It has been said that a sadness shared is half a sadness, but a happiness shared is twice a happiness.
Tea is like that.
Like the happiness, that is.
It seems that, as tea is shared, the amount of it increases exponentially.
I’m not much of a tea drinker myself, but Donna can’t seem to function on all cylinders until someone (usually me) has brought the kettle to a boil and several tea bags have had their goodness soaked out of them.
Tea drinkers of British extraction turn their noses up at the idea of “soaking” tea, and prefer to call it “steeping” – but the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries (how much more British can you get?) both define “steeping” as “soaking.” I rest my case.
But I digress.
We had the pleasure, this past week, of playing host to Donna’s sister – another unabashed tea drinker.
And the sheer volume of tea consumed by those two ladies over the course of those few days is nothing short of astounding.
I’ve witnessed the phenomenon before, in my youth. My mother and father were both tea drinkers, and when we went after-church visiting on Sunday afternoons, we ended up at tea-drinkers’ homes as often as not.
It’s no wonder that the world tea trade, at its height, rivalled the fur and precious minerals trades in volume and value.
Personally, I prefer coffee – practically addicted. And I’m not alone. While Millennials have been catching the tea bug of late, Statistics Canada notes that coffee still accounts for two of every three hot drinks consumed here.
Trouble is, too much coffee will make a body jittery and antsy.
I used to drink coffee by the bucketful on deadline days at the office – but age is catching up to me, and I no longer dare drink any but the decaffeinated variety past mid-afternoon, or face a troubled, sleepless night.
Caffeine has been implicated in panic attacks and bouts of mild to middling paranoia, not to mention my own aforementioned sleeplessness.
Perhaps there is a correlation between the state of the world today and the predominance of coffee drinkers.
Maybe the Millennials and the tea drinkers of earlier generations have it right, as do Donna and her sister. After all, they are two of the sweetest ladies I know… even without sugar in their tea.
According to Donna, “Tea makes everything right.”