Ten Poems About Tea {Introduction}

The ritual of tea is one I’ve always loved. As a child, I held tea parties for my dolls, and the brilliant thing I discovered about dolls, was that they didn’t really eat or drink, which meant all the more tea for me. As I got older, the tea parties became a bit less one sided, and I learnt that tea always has a language, never more potent than in the “How do you take it?’ early days of courtship.

Carol Ann Duffy says it best, with her “I like the questions – sugar? Milk? – And the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,

For I see your soul in your eyes and I forget”

How well I remember, the morning cups of half drunk PG, or English Breakfast, the afternoon tempered with a weak sugarless Earl Grey and a biscuit. The things that become second nature in tender dog- eared togetherness which early on feel like the discoveries of Columbus in miniature.

When I was very young I had a boyfriend from up North, with nice sensible parents who regarded my family as some sort of anthropological curiosity. One day, with nothing better to do, the boyfriend’s mum and I were discussing a particularly mad relative, who no doctor seemed able to cure.“Tell you what our kid,” she breathed into the phone, taking another suck on her Mayfair Super King, “There’s nowt that won’t cure that woman like a walk round the lakes, a fair old chat, and a good strong cup of tea.” Thing is, she was probably right.

“Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world”. The Chinese scholar Tien Yiheng said, and he was right. For love and madness and everything that sandwiches in between, a cup of tea can set the world softly back to rights.

Sophie Dahl (PG with milk, no sugar)