Tea is not her bag
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Regular readers of this column may remember my English e-pen pal, a university student and intrepid explorer of American food and culture. She was quite probably the first teenager in Lancashire to hear and enjoy "Black and Yellow" by Pittsburgh's own Wiz Khalifa, which later made the top 10 on the U.K. charts. Coincidence? Well, we'll see what happens as a result of my sending her Peeps.
We were e-mailing back and forth about governments and other problems and she opined that Brits could keep a stiff upper lip through most sorts of hardship -- except a threat to their supply of a certain dark liquid.
"If there was a tea shortage? Chaos would ensue," she warned. I considered what, besides celebrity news, Americans could not cope without. And then, without a thought for the national security consequences, I revealed to a foreign national our Achilles heel.
"If all the coffee plantations were irradiated or obliterated somehow," I told her, "Americans would riot, hoard, loot, kill, panic" before collapsing into a desperate slumber.
She admitted that while most of her countrymen "cannot let any blood get in their teastreams," her personal taste borders on the treasonous.
She is English.
She doesn't like tea.
She described it as "absolutely disgusting."
This is why I haven't mentioned her name. She can be stripped of her citizenship if anyone outside her immediate family (Mum, Auntie Jackie, Granddad, Little Dorrit, Old Fezziwig, Dobby the House Elf) ever finds out.
She prefers coffee. She also has no use for marmite. I'm not sure what that is. You either spread it on toast or carve lamp finials out of it, or possibly both.
It's unclear where she stands on Bovril, but knowing she lacks a Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, I am afraid to ask her.
The upshot of this iconoclastic behavior is that I can't send her my tea. People keep giving me tea. I don't know whether it's because I'm an anglophile or because I'm a single woman. As I explained to my tea-loathing friend, in this country it is assumed that women are big tea drinkers. The stereotype of an American tea drinker, I explained, is a middle-aged single woman who enjoys mystery novels, has a cat, and can be found curled up in an armchair (perhaps in a Snuggie because she is always cold) with a mug of quite possibly herbal tea.
First Published May 19, 2011 12:00 am
