An Infusiasm For Tea

Unlike me, my other half is not a coffee drinker. When I first met her, she mostly consumed diet cola, but she’s moved on from that phase and will now indulge in hot drinks like a proper adult. Most often in polite company, she’ll go for an English Breakfast tea without milk (she doesn’t ask for it like that – she’ll just ask for a cup of tea, but as I’m going to talk about various kinds of tea, I thought it pertinent to make the distinction – although having now just reread the next paragraph it doesn’t really matter and I’m actually just being pedantic. I could go back and edit all of that but I feel that you, dear reader, should know what a pedant I truly am.)

Other teas she likes are as follows: Earl Grey, Lady Grey, and various fruit teas that tea purists would probably refer to as infusions, because there’s no tea involved in them. But they’re produced in the same way, by introducing a small porus bag to hot water, so the distinction is just semantics really.

Her favourite hot drink, by far, is just hot water. Which makes her quite a cheap date actually, although mostly she’ll go for an infusion when we’re out and about because ordering just a cup of hot water draws far more  blank expressions from ‘baristas’ than either of us feel comfortable with.

She’ll ask for a hot water when we’re visiting family though. My dad, for some reason, still finds her propensity to drink hot water quite amusing, and regularly asks if she’d like another ‘sarsaparilla’. I believe he’s referencing an old Western TV series called Sugarfoot, in which the main protagonist would order  a Sarsaparilla rather than the expected alcoholic drink. I suppose it’s a pertinent enough reference because my beloved isn’t ordering a drink within the ‘expected norms’ although I think my dad thinks that Sarsaparilla is just water, albeit cold fizzy water, and that’s why he thinks it’s funny. I’ve just looked it up (to the best of my knowledge we don’t have it in the UK) and it’s not water, it’s a kind of root beer. That won’t stop my dad from making the joke every time we visit though…

Anyway, as I said, she mostly drinks infusions when we’re out and about and depending on where we go, she’ll have a particular flavour in mind. We went to Costa yesterday, ( I’ve mentioned going to Costa before on these pages, so just to be clear, I haven’t got shares in the place, it’s just that there’s one conveniently close to our house). When we go to Costa she tends to order the ‘Gingersnap Peach’ infusion. Yesterday I ordered this, only to be told that Costa no longer do this flavour and have replaced it with one called ‘Citrus and Ginger Twist’. In other places we’ve been she’s happily drunk ‘Lemon and Ginger’ tea, and this sounded similar enough to that so I ordered it.

When I brought the drinks to our table I informed her of the change.

She looked at me with genuine despair and these were her exact words:

“Why does everything I love get discontinued?”

There was a moment’s silence while we both contemplated this.

I pointed out that I have not, as yet, been discontinued…

After another pause, she conceded that she does love me more than tea.