Can you imagine a life without tea?

I’m a huge tea drinker and drink it by the absolute bucket load, in fact, I’ve got a pot on the go while I’m writing this blog! I must drink at least 10 cups a day and I’d say that’s quite a conservative estimate, if I’m honest! I have, however, cut out caffeine and so it’s decaf all the way for me, not that I think that makes any difference to taste, well, not to me, anyhow.

I really cannot imagine a life without tea. It’s the first thing to pass my lips in the morning and most days the last thing that I drink at night. In fact, I’d rather have a cup of tea than a beer and have even been known to go down the local pub for a night out and have a cup of tea. Sad but true!

You see, I’m originally from the Midlands and I come from a bit of a family of tea drinkers. My dad was probably the biggest tea drinker in my family, closely followed by my sister, Wyd and then me. My mum drinks tea, but I don’t think she’s so consumed by the need for it as the rest of us seem to be. We all like a nice cup of ‘builder’s tea’, or to those of you that don’t know that’s just your bog standard tea, P.G. or Tetley. Whereas my other sister, Tracy, she’s a ‘Lady Grey’ girl, or ‘Pledge’ as I like to call it as to me it tastes like furniture polish smells!

I sometimes wonder how I would cope if I was to relocate to another country ‘cause, as any serious tea drinker will tell you, you just can’t get a decent cup of tea abroad. I remember being on holiday once and ordering a tea with milk and they brought me out a glass of cold water with a teabag suspended in it and a glass of milk! I really did not foresee that one, but I suppose that’s what I asked for!

Us Brits really do love our tea and it’s more than just a drink to us, it’s an entire social experience. We invite people around for ‘a cuppa’ and a chinwag and then we make a lovely pot of tea and set it out on a tray with a jug of milk. You might even get a biscuit to dunk if you’re really lucky. And, if you’re upset what’s the first thing we say? ‘Come and sit down and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea’. It really does help to take the stress out of a situation. And whether you call it a cuppa, a brew or just a plain old cup of tea, it’s all the same to us so long as it’s hot and wet.

A few weeks ago while my wife and I were out we treated ourselves to a cheeky cream tea! If you’ve never had a cream tea it’s a pot of tea, usually for two, served with a fruit scone, a pot of jam and a pot of clotted cream…hmmmmm...now that’s a posh tea but this type carries a few extra calories, only just, though! The more pressing question was whether to put the jam on first or the cream, but that’s a whole other story!

For me the perfect cup of tea is poured from a pot where it has had enough time to ‘diffuse’ but not so long that it’s ‘stewed’, into a mug that already has a little milk in it and it should be poured with enough height so as to create some bubbles on the top of the tea, or ‘money’ as my mum calls it (I have no idea why she calls it that, she just does), and then it has to be drunk while it’s still hot, if it’s gone to warm it’s just not the same, drinkable but, meh, and if it’s gone cold, no way, never!

Anyhow, that’s how I drink mine. A little bit fussy, but, well, I likes what I likes and well, you just don’t compromise on a cup of tea. So, tell me, how do you drink yours?

Not even our memories!

Today is the 30th March and it's still trying to snow out there. The sun's been shining today, too, but it's still pretty cold outside. I did think about going out earlier, perhaps for a stroll along the river, but I haven't managed it as yet. Instead I'm sat on the sofa, huddled under a blanket with my cat, Scooby, watching movies.

Last night I was catching up with a new T.V. series, Revolution. It's only recently begun and it's about a world that exists in the present day without power. At the beginning, everything was quite normal, but in an instant and without warning, everything that required power to work just stopped working. Cars stopped right where they were, planes fell from the sky, lights and computers went off. Everything blacked out. A short while into the episode, and 15 years later, a female character was explaining to another why she continues to carry her mobile phone around with her, even though it hasn't worked since the power failed. Her reason? The mobile phone was the closest thing she had to photographs of her children. I made the assumption, at this point, that they must have died some time previous, and, even though she couldn't look at them anymore, the pictures she had taken, her memories, were still in there, stored on its hard drive.

This got me thinking about all of the photographs that I have taken over the years and have stored on my computer. I mean, I've got a box of old photos, probably not dissimilar to most people from the pre-digital generation at least, but, other than the pictures that I have on display in my home, all other documentation of fun times that we've had over the last few years are stored on my laptop's hard drive.

How times change. Only 10 years ago I remember having to take pictures on a camera with film that needed to be developed. You could get black and white or colour film in 24 or 36 exposures and they were sent away and developed, or, if you were in a rush and didn't mind paying even more money, done in a couple of hours by some retailers. And, until you got them back, mostly with 'over exposed' stickers all over them, you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes, you might find an old roll of film in the back of a drawer that you had forgotten about and had never got developed and you'd have no idea what it was of until you got it back from the photo lab. It was all part of the fun.

Nowadays it's so much simpler. Everyone has a mobile phone with a camera on it, or a digital camera with a display screen so that you can see the picture that you have taken instantaneously. It's truly ingenious. You can just keep snapping to your heart's content and it doesn't cost you a thing, only the memory space on your phone. And when you want to have hard copies, something to display on your mantelpiece, well, you just upload them to your laptop and print off the ones that you want on your printer and the others, they get stored in files on your hard drive. Easy peasy!

However, this does mean, of course, that we place all our trust on technology and our hard drives always being accessible in order for us to be able to access our memories. 

Lovely memories from the day my beautiful wife and I got married

Life has changed so much in the last few years, everything is electronic now, computerised or digital. Even our clocks are digital and change their own time in accordance with British Summer Time. There's no more need to put the clocks back or forth, unless you still have some of the old kind in your house of course, it can all get a bit confusing in our house. I haven't truly known what the time is since 1998!

It's funny how times change, isn't it? It does make you think though, eh. Perhaps we shouldn't take things quite so for granted. Not even our memories.