It is only very recently that I have fully embraced the concept of tea. Certainly in terms of my 36+ years on this planet I would say less than the last 1% has seen me drinking tea on at least a daily basis.
It's not that I previously disliked tea. My relationship with it was much like that most of us have with a certain category of friend — in their company you have perfectly nice time but after parting ways, if nothing specifically reminded you of them for the rest of your life you probably wouldn't think of them again.
Contrast this relative indifference with the fact that a love of tea is the closest thing that most of the English come to religion. Secretly, I never felt like a fully signed-up, card-carrying Englishman because I didn't share my fellow countryfolk's passion for leaf tips infused in hot water.
Coffee on the other hand I get. I'm neither a coffee gourmet nor a zealot but there are certain times when a good cup of strong, frothy coffee really hits the spot. I must confess, I still don't understand why a mixture of beans, hot water and milk should cost three quid but once I've got one I do rather enjoy it.
I used to work for British Gas on summer placements as a student and the office I worked in had a series of small "tribes", each with their own coffee run. Keen to make me feel welcome (and perhaps also to claim me as their own) for the first couple of weeks each tribe included me on their own individual run. I was too polite to refuse and by the end of the day I'd usually had at least a dozen cups and was buzzing like a sniffer dog after a double shift.
Of course, that was horrible early 90s coffee machine coffee. Our coffee palate is much more educated now and the making of coffee has been elevated to something approaching an art form. There's even a proper name for someone trained to make coffee. I'm pretty sure there's no tea-making equivalent of a barista — it doesn't take much of an induction to be able to stick a tea bag in a cup and add some hot water.
Which brings me on to the teabag. Some amazing strides forward have been made in medicine, technology and engineering in the last two decades but can any equal the progress of the teabag? This year is the twentieth anniversary of the round teabag, and since then we've seen the introduction of both the drawstring teabag and the pyramid teabag.
I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that for anyone in their twenties or thirties, the arrival of the pyramid teabag was a JFK moment — we can all remember where we were when we first heard.
It is hard to believe that the pyramidal tea bag can be improved upon but the natural next step must surely be the spherical teabag. If a pyramid give the leaves more room to move around in comparison to a conventional flat bag (circular or otherwise) then just imagine the freedom that a spherical bag would provide. The tea leaves would be practically free range.
But the construction of a perfectly spherical perforated paper bag must surely present some problems. Paper cannot be easily moulded, pressed or cast. If we draw inspiration from the humble football, then a multi-faceted shape approximating a sphere, such as a dodecahedron would seem to be the way forward.
In a fairly brief foray into standup many years ago I used to do a routine about Gillette product development meetings in which the result of the thinking-outside-the-box, blue sky brainstorming sessions was always the decision to add another blade (you may have heard a similar routine elsewhere, but I was doing it in 1995, so there). The natural endpoint to this process seemed to me to be a razor called the Gillette Centurian, which had 100 blades and was the size and shape of your entire face — one sweep and you were done.
I believe that PG Tips and the other major teabag manufacturers now have the opportunity to enter their own potentially unending period of predictable innovation. Every few years they can introduce a new tea bag, based on a geometric shape with even more faces, edging forever closed to the theoretical nirvana of the truly spherical teabag.
I may have come fairly late to the tea drinking party, but I think there are some exciting times ahead. So boil the kettle and strap yourself in — it's going to be one hell of a ride.
P.S. I said I'd tell you how the BBC meeting went. Well it basically went okay and our radio project is still in the running but there's been another minor regime change on the development side of things (our producer has a new boss) and so there is now the all-too-familiar situation of having to sell the project to somebody new...
Add Comment