100 YEARS OLD AND STILL ENJOYS A FORMULAIC TEA...

HAVING always appreciated the delights of a cup of tea, I was intrigued to have my attention drawn to a formula produced by the chaps at Tetley for a perfect cuppa.

At first, I thought this was irrelevant to my needs as it seemed to be designed to apply to teabags, while my own preference is for leaf tea. Indeed, I have long been reliant on the services of a personal assistant whose sole job is to fly out to Sri Lanka occasionally, where she harvests the finest tea leaves which she rolls on her thighs on the flight home before shredding them with her fingernails, according to my specifications, into Broken Orange Pekoe grade.

My long tea-drinking experience led to my considering this the recipe for the best possible cuppa but the Tetley formula has given me cause to reassess matters. I shall not trouble you by repeating the entire formula, which includes such items as zing, body, colour and sparkle which could be difficult to quantify but feel I ought to draw your attention to two other components that threaten to bring my Broken Orange Pekoe into disrepute.

The first of these is “sin(Y/114.5)” on the upper level of the fraction, where Y is the years of experience of the tea blenders. As I feel sure you know, “sin” indicates the trigonometric function sine which oscillates between +1 and -1 reaching its maximum value when the operand equals π/2 (measured in radians, of course, not degrees).

Now Tetley have been going for 180 years, so Y=180, which makes Y/114.5 equal to 1.57, which is half of 3.14 which is, to two decimal places, the value of π. So according to the formula, Tetley tea is now at its best but will slowly decline until, in another 180 years, it will bring zero pleasure and after that the value of a cuppa will be negative.

On the other hand, the denominator of the fraction in the formula includes the item (π-W) where W is the weight of tea in the bag in grams. Since this is on the bottom of the fraction, it means that a cuppa will approach perfection as (π-W) gets smaller, so the closer a teabag comes to containing exactly π grams of tea, the better it will be, unless it exceeds π grams, when the tea value will become negative.

In fact when W = π, we will find ourselves dividing by zero which will produce an infinite result. Tetley themselves settle for 3.125 grams of tea in each bag which is close to the 3.14 value of π but clearly 0.15gm short of infinite perfection.

I assume this is deliberately chosen to avoid producing infinite joy which could have profound consequences, both economic and theological, as infinite joy in a cup of tea would be such a great temptation that people would not do anything else, and even Heaven could offer nothing better after we have drunk ourselves to ecstatic death on cups of W=π tea.

I am so worried by all this that I am now making my tea in single cupfuls rather than pots and weighing out my Broken Orange Pekoe to prevent my accidentally using the precise amount required to produce infinite ecstacy. One cannot be too careful.