“If you feel a bit under the weather,
If you feel a little bit peeved,
Take Granny’s stand-by potion,
For any old cough or wheeze.
It’s a cure for hepatitis,
It’s a cure for chronic insomnia,
It’s a cure for tonsilitis,
And for water on the knee.
Have a cuppa tea...”
From “Have a cuppa tea”, by the Kinks
I always write my blogs on a Thursday after
meeting a friend in a local coffee shop.
She read out a pamphlet to me which had been left there, explaining the
benefits of drinking coffee. It got me
thinking of the different cultures of coffee drinking and its great rival, tea
drinking.
Vocabulary:
An English gentleman drinks tea. Nobody seems to know quite how it is supposed
to be prepared: some say that the milk is added after the boiled water, and
others swear blind that the milk must go in first. Some add sugar, or lemon. Some take it black. But few are in doubt that Britain is a land
of tea bags and cuppas.
In the English speaking world, it is the
Americans who dominate coffee. Their Seattle
based coffee empires sweep the world, avoiding local taxes and adding so much
sugar, cream and chocolate to their coffee that you wonder if the people who
drink it actually like the taste of coffee at all.
In Britain at least, coffee has an image
problem. It is not that we don’t drink coffee. As I suggested above, our high streets are
filled with chains of American coffee stores.
We probably drink, as a nation, about the same amount of coffee as we do
tea. It’s just that we don’t respect
coffee in the same way.
Tea is drunk with ceremony. The precise ceremony might differ from
household to household and from person to person. But in a crisis situation, a cup of tea will
be a calming influence. If important
guests come round, the expensive china teacups will be brought out to show how
important their visit is to you. Tea
drinking can be very elegant.
Who has expensive coffee mugs for special
occasions? Well, actually, my wife
does. But she’s Japanese and so doesn’t
count. In a crisis, who would make
everyone a cup of coffee to calm them down?
Not many people, since coffee is a strong stimulant. It will simply increase everyone’s nervous
energy and tension. Tea, of course, also
contains caffeine, but much less than in a typical cup of coffee.
Perhaps it was this stimulating effect of
coffee which made the British king try to ban coffee houses in 1675. Coffee houses were vibrant places where
social classes mixed, people discussed politics and exchanged rumours. It might well be politically dangerous to get
people angry at the government, and then fill them with a restless,
caffeine-fuelled energy buzz. You could
call coffee the more vulgar of the two drinks. It’s hard to be so angry when drinking from a
dainty little china cup.
And so both coffee and tea have their
place. My blogs are often angry
complaints about what’s going wrong in the world, or my life. Coffee is the perfect drink for a blog
writer. But there’s a refreshing cup of
tea brewing to calm me down when I finish.
I’ll have mine black please: no milk and no sugar.
under the weather – a British slang
expression, meaning feeling unwell
peeved – angry or upset
a wheeze – the condition of having
difficulty breathing, when one makes a noise breathing in and out
chronic – about a problem or illness,
persistent or recurring
insomnia – the medical term for being
unable to sleep
to swear blind - a slang expression,
meaning to absolutely insist that something is true or correct
a cuppa – British slang for a cup of tea
a stimulant – a drug, drink etc. which
makes people feel more energetic
vulgar – rough, inelegant, unsophisticated
etc.
dainty – delicate; small and fragile
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