Nirvana, Zen, and inner peace. Meditating monks, Chinese calligraphy, and lots of green leaves everywhere. That’s the world you enter when you drink tea. At least according to many of the advertisements. It seems that someone, somewhere figures that “waffle wisdom” sells tea.
Drink tea and your mind shall grow big and strong
Drink tea and sip the spirit
Drink tea and you shall be on a journey to…
Where exactly?
Guess someone doesn’t think highly of us tea drinkers. Simpletons that we are, we require a large dose of soul booster to nudge us along. Seems that our souls need lots of improvement and wisdom. If your philosophical compass is that far off, brewing up a cuppa isn’t going to do the trick. Warning: You will not enter the third realm with just tea leaves in the pot. You’re drinking tea, maybe some very fine tea, but thou shalt be no smarter than before you fired up the kettle. And your kitchen is no haven of pious purification. Heck, it might even need a bit of a clean.
All this mystification of tea, smacks of esoteric nonsense.
IF YOU look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
Put the kettle on!
The water is 18 degrees…Celsius. Cold, but the children don’t seem to mind as they charge, splashing into it. Every time they run up and back, their speeding feet fling sand high up into the air. Boredom, leftover from a morning shopping trip in the capitol fuels them. A summer afternoon on the beach is a good way to cure it.