Good cure for a hangover

A tea urn.  Note simplicity and practicality of design, centered around holding gallons of the stuff, and a simple spigot for rapid dispensing to thirsty masses.

Those bastards at Nottage Hill have successfully weaponised wine, that’s the only explanation for the results arising from drinking the filthy stuff that came out of the carton I bought in good faith from the grocers.  It also led to the establishment of a new phrase in the household: ‘two litres of red, all day in bed’ although in truth I don’t think that I’ll ever need to use this handy mnemonic because the phrase ‘I am never drinking wine from a carton ever again’ is much easier to remember.

In truth, the packaging should have been warning enough in itself.  I am not a wine snob, far from it, but even I know that no luxury product should come in a carton.  And, whatever the French would have you think, wine is a luxury product, or at least it should be.  Milk and fruit juice come in cartons, decent wine does not.  If necessary, apply this simple test: what product looks at home, in a carton, on the breakfast table.

In principle, wine in a carton is an excellent idea.  It’s the reality that’s a let down. 

To get a bottle of wine open, traditionally one needs a corkscrew and a flourish, this results in a pleasing pop as a prelude to a cheery glunking.  Of course, the advent of the twist cap has somewhat reduced this pleasure but what has been lost in terms of the erosion of heritage has been made up for in the efficiency with which plonk can now be opened and decanted.  With the carton, there is theatre involved in the opening of the packaging as one tries to winkle the spigot free of the container, an operation at the conclusion of which, take it from me, you will have earned your drink.

Wine comes in bottles. 

Tea can come in urns.

The industrialisation of tea by making it in an urn was perfected by the Women’s Institute of course, but the practice of making a proper cup of tea available in huge quantities has spread far and wide, a genuine force for good.

If you read the papers, you might be fooled into thinking that there are many varieties of tea.  Indeed the supermarket shelves are filled with boxes of ‘Earl Grey’ or ‘Assam’.  This is not tea.  When you ask for a cup of tea you expect to be given English Breakfast tea with milk in it and, if you are fancy, the option of not having sugar.  The great Kyril Bonfiglioll immortalised tea made with Carnation Milk as being a delightful shade of orange and this is indeed makes an already wonderful beverage even more appitising, orange being an acceptable shade of tea in exactly the same way that it is an unacceptable shade of skin, unless you’re an Oompa Loompa.

Urn tea is one of the cornerstones of this nation, from the jumble sale in the village hall to the cricket pavilion to the ready room of a fighter squadron, but variants have their place.  For instance builder’s tea, so called because it is practically a construction material in itself, being so strong and heavily sugared that, if made properly, one can stand a spoon up in it.  Such tea can be found in cafes but is best enjoyed in its native environment, on building sites or anywhere that cement is mixed with purpose.

Of course, if one were seeking to market builder’s tea one would be better off describing it as ‘artisan tea’ and playing up the health aspects of it, or at least concealing just how much sugar goes into the average cup by, for instance, simply stating that it provides 6000% of your recommended daily allowance.

There are those people, normally the sort of people that have lace at the end of their sleeves, lavender sachets in their knicker draws (or indeed have knicker draws) and exist mostly in etchings and ITV period dramas who will take a cup (cup?! I ask you, tea comes in a mug, always has, always will, always should) of Dajeeling and pronounce it ‘refreshing’.  These people are not to be trusted with a hod.  Or indeed a kettle.  Or the vote.