I finished work early today so as a treat, I thought I'd stop off at Starbucks for a cuppa and a cheese toastie.
A treat. I'd forgotten how bleak and dreary it is. Currently I'm being serenaded by a music track that sounds like someone randomly thumping a pillow and then falling awkwardly into a Casio keyboard. Plus there's the background roar of Sainsbury's and a lady loudly showing her friend her holiday snaps on a MacBook.
You'd be forgiven for wondering how you 'loudly show someone your holiday snaps'. Well she's championing at it, with all the descriptive flare of a raconteur on Jackanory. A picture in her book it seems, actually requires a thousand words.
Anyway, none of that is even the most remarkable bit. That happened in the queue, and it happened like this:
"Eating in?" asked the barista, sliding the packeted toastie towards herself across the counter.
"Yes please," I said, tapping my card on the shiny surface. She unwrapped the packet and slid the unappealing sandwich into the toasting kiln.
"Any drinks with that?"
"Sure. Regular tea."
"This size?" she held up a cup.
"Yup."
And then she said something so incredible, so outrageously unbelievable... that I'm sitting here, truly wondering whether or not it actually happened.
I've been made a lot of cups of tea in my life, and not once in my short history of imbibing the sinewed blend of camellia sinensis in all its varieties and flavours, has anyone ever asked me such an astonishing, brain-bending or obscurely astounding a question as:
"Two tea bags or just the one?"
I think I felt the cogs of time grind to a halt. It was as though the universe was on pause while every fibre of its vast uncharted matter was bending in to listen.
She stared at me, cup in hand, dangling from her finger.
"Um, just the one," I stammered. I think I half-smiled with incredulity, and half-wondered whether she would misinterpret that altogether.
Behind my motionless gaze, my mind was racing, processing the indisputable fact that I now live in a world where people, ordinary folk in Starbucks, are asking for, and indeed making, cups of tea with two tea bags. It is literally unbelievable.
The universe resumed. She span round and swooshed hot water into the cup.
You know, I thought it was odd to re-use tea bags; I don't mean to come across as snobbish or anything, but the first time I saw someone fish a bag out of a steaming mug and squish it onto the draining board for 'later' I was horrified. I am sorry if you do that, by the way - if you like it, good for you I guess, but honestly, there is a better way...
But using half a tea bag per cuppa is nowhere near as peculiar as using two! You might as well drink a mug of tangy soup. It's a decadent way to create a taste experience that you will almost certainly regret while your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth as the thick strong tea fizzes down the back of your inflamed throat.
Then, there's another question isn't there: would she have charged me extra if I had said yes?
What would she have asked me to pay for just hot water? And if the total cost of a cup of tea here is W+T+R where W=water, T=teabag and R=resources used to make it, then what am I actually paying for if T is so negligible that it can be doubled at no extra cost?
Either that's expensive W, or I'm being massively ripped off to sit at this dreary table with thumping music and the thrilling narrative of this lady's holiday photographs.
I'm not sure I like the implication either way. So what in the world of wonder am I doing here?
Two tea bags indeed. Okay, maybe I have become a tea snob. But let it be known would you, that it's places like this that have driven me to it.
My cheese toastie's gone cold while I've been sitting here stewing about all of that.
"You drove yourself here, Matthew," says a still, small voice. I could be wrong but I think there's a hint of a chuckle in it, reverberating from the other side of the universe.
A treat. I'd forgotten how bleak and dreary it is. Currently I'm being serenaded by a music track that sounds like someone randomly thumping a pillow and then falling awkwardly into a Casio keyboard. Plus there's the background roar of Sainsbury's and a lady loudly showing her friend her holiday snaps on a MacBook.
You'd be forgiven for wondering how you 'loudly show someone your holiday snaps'. Well she's championing at it, with all the descriptive flare of a raconteur on Jackanory. A picture in her book it seems, actually requires a thousand words.
Anyway, none of that is even the most remarkable bit. That happened in the queue, and it happened like this:
"Eating in?" asked the barista, sliding the packeted toastie towards herself across the counter.
"Yes please," I said, tapping my card on the shiny surface. She unwrapped the packet and slid the unappealing sandwich into the toasting kiln.
"Any drinks with that?"
"Sure. Regular tea."
"This size?" she held up a cup.
"Yup."
And then she said something so incredible, so outrageously unbelievable... that I'm sitting here, truly wondering whether or not it actually happened.
I've been made a lot of cups of tea in my life, and not once in my short history of imbibing the sinewed blend of camellia sinensis in all its varieties and flavours, has anyone ever asked me such an astonishing, brain-bending or obscurely astounding a question as:
"Two tea bags or just the one?"
I think I felt the cogs of time grind to a halt. It was as though the universe was on pause while every fibre of its vast uncharted matter was bending in to listen.
She stared at me, cup in hand, dangling from her finger.
"Um, just the one," I stammered. I think I half-smiled with incredulity, and half-wondered whether she would misinterpret that altogether.
Behind my motionless gaze, my mind was racing, processing the indisputable fact that I now live in a world where people, ordinary folk in Starbucks, are asking for, and indeed making, cups of tea with two tea bags. It is literally unbelievable.
The universe resumed. She span round and swooshed hot water into the cup.
You know, I thought it was odd to re-use tea bags; I don't mean to come across as snobbish or anything, but the first time I saw someone fish a bag out of a steaming mug and squish it onto the draining board for 'later' I was horrified. I am sorry if you do that, by the way - if you like it, good for you I guess, but honestly, there is a better way...
But using half a tea bag per cuppa is nowhere near as peculiar as using two! You might as well drink a mug of tangy soup. It's a decadent way to create a taste experience that you will almost certainly regret while your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth as the thick strong tea fizzes down the back of your inflamed throat.
Then, there's another question isn't there: would she have charged me extra if I had said yes?
What would she have asked me to pay for just hot water? And if the total cost of a cup of tea here is W+T+R where W=water, T=teabag and R=resources used to make it, then what am I actually paying for if T is so negligible that it can be doubled at no extra cost?
Either that's expensive W, or I'm being massively ripped off to sit at this dreary table with thumping music and the thrilling narrative of this lady's holiday photographs.
I'm not sure I like the implication either way. So what in the world of wonder am I doing here?
Two tea bags indeed. Okay, maybe I have become a tea snob. But let it be known would you, that it's places like this that have driven me to it.
My cheese toastie's gone cold while I've been sitting here stewing about all of that.
"You drove yourself here, Matthew," says a still, small voice. I could be wrong but I think there's a hint of a chuckle in it, reverberating from the other side of the universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment