A morning coffee is my favourite way of starting the day, settling the nerves so that they don’t later fray.

marcia carrington

Much as I like coffee in the morning (and hot chocolate, malted drinks, fruit juice, warm milk, or anything soft that tastes like lemon or cherry…), when I’m in a pinch, it’s tea that I keep coming back to. While there’s a blog post about how it’s my favourite thing to quaff while writing, a simple search for the term brings it up so frequently that I do have to wonder if such a post was at all necessary.

I’d forgotten all about dicksplash.

Tea was a very important part of my first relationship (ironically, since throughout the course of my fourth relationship, both of us have mainlined coffee so much we’ve both worked in coffee shops). It was a cornerstone, of sorts: during my two-day weekend visits, our Saturday mornings always started with tea. Tea would herald the fact that we were up, and active, and it became so much of a ritual that she wouldn’t kiss me before we’d had tea.

Tea also punctuated our heady days (as it was readily available – I like to think I have a healthy relationship with tea; with her, it was becoming a problem). With lunch, which happened soon after breakfast as we were sickeningly slack in getting out of bed, we had tea. Mid-afternoon, we had tea. Listening to music – tea. Chatting with 47 – tea. Working on the computer game we wrote together – tea.

And after sex… of course… tea. Cuddles too. But mostly tea.

In fact, practically every relationship I’ve had has involved tea in some significant way. Louise imported British tea to her place in South Africa because she missed it so much. Alicia asked me to pick up some milk on the way to her flat, lest we run out and have to forsake tea. Snowdrop promised me that she would “make us both a brew” before utterly ruining me on the bed upstairs. Although the drinking girl was more fond of gin, her mother made a very nice cup of tea (and even offered me one mid-wank once, fortunately through the door). Catherine’s mum regularly made me two cups of tea, for the simple fact that I could drink one after the other.

And this blog post, in fact, is brought to you by a battered, chipped mug from Eroticon, containing a nice, strong cup of… well, you don’t need me to finish that sentence, do you?

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In 2005 I saw a friend at camp attempting to drink a cup of tea approximately the size of his head. Having failed to find an appropriate mug, he had taken a two-litre measuring jug and thrown in a couple of teabags, a tablespoonful of sugar and a sizeable amount of milk, then topped the whole thing off with boiling water and gave it a stir.

“Sleep is for the weak,” he answered all the unasked questions.

But I drink tea before I go to sleep.

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