I drink a lot of tea. Four or five vast Sports Direct mugs a day. Twining’s Earl Grey tea, which must be made with fresh-drawn water, infused for but 30 seconds when it is at a rolling boil and enjoyed without sugar but with a light splash of milk.
I was tickled recently to learn that this was almost exactly how our late Queen enjoyed her tea – likewise, Twining’s Earl Grey.
Though she would probably have been shocked that I make it with a teabag, in the mug, and without the whole panoply of loose tea leaves, a china pot, a dainty strainer, and an additional jug of very hot water.
It’s doubtful if Her Majesty ever laid her eyes on a teabag in her life, or would have known what to do with one if she had.
But afternoon tea was her favourite meal of the day. Her schedule was always organised around it, even in London.
The late Queen enjoyed her Earl Grey tea
It was also a useful occasion to entertain people of importance but to whom Elizabeth II was not particularly close – former US Presidents, and so on.
But, be we high or low, tea is not just a refreshing drink.
Its very making is a ritual, putting much in perspective. Its precise preparation is acutely personal.
My mother likes Sainsbury’s Red Label tea, very strong, and literally boils it in the pot – a generational, Hebridean thing.
Were Putin ever to nuke Faslane, my mother’s natural response, I think, would be to shrug, and put the kettle on.
Brits – per capita, we down just over four pounds of tea a year – are often mocked for our preferred national beverage (although coffee did briefly threaten to overtake it in the novelty days of Starbucks).
In fact, we are eclipsed by the Irish – five pounds of tea annually – and well behind the Turks, who down nearly seven pounds of it.
China, unexpectedly, is far down the league-table, despite being a major producer of the stuff.
And, oddly, within the UK, an April 2020 Scottish Field study found that Scots sip more of the steaming brew than anyone else.
Indeed, Edinburgh has the highest percentage of daily tea drinkers in Britain: 88 per cent (Aberdeen, on 82 per cent, is a close second; London, at 79 per cent, limps in third).
A big factor in that, of course, is that our soft Scottish drinking-water is much more palatable than the awful, chalky stuff that comes out of taps down south.
And we are still a much more working-class country.
Tea is about the cheapest thing you can drink and, in the dodgy sanitation of the Victorian era, it was also the safest, as the water must be absolutely boiling when you infuse it.
The same study also found that, in the month preceding, Scots had upped their tea consumption from three to five cups a day.
But then, weeks earlier, we had been plunged into Covid lockdown. Soothing rituals suddenly, seriously, mattered.
And over the past couple of weeks I have been buying quite a lot of tea. There are now six or seven boxes of Earl Grey in the kitchen-press.
That’s because there are well-founded rumours of a coming tea shortage.
Most of it is imported from Asia and Africa by the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and, as you will have heard, the Yemeni Houthi group have of late been shooting at a lot of ships.
More and more companies are now diverting their vessels round the southern tip of Africa – which takes three weeks longer – and some predict rather wild scenes in our supermarkets: wee wifies coming to blows for the last, precious packets of Typhoo.
Tea was, of course, strictly rationed during the Second World War – a mean two ounces, per person, per week – and remained ‘on the ration’ till 1952. Yet it remained central to our national culture.
I am old enough to remember when, for a flitting, the removal-firm did not furnish you with cardboard boxes, but empty foil-lined tea-chests.
Forty years ago, every child in the land could sing the Tetley Tea jingle.
For decades, when performing animals were still acceptable, live chimpanzees starred in PG Tips commercials.
And, in more relaxed Glasgow days, back in the 70s and near elevenses, cheerful binmen would often appear at your door, brandishing a pot and asking for boiling water.
In the days when I was sent to cover US elections, the best thing about coming back was being served a proper cup of tea by genial British Airways flight-attendants.
Americans, bless them, cannot make tea to save their lives. I once, in Washington DC, foolishly ordered a pot from room-service.
There duly arrived some quite hot water and a single, lonely teabag beside it on the tray.
We know exactly who introduced tea to Scotland. It was Mary of Modena, consort to James, Duke of York.
He was installed in Scotland to persecute the Covenanters, dedicated Holyrood Abbey and – from 1685 to 1688 – reigned disastrously as King James VII and II.
But tea has been drunk avidly ever since and, in 1840, Anna, Duchess of Bedford, invented afternoon tea – unable to thole the long, hungry hours between luncheon at noon and dinner at eight.
A great advantage of afternoon tea was that it could be served without servants.
They would retire from the room, once they had brought everything in, and you could then in unusual privacy enjoy the most exquisite gossip.
And afternoon tea at Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel – it is positively theatrical, with the tea poured from spectacular height as a lady plays the harp on a balcony – should be on every Scot’s bucket-list.
The apotheosis of afternoon tea is the royal garden party.
There are four of them every year – three at Buckingham Palace and one at Holyroodhouse – and, most unusually, the invitation is always sent to one’s wife.
At Holyrood, the King gets to spend a pleasant afternoon with 8,000 of his best friends in Scotland – people of distinction, achievement and service.
And, of course, everyone is dressed to the nines.
It’s a ‘dry’ event – no alcohol – but exquisite sandwiches, scones and dainties are on offer with the hot and abundant tea and, though your odds of actually meeting your Sovereign are low, you do get to watch him eat and drink.
It’s one of the last echoes of the medieval court, when respectable people were allowed in simply to see their monarch dine.
And, like so much about the pomp and circumstance around British royalty, the royal garden party is a recently invented ancient tradition; the first thrown by Queen Victoria in June 1868.
‘The afternoon splendid, & not too hot,’ she noted in her journal that night. ‘Quantities of people on the lawn whom I had to recognise as I went along… it was very puzzling and bewildering.’
Her great-great-granddaughter, over the decades, quite mastered the royal garden party – vividly dressed, beaming, unhurried, drifting through lanes of people, and in time sipping from her own cup at the centre of a gawping crowd.
And, when all had gone, she retired gratefully inside the Palace. For a nice cup of tea, of course.