Thanks very much, tea bags. I hope that the lush plantations of Sri Lanka are a bit less like the inside of a box of tea bags though. Also, a bit less like where I actually am - which is an office, full of rattling keyboards, squeaky chairs and chattering software engineers. Far from the sun rising majestically over the rolling hills, we're illuminated by plastic neon lamps buried into the ceiling.
I checked the side of the box for more information.
"Once upon a time," it said in a curly script-like font, "Sri Lanka was the land of coffee, before disease wiped it out in the 1800s."
It's still there though isn't it, Sri Lanka? I mean disease hasn't scrubbed it from the map - there are still green mountains and vast fields and jungle and mists and Tamil fighters slinking through the undergrowth... as far as I know.
I'm being a pedant, a smug old so-and-so, to whom the box might reply dismissively, "Oh you know what I mean,"
And to be fair, I do, of course.
The other side of the box tells me that the tea is 'crisp and fresh tasting' and is 'perfect for days when you want to savour every note in your tea'.
Ah, so, we're closer to the world that my box of tea bags is imagining I inhabit! Not the Kandy mountains or the tea plantations of Sri Lanka! No, in the world of my tea bags, I need to relax at the end of a long day, probably into a comfortable chair with mood lighting, where I should sniff the raincloud of tea that pirouettes from my cup as I sense the misty aroma of Ceylon lulling me to sleep, to dream, to slip into the lush greenery of my imagination, where barefoot tea pluckers laugh amongst themselves between the 'rows of glistening tea plants'...
Don't go to sleep while holding a hot cup of tea. You will be dragged back from Sri Lanka very quickly.
I pause, holding the box and looking round the office. "I tell you what though, box of tea bags," I say quietly. "I know where I'd rather be."
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