Dark cherry 

This article will cover some pretty serious ground, so I advise the reader to sit down and pay the strictest attention. You wouldn’t laugh at a funeral, would you? (Unless that was the dying person’s wish) So don’t laugh at this. What you are about to read is deadly serious. And as everyone knows, such a disclaimer as that can only be a precursor to an article concerning tea.

Tea respect is something which so many people overlook. There is all this talk of coffee, and how much of a ‘kick’ it gives, but what about tea? Tea makes you feel good. It relaxes you, allows human beings to form bonds, and is truly something only second to air and water and designer bedding and TV in terms of what matters most to modern human beings. Coffee? Doesn’t even compare! Yes, it has something, but comparing coffee to tea is like comparing an over-make-upped leopard-skin-dress-wearing woman at a party to the provincial lady who knows how to not only make teas excellently, but does so in a classically styled black dress that would make Audrey Hepburn proud. That’s why I bring this topic of discussion up whenever I go anywhere. Buses, trains, waiting in a shop to buy yet more tea. And I also bring it up when I hear tea getting insulted. Tea, I think. What business have they got attacking the best thing that human beings have ever invented?

Several times my strict approach has been called ‘anal’, ‘bitter’ and ‘reprehensible’, a word normally used by old war veterans and David Dimbleby. It has caused feuds in cafes—with one such feud resulting in me being barred from said Café: good riddance I say! The tea was crap!—infuriated staff at Norwich train station’s temporary tea-shack forecourt thing, and the break-up of my fifteen year (up until tea was mistreated) marriage. But it was worth it. Anything that tea puts its name to always is!