Tea. The Great British Myth

Tea. Nobody in this country can make a decent cup of tea, the only people that can come close are myself and my mother, and even she doesn’t bother to make a proper cup any more.

The worst place to get a cup of tea in this country is at any kind of ‘Great British’ establishment that would pride itself on serving up a nice cup of ‘Rosie Lee’.

A truck stop at the side of the road for example. A white caravan on the A road heading out of any satellite town, grubby Union Flag and dirty looks, fat blokes stood around chuntering and bacon that tastes oddly of fish. Re boiled water in a polystyrene cup, a cheap tea bag and far to much full cream milk. Utterly Foul.

What about the Great British Café? Slop some warm water into one of those massive steel pots with a week old A4 size tea bag and pour the tepid liquid into the same amount of skimmed milk for a truly vomit inducing beverage. “Sit yourself down love, I’ll be straight over”. Properly disgusting.

But by far the worst cup of tea anyone in this country could ever consume is served up by the British Army. The organisation itself is so unbelievably tight that it buys the cheapest of everything in massive bulk, including tea bags. ‘The Brew’ is usually knocked up in large green plastic insulated containers that smell faintly of mould, diesel and urine in equal measure. The fluid is mixed with UHT milk until frothy and left for at least 45 minutes to cool before being poured into paper cups with two heaped tablespoons of sugar (plastic spoon with no handle). The resulting slop is referred to lovingly as ‘NATO’, a drink that is so far removed from anything consumable to beggar belief. Soldiers drink gallons of this shit, they simply can’t get enough of the stuff. Why? I just don’t know.

It’s a fairly sad indictment on this country when the cheap refreshing drink for which we became world famous is almost impossible to obtain on a daily basis. In fact, the only place to get a half decent cup of tea is at MacDonalds.