I have very low expectations of the Spicy Chai Flavoured Black Tea. Pete and I have the day off today, and have been for a six mile hike that ended with posh sausage rolls and a trip to Aldi, where, amongst other things we didn’t need, we picked up their salted caramel crumble topped mince pies and a pair of tumblers that Pete really, really took a fancy to. This always happens when we go to Aldi. I had a small skimmed milk latte with my posh sausage roll, and cannot find the words to describe how much of a treat that was, because that’s how fun my life is now.

So the next hot drink of the day has a lot to live up to, and it’s another of the flavoured teas. I do like a chai, and I even have a tub of instant chai powder, which is probably illegal in tea snob circles. In appearance and smell, this seems suspiciously similar to the Farrers Spiced Christmas Tea that came in a Grasmere Gingerbread hamper from my mum last year. That’s the one with the whole cloves, and I haven’t made much of a dent in it. If you’re ever stuck for a gift for me, send me Grasmere Gingerbread, but don’t bother with the tea. Instead of whole cloves, this one has whole peppercorns, which piqued my interest somewhat. I know that authentic chai should be boiled up in the milk, but for the sake of consistency and also out of laziness, I’ve gone with the conventional teapot method. I did however give the milk a quick blast in the microwavé.

Both the aroma and flavour of the tea are utterly annihilated by aniseed, to the extent that there’s even a little aniseed burn on the tongue after drinking it. This, my friends, is aniseed tea. You would only drink it if absolutely all the other teas in your cupboard had been stolen by some bastard, who was such a bastard that they had actually left this one behind, the bastard.

The chai is polluting my newest mug, a birthday gift from Bernard which arrived yesterday. But wait, I hear you cry, that mug says “coffee” on it, you can’t drink tea out of it, it’s quite clearly a coffee mug! And I reply to you that you are completely missing the point, this was a birthday gift from my darling boy, who bought it for me because we have spent so much of the last few months playing Stardew Valley together, and in Stardew Valley my character did get a bit obsessed with being a coffee farmer, so his train of thought is, she’d like a Stardew Valley mug; obviously it would be a coffee one. Also I don’t know if you can tell, but if you compare today’s photo with previous days you will see, this mug is enormous. You can get a lot of tea in there. I’m looking forward to doing that when the tea is actually nice to drink.

Cocktails will be served out of inappropriate vessels at 5.