Tea for me, too!

The virtues of white tea have been yelled from the headlines of the relevant pages of various publications for the past few days. I am not sure why this fabulous stuff has suddenly taken pole position on the health and nutrition track, but – at the risk of sounding self-righteously virtuously puffed about it – I have been drinking the stuff for years now. Well, to be absolutely accurate, I discovered it a few years ago and, at that time, could afford so little of the precious leaf that I drank its essence as a special treat for something out of the ordinary accomplished. Then I managed to acquire more and still drink it to celebrate an occasion, though these days that celebration comes on Sundays, when I do not have to stagger out of bed and blunder my weary way to work. So I am rather chuffed that what made a lot of people who know me well chortle in ridicule as I delicately sipped what they considered to be tasteless tinted hot water is now cited to be the healthiest thing this side of celery.

But then I have always liked strange things to drink, almost always avoiding the more conventional liquids – usually alcoholic – that my friends, relatives and other acquaintances were quaffing whenever they were quaffing it, especially in my presence. Apart from the preference for avoiding the clichéd and the norm, I liked the taste of the strange things I imbibed. And they made me as sane – or mad – as I am now, which is all to the good, in my own considered opinion.

Once upon a time I drank coffee. Now I do only rarely, perhaps on occasions that I have more work than the letters in my full name waiting for me to get through and have had to spend a sleepless week courtesy Small Cat’s hormones. Perhaps it is my sense of gustatory discrimination that has finally been aroused, making me more conscious of the fact that the instant brown liquid I once swigged by the mugsful is actually nothing more than diluted – and that, sometimes not – mud that tastes of the bitterness of a bad acidity attack and has all the effect on me of a high-voltage shock on a bad hair day. Today I regard coffee as a useful accent to a tiring day, but a dreadful thing to be avoided as far as is humanly possible. Which I do, if I am being my usual self-righteously virtuously puffed self.

So my day kick-starts itself with the adrenaline of needing to get through it and the knowledge that at some stage it will indeed end. There is, after all, no other alternative. I drink my green tea every morning except Sunday, then zip about the house doing whatever it is I think I need to do to get things in order and ready to go even after I leave. Then I get set to leave and blast out of the front door in a flurry of heels and instructions about lunch, dinner, Small Cat, Father’s peregrinations and whatever else I can remember, all the while asking myself why I need to, since I don’t really need to. After all, they are all perfectly capable of looking after themselves, I tell myself as I bounce downstairs to the car, feeling silly even as I feel self-righteously virtuously puffed about doing my housewifely duty.

It’s the tea, I mutter as I sit back and am driven to work. I knew I should have stuck to hot water!