Great news for men of proper tea: proper tea is available again in Norwich. The House of Tea, in Elm Hill, now offers no fewer than 27 different sorts of tea, and it is all (except for one – English Breakfast) the real thing!

Halleluia in excelsis Deo!

On Royal Wedding Day Sarah and I decided we would prefer not to be exposed to the nuptial media saturation, and so set off for a longish walk.

We left North Walsham Market Cross at 9-30 and strolled along footpaths and across fields and down little, quiet lanes for the greater part of the day, arriving in Cromer at about 5-30 that evening. The weather was glorious – bright sunshine without being hot enough to make you sweat and strain – and the countryside utterly ravishing, as a Dornford Yates character might have put it. We ate our picnic lunch early, sitting on the footpath (the Paston way at that point) just past some of our favourite cottages near Antingham, where we were overtaken  by a party of really wholesome looking young people toting camping gear and  arrived in South Repps in time for tea. We had forgotten – if we ever knew in fact – that South Repps Post Office is also a tea shop. We got splendid homemade scones, with butter, cream and jam. OK the jam was from ASDA but we ate it all.  Unfortunately the tea was in bags, but then, as I have observed at length, it just about always is nowadays, and I drank a lot of it. One of the village streets had been awning-ed and long tables had been set out for the “street party” which was in progress. Everybody seemed to be having a good time. Some of them had champagne in tall flutes which looked very good.

The track between the Repps-es must be one of the loveliest paths in Norfolk, with scarcely a hint of the modern world to be glimpsed. Plus it rises and falls in a most beguilingly non-East Anglian way.

As far as nature is concerned, summer seems to be here. This year I have eaten the earlest Norfolk asparagus I have ever even heard of, and the first local strawberries already! The blossom is incredible. Roses are in bloom. I have never seen such profusions of dandelions, alkanet, daisies, eyebright and cowslips. Hoverflies are hovering in millions, with only a few swallows as yet to eat them. Haven’t heard a cuckoo yet, but the way things are, it can’t be long. We intend to go up to Brancaster, to a hedge famous for nightingales, before long!

In Cromer, before our statutory stagger along the pier, we ate in Mary Jane’s fish and chip restaurant. This has got to be the best such in Norfolk, and bears comparison with some of my favourites in London in the dim and distant (the place on Fortune Green, for example, run by and mostly for Jewish people, where all the batter was made from matzo meal, and you could get gefiltefisch and chips; the Sea Shell, in Lisson Grove; another place, whose name I am not sure I can  remember  accurately – was it Geale’s? - in Farm Street). Oh, many times yum! And four times long ago yum! Apologies to Callimachus.

Marking off our route on the ordnance sheet, we appear to have walked about 14 miles. Building up to the 20 I used to do regularly when I was in my thirties.

Grated v. Sliced Cheese in Sandwiches

Another modern pet hate of mine is grated cheese. Until very recently, if you ordered a cheese sandwich or cheese roll, just about anywhere in the UK, the cheese in it came  in slices varying in thickness from great, luscious, meaty, satisfying ones, a quarter of an inch thick, to paper-thin ones you could see through. But always slices. Then, I don’t know exactly when, but really not very long ago, all this changed. Someone cottoned on that if you grate the stuff, a couple of ounces of cheese will make a huge number of sandwiches. The ultimate horror, a ploughman’s lunch with grated cheese, was not long in arriving. Grated cheese now seems, like the infernal tea-bag, to be just about universal. The only exception appears to be Stilton, for the very good reason that you simply can’t grate it. Basically, of course, grating Cheddar or similar cheeses is a way of selling people air – cheese-flavoured air – just as candy floss (American cotton candy) is a way of selling people sugar-flavoured air. And we, by and large, are stupid enough to accept it. I have once or twice protested, but only once successfully. The old King of Hearts café in Norwich produced a custom-made cheese sandwich for me with sliced cheese. That place is now under new management. I’ll try them out some time. However, I have very good news for anyone who feels about cheese sandwiches or rolls as I do. That news is the Alexander pub, just off Dereham Road and not actually in Alexander Road. I have always liked the Alex a lot. It is a proper old-fashioned town pub, with excellent food and real beer; and sensible prices. And if you order a cup of coffee you (usually) get biscuits with it. I was in the Alex recently and noticed a cheese roll for sale. Glory be to God! It contained thick SLICES of cheese! They told me they had always made them that way. Well so they should, and so should everyone else. It’s just that nobody else does any more! Moreover an Alexander cheese roll costs...can you believe it?...ONE pound! Floreat! Floreat!

_______

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?

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.