It’s 8:45am on a Saturday and today’s tea is the Superior English Breakfast, so there is no time to lose. It turns out that yesterday’s tea things haven’t been washed up yet, and there’s no way a quick rinse will rid the pot of that overpowering aniseed flavour, so I’ve located the back-up teapot. This is a cute red fellow that I picked up in Oxfam, along with his handspun, handknitted cosy.

There are a lot of words on the box, but what it basically comes down to is, this is what tea is supposed to taste like. So golden tips of Assam blah blah blah, all I want at this time of day is something to wake me up and enhance my mood, hence also the mug.

Photo by Pete

This mug was acquired through a strange but compelling competitive raffle game one New Year at Mike & Susan’s. We miss New Year at Mike & Susan’s, it was always a blast. We provided prizes for this game, and I think we had Mike in mind for the mug, whose caption in full is A bad brew makes me grumpy, a sentiment to which I am sure we can all relate. All of us but Pete, who is never rendered grumpy by such trivia as poorly made tea, and anyway only drinks herbal/fruit teas these days so his opinion frankly, well, he can stick to beer. Naturally Pete won the mug.