America: land of coffee.

One of the hardest things about moving here is resigning yourself to the fact that you’re unlikely to find a decent cuppa unless you brew it yourself. Chai Latte? Almost certainly. But good, strong builders’ tea is way out.

There are, of course, historical reasons for this. I doubt that the whole mad King/taxes/Boston harbour/big freaking war thing really helped tea in its status as a Big American Drink.

Still, there are advantages to this. There’s no easier way to play the ‘quaint Englishman’ card that to stick a teabag in a cup of hot water and dump some cow juice on top. Honestly, it gets people here cooing over how great Englishness is in the same way a belly rub makes a dog’s hind leg shake.

Now, where’s my box of PG Tips gone…?

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Monday, January 10th, 2005 at 6:31 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Brief Notes on America, Thinking.
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).