Any tea

Julia ♦ October 22, 2020 ♦ Leave a comment

Too bad Kipling didn’t have a nearby tea shop like this one in Bar Harbor, Maine, June 2012.

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week…
The bottom is out of the Universe.
— Rudyard Kipling

…and speaking of reasons I love to be in England, I think the top three would be tea, tea and tea.  Of course, one can get delicious tea pretty much anywhere, but my love of tea is most connected to Great Britain.  I was just beginning to have a real taste for it in May 2001, when I had tea at the home of my longtime British pen pal in Essex.  We had been out touring on a cold drizzly day, and our coming in to sit by her fire and drink tea is one of my happiest memories.  I’ve forgotten how many cups I drank (some with cream and sugar, and some without) but I think I was hooked from that point on.

And “hooked” is not too strong a word for it.  I can hardly get through a day without tea, much less a week, so Kipling’s verse made me smile.  I know coffee drinkers who feel the same way about their morning cup, and while I don’t share the same enthusiasm for coffee, it’s beginning to grow on me.  But I doubt that it will ever replace tea in my affections.

What simple pleasure does Kipling’s verse remind you of? What seemingly trivial loss would cause you to declare “the bottom is out of the Universe?”  It’s easy to take the commonplace for granted, until we are without it.  Today, let’s remind each other of all the small blessings woven so tightly into our days that losing them would make us feel everything was unraveling!

This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.