. We were like ships, passing in the night, and we exchanged very little information about anything in detail. I decided to make a cup of tea, and put the back of my hand to the kettle, to check if it had boiled recently. To me it seemed that the kettle was hot, and I thought I could make a cup of tea right away, which would have been brilliant.
I popped a teabag into the cup, and started pouring the water. I was looking at it, and I realised that actually the water might have been warm, but it wasn’t hot enough for a cup of tea. There were a couple of clues: the main ones were that the tea wasn’t seeping out of the bag and mixing with the water, and the water wasn’t steaming. “No problem”, I thought, “we can rescue this”. So I put the kettle down and boiled it again. My intention was to top the cup up with boiling water, that would be okay.
The kettle boiled in seconds, as expected; after all, it had boiled recently. Unfortunately, there was another reason why it boiled so quickly, and I found that out when I tried to top up my cup of tea. It was mostly empty.
So my cup had been a third filled with lukewarm or tepid water. Then I had managed to fill it two-thirds full with boiling water. If I had been thinking straight at that point, I would have probably abandoned the effort, and started from scratch, but I was tired, a bit frazzled from work, and just *really bloody eager* for a cup of tea. So I partially filled the kettle and set it to boil again.
Our kettle is pretty quick at boiling, and I didn’t fill it very much, so I was expecting not to have to wait for a long time. But while the kettle was boiling again, the teabag was starting to steep in a mix of partially tepid / partially boiling water. Then, once the kettle had boiled again, I topped the cup up with more freshly boiled water. By this stage, it had taken me three attempts to fill a cup with water hot enough to make a cup of tea.
I let the tea steep again, and then took out the bag, added the milk, and a couple of sweeteners as per tradition. And I drank it, once it had sufficiently cooled. But I wasn’t happy. The mix of three different batches of water - tepid water, reboiled water and freshly boiled water - did not make a happy blend.
Of course I drank it; after everything a cup of tea is a cup of tea. And sweeteners can cover a multitude of sins. But it was not an enjoyable cup of tea. And looking back on the experience, I now know that a cup of tea should not be rushed. And if I can’t make a cup in one go, then I should scrap that attempt and start again. You live and learn, I suppose.
TTFN.
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