Cherry Pop

Be warned, I take my tea extremely seriously. More seriously than Dick Cheney and The Yorkshire Ripper take /took violence against humanity, in fact, and that’s saying something (Note: of course, I am not suggesting I admire the Yorkshire Ripper. Tea-issues aside, he was evil, but I don’t have enough time to get into that and I am not even from Yorkshire). Tea must be drunk a certain way, you see. It must be handled with due care and attention, as must the rarest orchid (although unless you are starving to death please never eat an orchid). Not only does it require a careful eye, good hand-eye coordination, special awareness (in order to not over-do the milk, obviously) and an expansive knowledge of tea-bags (all the different kinds of tea are all different, so don’t get caught in the trap of imagining triangles and squares are to be treated the same!), tea DESERVES to be drunk at the correct and right temperature. It is so much more than a simple case of process: drinking tea at the right temperature is all about recognizing right from wrong. Do it improperly and you are saying that wrong is right and right is, well, you get the picture.

Now we’ve got the fun stuff out of the way it’s time for more serious matters: tea-drinking-equipment. I am talking mugs and cups, both of which are fine, but please be careful. ALL tea utensils have slightly different properties, and these affect the tea itself: for example, a tea mug which resembles an urn—which I would make illegal if I was in the government (you may as well just drink your tea out of biodiesel storage tanks)—has rounded-edges which can turn what should be a highly pleasurable tea-appreciating exercise into tea-drinking-bedlam. It not only ruins the taste, but tarnishes the memory, making all future tea-drinking endeavors slightly less fantastic than they truly ought to be!