I’m probably not the first to declare the world is divided into two camps – coffee drinkers and the tea sippers.
My wife is the latter. I am the former.
Coffee, to me, isn’t about taste – it is purely a functional duty. Bracing, bolted down, badda boom and bang – out the door, on with the day, day, day!
I often observe my wife with her tea cup in the morning – she’s not drinking from it, she’s caressing it.
Tea looks to be all about lingering, savouring, easing … smoothly, gracefully … into the daaaaaaay … Tea, it seems to me, is more about meeting the day and negotiating a proper start to it, versus charging in and confronting it.
Check this out for yourself this summer:
I maintain that tea drinkers step carefully, gingerly into life’s swimming pool. Coffee drinkers? Hell, they cannonball straight into the deep end.
Even the afternoon tea break – a fine English tradition – is a discrete way of slipping out of the moment and then quietly back into it, whereas a coffee break is about refueling, recharging and gearing up for the day’s final grind.
But on an Air China flight to Beijing this morning, I was handed an 8-page Tea Menu that has caused me to rethink everything. Its introduction jolted me like a rich mug of black Colombian, and at the same time, it also gave me pause:
“The tea emits a sweet scent and a degree of warmth, displaying its posture of calmness, reservation, introversion and modesty, providing us with a share of ease and peace of mind in the noise of the city, ( deep breath here) allowing us to enjoy a portion of quietness and comfort in the surge of lives, the change of seasons and the convergence of time and space.”
Dang. Who knew? (And to think my wife has been harbouring this truth from me for all these years.)
Purely as an aid to public health, allow me to now quote from a few of the selections Air China has on offer :
Green Tea
Suitable for busy young people who often use computers with refreshing, cooling digesting, clearing throat, brightening eyes functions
Black Tea
Suitable for weak people with refreshing and enriching the saliva, diuresis, diminish inflammation and anti-bacterium, detoxification functions
Blue Brown Tea
Suitable for the crowd to lose weight and feel irritable, with the functions to prevent occurrence of reactive oxygen and tooth decay, elimination of damage to beauty and health
Preventing an “occurrence of reactive oxygen” seemed like a good idea (chicken sausages for breakfast) but instead, I went for the Jasmine – “full fragrance and stored in a cool place.”
Supply your own punch line here: _________
Jon
