I was given my first cup of tea when I was about five years old. In those days, when tea-bags had not yet been heard of, it was considered quite all right to give young children tea, but not coffee. From the outset, I couldn’t drink it with milk. My grandfather made his tea in the Indian fashion, with boiling milk and no water at all, though he sometimes added a little curry powder, or a clove or two, and my parents liked the standard British cuppa – usually Typhoo, milky and very sweet – and they all thought me very odd. But to do them justice, none of them ever accepted tea-bags. I took a lot of sugar in my tea, until I was diagnosed diabetic, about twenty years ago. Over the years my tea-taste has changed, steadily evolving towards a predilection for a stronger and stronger brew. In the sixties I drank Broken Pekoe (because it was cheap) and Oolong (For treats and high days). This was before I started to drift away from China tea. Historically of course China tea is a much older taste, and it was imported in vast quantities for a hundred years before tea was even planted in India or Ceylon. I settled on various Earl Grey blends for many years but I slowly began to find them too weak. Nowadays my standard mix is half Earl Grey and half Irish Breakfast. Irish Breakfast, as you would expect, I think, is the strongest blend I know of and is reminiscent of Stockholm tar. Wilkinson’s lovely old shop in Lobster Lane, Norwich, keeps my personal mix for me as Barrie’s Mixture. I get through a kilogram a month.

When I lived in London in the 1970’s there were still a handful of places which served proper tea, by my definition. There were the Indian and the Ceylon Tea Centres in the West End and a nice old chocolate shop in Sloane Street, whose name escapes me, and a few others here and there. Nowadays, so far as I am aware, there is nowhere. I can’t speak, of course, for places like Brown’s and Claridge’s and Fortnum’s and the Ritz, which I am too poor to penetrate, and I don’t know what goes on in the Pall Mall clubs, but I suspect the worst. The victory of the tea-bag seems to be total. My many years of country walking have discovered one tea-shop in Norfolk (in Ludham, a pleasant Broadland village) where they still offer real tea.

In 1972, at the Press Club, I attended, more or less by accident,  what turned out to be the founding meeting of CAMRA – the Campaign for Real Ale. At that time traditional English beer seemed to be on the point of going extinct. It was certainly a ghost-species. CAMRA has been, arguably, the most successful consumer group in history. Traditional English beer is alive and thriving in the 21^st century. Perhaps there could be a campaign for real, or proper tea?