23-12-23 - Saturday I - A Cup of Tea

Haha, I just took TW a cup of tea in bed but she was asleep and so she won't drink it. I walked in and she had her phone in her hand, and the bedside light was on. So I gently took the phone out of her grasp and left it on the bedside table, and I extinguished the bedside light. I did leave the cup of tea there, so she will see it when she wakes up and it's cold. 

The funny thing is, I said, when I was getting up, that I wanted a cup of tea and she asked if I was going to make her one. "You're going back to sleep, aren't you? You said you were." She denied it and insisted she wanted a cup of tea, so I made her one. And now she's asleep and won't enjoy it. Sometimes - not very often, mind you - I know her better than she knows herself. 

TTFN. 

19-09-01 Sunday - A Bad Cup of Tea

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.

19-07-26 A Note on the Appointment of B Johnson as Our Prime Minister

In these most desperate of times, it is the small things that are reassuring. A good cup of tea is not affected by a change in occupancy in Downing Street.





And when that cup of tea is served in a favourite mug, brewed strong and milky, with a couple of sweeteners, one could almost believe that there was nothing wrong with the world.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Johnson is now our Prime Minister, a man who failed as Foreign Secretary, causing more harm to Nazanin Zagari-Ratcliffe. He discussed beating up a journalist with a friend. He was described as a “nasty piece of work” by a BBC journalist, completely correctly in my view. And now this man is our Prime Minister.

That might be enough to make your heart sink, but wait, there’s more....

He has taken it upon himself to appoint Priti Patel as Home Secretary. Priti was previously dismissed by Theresa May for seemingly making up foreign policy on the hoof and not informing the Foreign Office. There is another issue brewing about a possible breach of the ministerial code, but yet here we are, with a Home Secretary who was openly supporting the return of the death sentence just a few years ago.

You might think the Home Secretary appointment was bad, but he has appointed Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary. Raab doesn’t even understand the importance of towns in his own country, i.e. Dover, let alone (I imagine) the geo-political machinations going on beyond our borders. He tweeted yesterday “Thanks, beautiful!” to a fellow Foreign Minister:





The man is a dunderhead of the highest order, and B Johnson has decided he is fit to represent the UK abroad? That is some serious misjudgement. I’m sure that Raab is a lovely, personable fellow, but if he can’t get the detail right, we’re likely to end up with another Zagari-Ratcliffe scenario.

And then there are the special advisors, the SpAds. Dominic Cummings, who has been held in contempt of Parliament earlier this year. He was also involved in running Vote Leave, found guilty of overspending in the Brexit Referendum. And Chloe Westley, previously of the Tax Payers’ Alliance and Vote Leave, is now appointed by Johnson as a (if not *the only*) “digital advisor”.

I think the government has taken a massive swing to the right, although I think that Johnson himself is more socially liberal than his appointments suggest. But if you surround yourself with reactionaries and illiberals, that is going to rub off sooner or later.

I don’t particularly think Johnson’s thoughtless scribblings for the Telegraph prove that he is a racist, but they certainly bring his views into question. I think, much as Danny Baker was recently sacked by the BBC, he creates a picture and doesn’t self-edit or think it through. Hence his writings are littered with phrases and allusions which can be construed as offensive.

I thought his speech on the steps of Downing Street wasn’t too bad, but then I didn’t think Theresa May’s speech was too bad either - it just wasn’t backed up by any matching actions - and that is my concern for Johnson’s premiership. Warm words butter no parsnips, and if he doesn’t implement inclusive policies, then I can see the country becoming more divided. I can certainly see us leaving the EU on 31st October without a deal - if you surround yourself with people who don’t care whether we leave with a deal or not, then leaving without a deal suddenly isn’t important. The question is whether Parliament can do anything to stop that now, and my hunch - given that they have had several opportunities and not taken them - is that they won’t. The fact that I might finally win a bet (oh last of the Big Spenders) is cold comfort:




Still, until then, I’ve got my cup of tea, right?
TTFN.