For the love of Tea

My favourite drink is Tea.  It always has and always will be tea.  My favourite drink in the whole world, the drink I can count on every time and even better than gin!

The idea for this piece of writing was brewed up as surely as freshly boiled water is poured over dried leaves and left to brew.  The resulting amber liquid, the best thing to drink, with or without milk (my favourite being almond at the moment).  I have never taken sugar in tea (my Mum was a dental nurse in Glasgow and well aware of the horrors that too much sugar could do to your teeth!) but I have been given strong, sweet tea at times in my life, and those were stressful or sad times when perhaps the caffeine and the sugar were needed to restore and revive.

My first memory of the magic of tea was a blue 'Caddy-Matic', attached to our 1970s kitchen wall between the gas cooker and the sink.  I was allowed to stand on a chair, reach over and press the big cream plastic button, and whoosh, the tea leaves dropped, perfectly measured into the warmed (always warm the pot) teapot.

The tea was Typhoo and it came in a nice red cardboard box that looked a bit like an old fashioned Telephone box.  I used to love tipping the leaves into the plastic hopper of the Caddy-Matic

Our teapot at the time was shiny metal, stainless steel perhaps?  The lid knob and pot handle were either black plastic or bakelite I think and the pot itself was engraved with some fancy pattern.  My Mum was quite proud of this pot, which had a matching strainer which looked liked a knights shield and sat in its own tiny metal bowl.

Inside the teapot was where the alchemy happened.  I remember my Mum or Granny telling me that we should never put soap inside the pot to wash it but just to rinse it out.  The texture on the inside of the pot was black and velvety.

I started collecting teapots as a teenager.  My Mum was a great fan of jumble sales, I'm not sure that they happen anymore given the rise of the charity shop.  Anyway I bought a pale pink china teapot with a white handle and kept it on the windowsill in my bedroom.  I don't collect teapots anymore, I really have no space for them but I do have a chosen few which I will never part with.  I do have a small collection of milk jugs collected and gifted from friends, for some reason I never quite understood, it was always seen as bad manners to have a milk bottle or carton on the kitchen table!  Therefore I have always used milk jugs too.

Tea is my first drink in the morning, always made in my favourite pot,  which is a small cosy Highland Stoneware one.  I have a large Emma Bridgewater pot for making tea for the 5 of us and I have my Mum's Picquot-ware teapot for when there are only 4 of us at home.

My friends and family have given me some of my favourite Tea gifts over the years.  From milk jugs and glass teapots for herbal teas, to tea towels and proper metal pots from the Far East.  One of my best friends from Calgary passed away, finally losing her fight with Breast Cancer and when her family visited us in Scotland last year they couldn't have brought me a more fitting present to remember her by, her horse patterned tea cosy.  I had been with Eileen when she bought it and we had laughed over our British way of having tea as the drink to solve all problems.

Most of the time these days I cheat and use teabags (always in a pot though!).  I remember when Teabags came out my Nana saying that they would never catch on and that teabags were just full of the sweepings from the tea factory floor!  Not sure about that.

My daily tea time table is as follows;

6.30 am, get up, feed dogs, put kettle on and make first cup of the day
Tea is either Lapsang Souchong or PG Tips (I like Lapsang Soughing as it is smokey and a bit like the first cigarette of the day, even though I stopped smoking 30 years ago!)

10.00 am - my one cup of coffee, mostly just instant as I'm not a huge coffee fan and its more to have a quick drink after I have mucked out my horses!

Lunchtime - PG Tips, sometimes I manage to sneak in an extra cuppa during the day too!

Green tea or Ginger Tea or Mint Tea - mid afternoon

4.00 pm - After school cuppa
Always Earl Grey, which I do add milk to too!

8.00 pm - Last cup of the day, some Rooibos with milk, no caffeine for me after 5.00 pm otherwise I won't sleep.

Some of the best events in my life have been celebrated with Tea. The first cup of tea when we moved up to Aberdeenshire and into our new house after living in two flats in Glasgow.  I had packed the teapot, kettle, tea and biscuits in a box that I had written OPEN FIRST on!

After the birth of our two older children the cup of tea and piece of toast that we were served at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital (Paul got some too!) will always be one of the most memorable meals of my life.  When we had our youngest son in Calgary, Canada they didn't serve tea and a glass of water was not the same, we saved the cup-of-tea-celebration until we returned home the next day and drank tea in the garden of our Calgary home.

I have drunk more cups of tea at funerals than I care to remember, and on those sad occasions it is just the ritual of having a warm, soothing drink that perhaps keeps you from smashing the cup and saucer to the ground.  I have essays to write about grief, and I'll probably be drinking a cup of tea as I do.

One of the first things I bought my husband when we started going out with each other was a Blue teapot from Habitat in Glasgow.  He didn't have a teapot then, we then added mismatched mugs to our collection.  It seemed like a fitting way to be starting our new life together, we don't have the teapot anymore but I do have a small pink milk jug that we bought at the same time.  Not bad for 26 years together.

So Tea it is, and if you like me are a tea-fanatic here are a few of the places we have visited over the years that are especially wonderful for a cup of tea;

The Cutty Sark, Greenwich - Walk on board this famous Tea Clipper, built on the Clyde and now restored and sitting on the Thames at Greenwich and smell the tea as you walk through her hull and learn the history of Tea.  You can sit in the tearoom underneath her hull, alongside figure heads and have quite a nice cup of tea too.

The Royal Yacht Britannia, Edinburgh - speaks for herself but they serve a lovely afternoon tea on board, in beautiful china too.  A proper tea.

Dobrá Čajovna, Prague, Czech Republic - we stumbled across this fabulous Tea House in Prague when visiting 10 years ago.  It was so lovely we went twice and also bought some fabulous Gun Powder tea leaves to bring home.

Places to avoid tea unless you can take your own are most of North America, unless when in Canada you can find a "British" tea place.  The sad habit of being served a cup of lukewarm water with a bag on the side is very common in most of the States.  If I am travelling now I have a travel kettle and will take my own teabags, sometimes the only way to get a proper brew.  We also have been known to have a camping stove and tea supplies in the back of our car on family holidays so that a cup of tea is ready after a day on the beach or a hike up a hill.

Well, now I am thirsty and that means it is time to put the kettle on.  

Cup of Tea anyone?

Ali

PS - How to make the perfect pot of tea - my way

Put a kettle of fresh water on to boil 

Just before the kettle boils warm your chosen teapot with a swirl of hot water

Add two teabags - enough for two people and an extra one if there are more of us!  We have soft water in Scotland and that usually brews fine

Wait for about 5 minutes or more but NEVER less!

Pour out into mug or cup and THEN add milk

Drink and enjoy x

The journey of grief, the price we pay for love

I first wrote this six years ago, but didn't publish it.  It was and still is too painful and too raw even now coming up to 8 years since my brother died.  The month of March is when my Mum's birthday is, it is when Mother's Day is and also it is Brain Tumour Awareness month.  And at the end of the month I am organising a fundraising Tea Party for the charity Brain Tumour Research, to raise awareness of this devastating cancer and also to celebrate the life of my wonderful Mum, who died 11 months after being diagnosed with a Grade 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme tumour.   I will be revisiting the thoughts and processes I have gone through in my grief over the next wee while, I hope to show what the deaths of my loved ones have taught me about living.  But for now it seems that it is time to show how I felt when I first wrote about my grief.

December 2011


Yesterday was my late brother's birthday, he would have been 44 years old but sadly he died 2.5 years ago.  Yesterday was also the second anniversary of my Mum's death, she was 67 when she died from a terminal glioblastoma brain tumour.

They both died too young.

About 6 months after my Mum died and a year since Stephen my brother had died, I attended a grief counsellor.  I explained how I had been feeling and she said what I was experiencing was normal.  Normal! surely not?  How were people managing to cope, to deal with everyday life while grieving?  Grief consumes you.  Her advice to me was to write how I felt down.  So I did, along with reading books on everything from life after death to visiting a psychic (which strangely was a very positive, reassuring experience).

What is written below was what I wrote in my journal after visiting the counsellor.  Re-reading it now I can say that I have coped, life does go on but it's still hard.  Writing this is a small way of moving on too.  I miss them every day but now the happy memories are the ones that I have rather than the sad ones of losing them.

Thoughts on Grief

Grief can't be planned or scheduled.
Violently, it sneaks up on you and punches a hole through your heart,
takes away your breath
and leaves a lump in your throat

Or, it comes and stays a while,
wrapping a thick foggy blanket of sadness
and melancholy
around you.
Invisible, of course.

Only the individual knows how their grief feels to them and it is hard for others to see and understand.  You can go for weeks feeling normal, yes perhaps you are 'getting over it', life does move on and is to be lived, and is too short but then grief descends and opens up the rawness and pain you have within.

When I was 17, 27 years ago, I had my first encounter with experiencing the death of a loved one.  My boyfriend and first love died after being fatally injured in a car crash.  He crashed his car on the day of his 18th birthday.

I have no idea how I coped, nobody spoke to me about it.  Friends ignored me, people crossed the street away from me (really they did).  No one knew what to say.  I was asked to be strong and carry on.  I was aware of feeling as if what had happened was a bad dream.  Perhaps some conspiracy had occurred where he had really just left us and moved to Australia (or something).  Being unable to talk to anyone, I ended my teenage years rebelling, on a self-destruct mission, which I'm very happy I didn't succeed with.

Every day now, I suffer from another loss, my dearly loved brother who tragically died of a painful cancer, undiagnosed until too late to save him.

And I am angry, so very angry about losing them both.  A parent's death at any time is a rite of passage, the natural progression of life that our older generation pass before us and as sad as this is I accept it.  To be able to die having lived a long, happy and fulfilling life leaving behind our children and their children is what we expect.  But, my Mum shouldn't have died at 67, that's too young but Stephen dying at age 41 is the hardest loss.   He had so much of life to live and it is so fucking unfair that he didn't.  My loss is an intricate one, my brother and I were both adopted, not related though but we formed a small unit of 2 and we experienced a world growing up in a home with our adoptive parents in a way only he and I understood.  And now he is gone and I am alone to deal with our father, who somehow managed to come through his prostate cancer to survive when my Mum and Brother didn't survive theirs.  I am so angry about that.  And that probably is another blog post altogether.

My wee brother (he would laugh at that, my over 6ft, Glaswegian, biker, tattooed beautiful brother was never 'wee' except to me) should still be here and I rage at that.  I am furious that he is not still here with his wry humour and his wonderful laugh.

Grief is the price we pay for love, and when there has been great love, the grief is visceral and leaves great tears and scars on your heart.

and I have to stop writing now, the tears are too many, my loss is too great

My favourite colour is

Blue.

Blue makes me think of the sea and the sky.

It is the colour of my childrens' eyes, all inherited from their father.

Blue is the colour of all my darlings' eyes, they are transfixing, passionate, merry, moody and never cold.  

My true love's blue eyes light up when he's enthusiastic about something.  They sparkle with mischief when he is laughing, they focus with intensity when he concentrates and then glow with pride when he is with our children.

I love the fact that our three children have his eyes too, my four beloved blue eyed people.  Only I have green eyes.

Our boys have bright blue eyes, soulful and open.  

Our daughter says her eyes are not blue, but grey, she is lucky, her eyes do change colour.  Sometimes her eyes are that pale, high in the sky blue and other times they are the soft, steely blue of the sea on a grey day.  Our daughter has the eyes of a wolf, one of my favourite animals.

The eyes are the windows to the soul and what beautiful souls they are.

My heart belongs to blue eyes.

The colour of water and sky.

I love the colour Blue.