Tea - proper and improper

I love tea – strong, black, Indian or Ceylon tea. I drink perhaps ten large cups of it a day. But it must be proper tea. By proper tea I mean loose, free-running leaf-tea, brewed in a teapot, with boiling not just hot water,  and stirred quite briskly. I am not fussy about the pot, really, although I usually take my own with me when I travel. This is a stainless steel teapot made by STELLAR, which is, I believe, a Belgian company supplying the hotel trade. This pot is one hundred per cent non-drip, and it was largely for that reason, as well as its apparent indestructibility, that I parted with £35-00 for it, in a delightful shop called Head Cook and Bottle-Washer, in North Walsham, Norfolk, about six years ago.  Head Cook and Bottle-Washer was the best kitchen shop I have ever found, in a fairly widely travelled and quite long life, anywhere in the world, and I still suffer a distinct pang whenever I pass where it used to be. Because it is, of course, like so much else that is wonderful in England, a thing of the past. Now some tea-buffs can’t abide a metal pot, but metal doesn’t bother me. In fact the tea I get when visiting certain old friends, tea from an inherited solid silver pot, tastes better than any I’ve ever had from a porcelain pot. But what I truly loathe is the tea-bag. Tea-bags are, however, almost universal nowadays. They began as a way of using up what used to be called fannings - the thitherto unsaleable dust that settled on the bottom of tea-chests. Then someone cottoned on that it was a huge potential money-spinner, as would be any scheme to sell what was previously considered worthless rubbish to enormous numbers of people, in tiny unit quantities, at a colossal mark-up. All that was necessary was to convert the British populace to this barbarous new habit. The process of conversion was largely accomplished by the 1970’s, though forty years on there are still a few of us holdouts.