Why tea is better than wine, and other difficult truths

WEKA TANGAZO

By,Fatma Mzee

England’s chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies has suggested that after work, instead of a glass of wine, people choose a cup of tea. Uproar. Statues crying blood. The worst. How dare she rip our sacred poison from us, said the alcohol-drinking world, through lips tinted a dry cabernet blue, their hair smelling just slightly of fat. Burn everything immediately on a fire of outrage and Twinings.

I nodded along. If they were to go further, to protest the obscenity, to show that I am edgy and vital and up for it, I would march with them, too. I would march, propping up a banner saying SAVE OUR FERMENTED JUICE or I would shuffle, as the back legs of a beer bottle or carafe. But my filthy secret would march with me, craving the hot teat of a teapot, the steaming mug of tasteless nectar that even now, with a supersized SportsDirect only recently in me, I yearn for. Tea. Lovely tea.

There’s this advert on the radio for, I think, life insurance? Life itself? But towards the end, after the accident, ladders, roofs, after the payout, the payoff – a rich northern voice, tones of regional Shakespeare, suggests, “a nice cup of tea”. And under my breath, I croak: “Trigger warning.” It’s too late by then. My mouth is swollen with longing. For tea, for the whole sorry ceremony. Then with the longing comes the despair. I weep inside for all my basic-ness that it reveals. I am a lazily drawn British character in an American novel. Bad teeth, sarcasm, tea. The radio advert gives way to an Adele song, and I know myself all of a sudden, and I am disappointed, again.

So this is me coming out. I prefer tea to drink. Not the taste, of course. Because what does tea taste of, really? It tastes of what I imagine eBay tastes like. Like an old book, fallen in the bath. And not the burning sip, of course, because it is never the right temperature, first being scalding and then almost immediately being tepid and a huge disappointment. And not the “Britishness”, of course, because that whole myth is Ukip- ish and twee. No. I like tea for the ritual and for the settling down. Also, it is home. It is like building a fire when lost in the woods – you put the kettle on, and there you are.

It brings home to difficult places hospitals, wakes, work, too. Offices are designed around tea. They are built upon it like ancient burial grounds. Google, you can keep your free sushi, your egg-freezing perks I have a mug that says “Fabulous and Fifty” and I have a tap. During a tea run, these fools that you sit next to for eight hours a day become actual people, with feelings, albeit ones about the precise colour you must aim for with your milk, and you see they are tortured as if human, and all craving the warmth of tea/their father’s love.

Tea is better than booze, but you will rarely hear anyone say so, because it sounds disgusting. Do you remember when David Cameron was interviewed in his kitchen, and there was a red “Calm Down Dear” chopping board next to the kettle? To argue for tea is to be perceived as this chopping board – the worst thing, in a room of the worst things. Because not only are you dull, you are provincial and you are offensive. Except, sorry.

If I were to dare to counter the pro-winers, who surely talk quite loud and with sincerity, I would argue that all the things that drunkenness does, tea does better. 

If alcohol helps you forget, tea helps you remember. TV is good, but never great, without tea. Chat is never great without tea. Birth and death require it – the best cups I’ve ever had were in a backless paper gown. Alcohol enables big talk, but tea is for small conversation, and that’s the good bit that makes us know each other.Alcohol is sound and fury, tea is thoughtful and full of pause, even if the thoughts are centred around a KitKat, maybe two.

A stiff drink when you get home dulls an ache but stokes a fire – Dame Sally’s cup of tea, it soothes it instead and sits with you while your shoulders relax. Alcohol enables lunging in the dark, but tea, crucially, enables the 26 years to come.

WEKA TANGAZO