The Meaning of Rice by Michael Booth

Author:Michael Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Chapter 22

Tea

The man in the white lab coat removes the bamboo ladle from the top of the brown earthenware water pot where it has been resting, carefully lifting the handle first, then the bowl in two separate, measured, tai-chi-like movements. He scoops some hot water and pours it over the dark green leaves in the broad, flat stoneware bowl. An infusion is permitted for just a few seconds before he covers the bowl with a lid, swirls the leaves and water, pours, and vigorously shakes the last drops, not much more than a thimble-full in all, of a luminescent golden liquid out into the small white bowl in front of me.

I lift the bowl to my lips and sip. It is the most intensely delicious tea I have ever tasted. Rich and grassy, toasted, bitter, fresh and mildly sweet, it is like a distillation of the entire plant world.

The second cup from the same leaves is infused for slightly longer with a greater yield. If anything, it is better than the first, deeper, richer with a pleasing bitter aftertaste. After the third serving, poured over ice and served in a tall-stemmed wine glass, I am buzzing. As a non-coffee drinker I am not used to this much caffeine and in my giddy state accept as perfectly reasonable the tea master’s invitation to now eat the leaves themselves with a drizzle of ponzu. They are delicious.

Though I haven’t lived in England for over a decade and a half I still think I make a passable Englishman. I appreciate a good queue. I apologise if someone treads on my foot. I know how to pronounce ‘Magdalene College’ and ‘Holborn’. I eat my main meal of the day in the evening and cry during the opening titles of Dad’s Army – sometimes simultaneously. I feel at home in a pub, and still calculate currency transactions via sterling, which makes no sense whatsoever. I can deploy passive-aggressive politeness with Exocet precision; I still learn most of what’s happening in the world from the BBC; and I even own a pinstripe suit. But there is one aspect of Englishness in which I have always felt inadequate, a failure: in all the years I lived in England, and for many thereafter, I never drank a single cup of tea. Not so much as a sip. It wasn’t a religious thing, the rest of my family all drank tea, as did friends, I just never got round to it somehow. Lukewarm, milky-brown, sugary liquid just didn’t really hold that much appeal.

This was often inconvenient. If you’ve just heard you have got the job, or you have lost your dog; if your aunt has died in a ballooning accident, or you’re feeling at a loose end; if it’s late morning, or mid-afternoon; if there is an ad break on television, or if it’s raining – for English people everywhere, whatever the situation, the universal solution is: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ If you decline the offer, they literally have no idea what to do next.

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