Goatee no sympathy

Those who know me will know that I like a nice cup of tea; my preference is for the malty taste of Assam and of course, much to the horror of a lot people, I take my tea without milk. Somebody once said to me that I couldn’t be a Yorkshireman if I didn’t have milk in my tea but in my opinion the milk spoils the taste of the tea and if you want to taste the milk you may as well have a glass of milk.

Thinking about the glass of milk, though, reminds me that I’ve not always been a tea drinker. As a young man, I thought it was something that only old people drank and because I thought I was bohemian and carefree, I would drink fizzy pop. Many years ago when my wife of four decades was my girlfriend, we went on a bed and breakfast holiday in Scotland and in the morning the landlady asked if we’d like tea or coffee; my wife asked for tea but I asked if they’d got lemonade and, unsurprisingly, they hadn’t. “Do you not like tea or coffee?” the landlady asked in a voice like that of Janet from Dr Finlay’s Casebook and I shook my head. “Would you like a glass of milk?” she asked and I nodded a little too eagerly.

My girlfriend/future wife almost died of embarrassment as she had to endure me gamely glugging what felt like a udderful of milk from one of those dimpled pint pots with a handle that you used to get in the kinds of pubs where if you didn’t wear a flat cap and a muffler they chucked you out. And of course I left a goatee of milk around my ample chops. And of course she didn’t speak to me for hours, quite rightly.

Years later I was employed in a little local factory and I still didn’t drink tea but now I was determined to learn how. One of the bosses gave me the task of making tea for him and the other gaffer, and I thought that here was my chance to be initiated into a South Yorkshire version of the tea ceremony. It’s hard to believe this, but I’d never made a cup of tea before and so my mistake was to think that the teabags at the side of the sink could be reused. I put two or three of them into the vast antique teapot that had been around since the start of the Industrial Revolution and added warm water. I waited a while and then poured the tea into the chipped mugs and took it to the bosses who were sitting in the office moving pieces of paper around.

They accepted the tea and both took a big drink. The next few seconds were like a cartoon because they both spat the tea out and one of them said: “Groooh!” and one of them stood up and theatrically, like someone in a sitcom, poured the remains into a pot plant. If it was a cartoon the plant would have died straight away.

Ah yes, me and tea (or tea and I) have had a long and eventful journey to get where we are now. But remember: no milk!