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.