Tea inter alia.

Dear all,

as I sit on a motel bed in Greybull, Wyoming (130 miles East of Yellowstone Park which is in the Northwestern corner of Wyoming - You know who you are), two things spring to mind. The first is how on earth am I going to make it up tomorrow's climb to 9022 ft from 3750 ft without at least one part of the body giving up the ghost. The second is that now I've worked out how to allow people to comment without going through the hassle of registering, you lot better bloody start keeping in touch.

The third is I lied about how many things spring to mind, because now loads are. The good people of the Weather Channel now appear to be following me East as the exciting weather drifts across the continent - bastard.

And now to the main feature - Tea. To whit, why is it impossible to get a palatable cup of tea the instant you leave Blighty ?

The core constituents of the stuff aren't difficult to accumulate and yet the desired result still isn't forthcoming. It's clear that this is a recent phenomenon as there is no way we could've built an Empire without being fuelled by the real Amber Nectar. Therefore, something must have happened around the turn of the century to create a world without appropriate Tea. Geo-political considerations aside, could it be that, with the exception of Merrie England, there really is something in the water? Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you that there's always something in the water, even in England, not to mention Oliver Cromwell's urine (look it up). For example you'll all be familiar with hard and soft water and whilst the chemical compostion is broadly similar, there are subtle differences. Soft water, so far as I can see, exists merely to preclude rinsing properly. That is not to say that a decent cup of tea can't be made with it. I had one in Windermere ony last year and it was a perfectly decent, although Northern, cup of tea. Also, last time I looked, Cumbria is in England. While I'm absent could someone keep an eye on the Scots, they'll be annexing Carlisle as soon as they realise we're all pissed after 2pm. No, wait a minute, they're half cut by 11am. Forget the Scots. So, it's not the water.

How about the Sugar? That's never been English has it? Could the Caribbean producers be getting their own back for decades of slavery? Perhaps, but then surely they'd make sure that we drank rubbish tea at home, rather than ambush us on holiday? Unless they're really, really stupid. Which they're not. So there, it isn't the sugar. Besides, some of you out there don't have sugar, and I bet you have as much trouble finding decent tea as the rest of us.

This brings us to the tea itself. I'll be the first to admit that there are plenty of teas out there that aren't quite the ticket even at home, Earl Grey, for instance, and anything that has a type of fruit in it's name. Even Aunt Sally's Rose Hip concoction isn't tea. No, there's an entire industry of hot beverage hawkers out there selling stuff they like to call tea because it's drunk with hot water and contains leaves. We are ignoring them because those drinks are rubbish everywhere, even 2 MacQaurie Way, the tea drinking capital of the world. We are dealing here solely with what the rest of the world refer to as English Breakfast Tea (Does anyone know why that is?) and I refer to as PG Tips. I suppose, for want of making this blog even more impossible to finish, that PG don't know which leaves are finishing up in England and which aren't, so they can't differentiate. Even then, Lipton's monopoly on tea ex England (how did that happen?) make it almost impossible to test that principle.

Lipton's, therefore are today's scapegoat, and the fact that the rest of the world deals primarily in that devil of a temperature scale, Fahrenheit, rendering it impossible for the water to be boiling at 100 degrees. Johnny F cannot make a decent cup of tea because they haven't decimalised their thermometers. Er that's it.