Vani-teas are dealing a fatal blow to our traditional cuppa

Brace yourself, I have terrible news. It’s the kind of news that in earlier times might have been soothed with a hot, sweet cup of tea. Except we’ve ruined that, apparently. Tea used to be the simple daily pleasure that united us as a nation. But we’ve changed. We’re flirting with infusions. We’re seeing other teas.

We may still consume 165 million cups of tea a day – surpassed, per capita, only by the Irish – but our tastes are changing and total tea sales fell by 5 per cent last year. So, in an attempt to appeal to younger shoppers, Tesco is scrapping 16 lines of “ordinary” tea – that is, the everyday black tea that wakes us up and calms us down, builds bridges and breaks down barriers; in fact, the tea that makes us who we are.

It’s goodbye builder’s and hello herbal infusion, time for Typhoo and PG Tips to budge up along the shelves to make room for mango and strawberry, liquorice, blackcurrant and blueberry, and buttermint (“the creamy sweetness will take you back to the nostalgic flavours of a charming little sweet shop”. Seriously? Take a look at yourselves). This is nothing short of an act of aggression, pouring cold water on that great British institution, the cuppa.

My husband once – following a catastrophic error of housekeeping which resulted in there being no black tea in the house – offered the window cleaner a cup of camomile. It took us all a while to get over that episode and we still do not speak of it. Astonishingly, today we would be right on-trend.

But if we’re now too good for builder’s tea, who and what have we become? Over the past couple of decades, more choice has usually meant better – see cheese, coffee, bacon, those other staples of civilised living – but too many teas is a choice too far. When it comes to tea, a country that sips together stays together.

Today, when you offer a visitor a cup of tea, it’s becoming ever less a simple invitation and increasingly a complex, esoteric game of multiple choice. Do you have decaf? Rooibos? Lavender and hemlock? It can easily descend into an uncomfortable shuffle that hits the hospitality buffers when it terminates in: “Oh, nothing then.”

But it’s not about the tea, stupid. It’s about expressing our common humanity via the medium of hot beverages. For decades tea has been a social glue, soothing and smoothing over all social divisions. Rejecting a cup of tea is as cruel and cutting as offering someone your hand and that person refusing to shake it. If I offer you tea, I don’t mind much if you don’t drink it, but I do mind enormously if you reject the very idea of it.

Of course, in the privacy of your own home, brew what you like. But for the sake of society, don’t drag these affectations out of the house with you. It is a slippery slope between, “Do you have rosehip?” and being one of those people who bores on about having a kettle that boils water to the correct temperatures for green, white, black and oolong teas, herbal infusions and coffee. Essentially, you become the sort of person who mistakes “How do you do?” for a question, and to be perfectly frank, I’d probably rather hear about your hiatus hernia than how you find infusion of fennel so soothing.

And, of course, the final nail in the coffin for tiresome vani-teas is that they’re deeply unpleasant to dunk your biscuit in (shut up, I know you do it). Which might, ultimately, be their joy-defying point.