Morning cuppa - how do you take yours?
Vital things on our minds here at iPM. Namely tea. There's something very special about the first cuppa in the morning. The bit between sleep and starting your day. A small ritual. For some it's tea and for others it has to be coffee. Some people drink coffee all day, but always have tea first thing and vice versa.
How about you? We'd like to hear from you about what you drink for that FIRST cup of the day, AND tell us what that first cup means to you. Is it your chance for peace and quiet, a bit of day dreaming or are you busy planning your day?
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I don't have tea or coffee. I just wash down my daily medication with a nice glass of water from my lavender decorated carafe, then go for a walk with my border collie. I then have my breakfast to look forward to and my lovely black coffee!
I do agree that the early morning is special. If I am up at 6 am in the winter when it is still dark, I don't want to speak to anyone, but the people I meet on my walk also feel the same way, so we converse in a half-whisper, so as not to wake the birds.
I'm afraid that the birds don't mind waking me in the summer, but I don't mind that. What could be nicer than a yell from a very small dinosaur at dawn?
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I love to listen to the Shipping Forecast when certain folk read it- it has a flowing poetic feel, almost musical. Listen on my old walkman, tucked under the bedclothes- it feels secretive and very personal. Then I get up, have a quick shower, make the tea and take it back to bed to listen to the early part of the prog. which I find is less tabloidish than later on. I take my tea black and have one rich tea biscuit - which has to be shared with the dog - he's getting on and doesn't want to get up so early these days. Since my husband died he has taken to getting into the warm spot in the bed whilst I am in the shower. Confess that it is quite nice to have someone in bed with me even if he does have bad breath!!(He has a buster collar on at present - interesting!)
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I loove my morning coffee strong and black. I rarely have another during the day, but that first one lubricates the dry mouth I get from the previous night's meds, and helps to kick start my morning and overcome the fatigue that I get, at least for a couple of hours. The smell is heavenly and for a little while when I drink it I am somewhere in the south of France. mmmmm :-)
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Mornign I usually wake after 7am. When I get out from bed first thought is about the climate, I look through the window suddenly kitchen change my mind to make coffee. I switch on the stove and spend few minutes to prepare coffee. When the coffee ready to drink. I eagerly lift the cup and sip the liquid gently. After I feel very enthusiastically my day starts with good flow.
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I work for a charity and am paid the minimum wage so I have to choose my luxuries with care, but when it comes to that morning cuppa I spare no expense. I buy the most expensive coffee beans I can find. They are the focus of my morning ritual. When I take the lid off the grinder the aroma fills the kitchen. The espresso machine gurgles and a half coffee, half hot milk potion is prepared. For the next 20 minutes I'm sitting outside a cafe in Rome, in an early morning diner in New York or watching the traffic in Rio. I'm the richest man in the world. Then its back to reality, feed the cat, wash the cups and have a go at today.
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My first drink of the day at 6.25am is a cup of echinacea tea with chopped fresh ginger supped from my favourite Royal Dalton Bunnykins mug that a beloved boyfriend gave me in 1991.
I have never allowed anyone else to drink from said receptacle during those 18 years & I've used it every morning since then. This special cup plays an important part of my morning ritual of two drinks... but has never experienced the sensual liquid of real coffee which is my 2nd & equally signicificant drink of the day.. upon arriving at school at 7.25am (Im a teacher), again a specific receptacle - a bon mamon jam jar.
For the rest of the day it's water and wine... obviously the latter upon returning home at 6.25pm!
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Lady Grey in a Minton bone china breakfast cup at 6.30 am. Tea doesnt taste as good in anything else, no matter what time of day.
Then 30 mins listening to the birds, thinking about the day ahead, stepping into the garden if summer, and savouring the calm before everyone else wakes at 7. Any other start to the day is imperfect.
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An iPM morning is not a working morning so the atmosphere surrounding the first cuppa on Saturday is different to other days of the week. However, whatever the day it's always a large mug of filtered coffee preceded by a large glass of grapefruit juice. On a working day coffee is accompanied by toast (large slice of bread which I cut up and freeze as soon as I buy it), but on the weekend I buy a baguette from my local boulangerie. Living in France, I'm 1 hour ahead of UK listeners so I feel less of a dawn "warrior". My boulangerie opens at 7 am, just after iPM goes off the air.
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You ask us about our first beverage in the day and I cannot but help wonder where you are are going with this, although it reminds me of the time when Tony Blackburn, undoubtedly in short trousers, was doing the sparrow's f*rt shift and asked his listeners how many cups of tea they drank in the day. Are you attempting to emulate him?
Anyway, since you ask: it depends really. If I am breakfasting with my husband then it will be a cup of builder's (thought long and hard about the positioning of the apostrophe there: decided on the singular) tea with milk and no shoogs. He has a cup of what looks like pitch tar which I don't think I could face at any time. If he has gone onto work ahead of me then more often than not I will just have a glass of water to swill down the spoonful of linseed which I take for quasi-medicinal purposes.
Throughout the day (and I know you didn't ask this, but you will Eddie, you will) I will generally have tea, ersatz coffee, or some herbal stuff which is supposed to be good for you but tastes like the most synthetic of bubble gums. I do this whenever it is on offer, which it frequently is from the lovely Suzanne who seems to need these refreshments at amazingly short intervals. And because she is so hospitable I feel I have to reciprocate, which rather ups the intake. When she is out I can get through the whole day without even thinking about hot drinks.
It's the same with alcohol really. I am not teetoal but I can go weeks without it, or I may indulge on consecutive days. And when I do, a glass (or two) of something nicely fizzy may be sunk without touching the sides, or I may leave half of it in the crystal flute/paper cup/whatever.
So I thank you for this tour of introspection along which your innocent (yeah, right) question has led me, and I leave you, or rather, me, with this plaintive thought: if ONLY my relationship with food were as cool and nonchalant as it is with drink.
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First thing in the morning, my cat, Casper, won't let me out of his sight, until we've gone downstairs and I've given him some breakfast. Then it's a nice cup of tea while I listen to Today and make occasional forays into the garden to see how it's all going. It's a nice, quiet, slow time of day, before reality sinks in and I have to start my frenzied rush to get ready for work. I treasure that part of the day.
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Making my first cup of tea in the morning is both ritual and remembrance of things past.
The teapot sits on its own mat, surrounded by the necessary paraphernalia for the observance. This corner of the kitchen is sanctuary to the ceremony.
The large-leaf Assam tea is stored in a reproduction utility enamel tea-canister. It was a present from Lisa, mother of my niece, and reminds me of her every time I brew up. I dont take sugar, but the sugar lives in a stainless-steel canister with a glass lid, a gift from Bryn.
The teapot holds three pints but, as a result of breakages, the current incumbent has no associations. It is, in any case, only fleetingly visible due to its enveloping cosy.
The tea is transferred to the warmed pot using a long-handled teaspoon liberated from the Porterhouse Brewpub in Dublin on a days excursion from Holyhead. I think of Dublin and Joyce and Beckett as I ladle two heaped spoons into the pot. The pot is topped up after the first pour so I get four pint mugs out of each brew. In winter I usually make a second pot, in summer not. After which I am teatotal for the rest of the day.
The spoon rests in an oval Masons Regency pattern saucer designed to hold a sauceboat. The crockery at my late parents flat in Grays Inn was all of this design, so I am reminded of my parents, my brothers, the flat, London, and of my childhood.
The pot is coddled by a tea cosyin fact, a Russian doll of three nested tea cosies, topped by a grey one with yellow and white stripes, chosen because it matched the colour scheme of our kitchen in Milton Keynes. It reminds me of happy years spent in our canalside house with our young son.
The tog value of these multiple cosies is further enhanced by a layer of five bar towels. The topmost, visible one is a green J. W. Lees towela Manchester brewer, but the towel liberated from The Mælog Lake Hotel at Rhosneigr, a seaside resort on the west coast of Anglesey. This is a Lees pub a short walk from the house where I have holidayed most years since 1960. So thats the other side of my childhood and something of my adult years evoked.
I time the infusion with a digital radio-controlled clock mounted on a shelf immediately above the tea shrine. The clock is from Lidl and gets its time signal from Frankfurt am Main, automatically adjusting for British Summer Time. Vorsprung durch Technik. It was one of many clocksdigital, analogue, manual, electronicfestooning the walls of David McKenzies tenement house in Glasgow. After his death last October I cleared the flat, retaining (among much else) this clock as a functionally-useful memento.
I knew Dave for 36 years and lived with him in Cambridge, Howden and Cardiff. He was in Glasgow for the last 30 years of his life and I came up to see him most years. His death has left a huge hole in my life. The clock reminds me of him, of his Possil flat, and of Glasgow, a city I have come to know very well.
I used to drink my tea from a blue-striped white porcelain pint mug. It had been liberated from a stevedores canteen on Hull docks. Dave was skipper and I was first mate on a general cargo barge on the Humber, working out of Goole. But that mug got smashed many years ago and I have been unable to find a replacement. Only plain white ones which are functional but evoke nothing.
Recently I have taken to drinking my tea from an earthenware German beer stein liberated from the West Brewing Companys brewpub on Glasgow Green. They use it to serve Bamberger (a Rauchbier made with smoked malt) which is particularly delicious. Requisitioned to serve as a mug for tea, it is another memento of the dear green place first thing.
So my early morning tea routine evokes people and places, different parts of my life and the past in general. I did not consciously set out to create this memorial. It evolved accidentally at first, but once I became aware of this aspect I deliberately set out to embellish it. For example, I chose the Lees beer towel as the uppermost one for its power as a signifier of more than just a particular brewerys beer. The sauceboat teaspoon rest was a conscious choice, replacing an ordinary anonymous saucer.
There are important placesCardiff and Liverpool in particularand many people absent from this aide-mémoire. But all the components of the tea-making ritual have to be functional as well as meaningful. Its not a photograph album. So I cant hope to reference every part of my life and everyone in it.
However, I am always looking to add further layers of evocation, meaning and significance. I could, I suppose, substitute a teapot that evoked my life in Liverpool or Cardiff, but I am at a loss to imagine what form it would take.
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