The Long, Dark Tea-Time Of My Soul
August 22nd 2008 09:10
My kettle is just about to boil.
That's not a euphemism, despite the fact -- and this is a complete coincidence -- my "kettle" really is about to "boil". Such is life.
No, the actual kettle is on the actual stove, heating away on top of the gas flame, and I'm left pondering my identity as an Australian. Oh, these two things are most definitely linked. How? Well, it all comes down to Colonial Imperialism vs Cultural Imperialism.
My struggle as an Australian is markedly different from, say, the struggle of a drought-stricken farmer trying to irrigate their land with dust, or of someone living on the streets of Melbourne trying to figure out why people in much nicer clothes keep thanking his grandparents every time they open an art exhibition. My personal struggle is a very middle-class, WASPish one, and I preface it with an apology to anyone who has to struggle with, you know, actual stuff in life.
It's a struggle of duality. I've come to terms with the fact that one half of my family is Jewish and the other half is Christian; Hanukkah and Christmas usually meant lots more presents than my friends got, and so coming to terms with that as a child was like coming to terms with getting two desserts. I've come to terms with the fact that I live in the only country that's also a continent; our idea of a border is somewhere you put a towel down and lie on for a bit, not something you have to defend from the Mongolians. No, the problem is that, from a cultural standpoint, we are heavily influenced by both the English and the Americans.
The film, television, music and literature we get is almost exclusively a mix of US and UK, and though the scales tip more frequently towards that of the US, this is balanced out by the fact that we were colonised by the Brits. Case in point: the characters on Neighbours may be sounding more and more Yankified by the day, but they're still on a show called Neighbours, not Neighbors. Note the appearance of "u" in the program, particularly if you're a Melbourne-based actor who's been alive at some point in the past three decades.
It's not that we don't have a culture of our own, it's just that we're not entirely sure what it is. Once you've sifted through the things that were clearly brought over on the First Fleet (or any subsequent voyage), and guiltily dismissed anything distinctly Aboriginal (there's not a pale, city-dwelling person that feels comfortable claiming a witchety-grub snack as part of their own culture, though this is more to do with potential accusations of cultural thievery than dietary squeamishness), there's not a lot left.
There's the meat pie, but none of us should be too eagre to claim a food with unidentifiable contents. (In 2002, the Australian Consumers Association discovered that three supermarket meat pie brands did not meet the minimum 25% meat content. First, the minimum is only 25%?!? Second, you guys couldn't even live up to that?!? What, there's a supply shortage of pig snouts and RSPCA "recyclables"?) There's the song "Down Under" (where, reliable sources inform me, women glow and men plunder), but even that was largely written by a Scotsman (Colin Hay, born Scotland, 1953). And we can call Nicole Kidman "Our Nic" as much as we want, but that won't change the fact that she was born in Hawaii. (Side note: though I consider the finest Australian mind to be that of Shaun Micallef's, I loathe to mention him as an example of Australiana, because most of us simply don't get him. He is a product of British comedy more than anything, and would clearly be ten times more successful were he in the UK, a fact I selfishly hope is never made clear to him.)
As a consumer of art, this isn't really a huge problem for me. I can still jump from Monty Python to M*A*S*H without problem. I can watch Star Trek and Doctor Who without experiencing cultural whiplash. I'll buy the new Chuck Palaniuk book with the exact same fervour with which I buy the new Nick Hornby book. It's really not a huge problem.
Even though I'm able to balance so many disparate elements, I do still feel an undeniable pressure to commit to one over the other, as if I'm standing in the middle of a battle ground during the US War of Independence, with both sides beckoning at me and going: "Eh...? Eh...?"
There's no real way to settle this conflict (other than wait around for another few decades and then argue about it some more), mostly due to the fact that there are too many contributing factors. Far too many to consolidate into one single, spuriously-researched study, anyway. I have therefore decided to bring the entire debate down to one singular thing: I am going to drink a cup of tea.
You see, though I've thought a lot about the two familial cultures that pull me one way and the other, I've always thought they were pretty evenly-matched. There is, however, one area in which there is a clear victor.
Anyone who knows me know that I love my coffee. I love other people's coffee as well, but they tend to get upset when I drink it, so I usually keep to my own. I could delve deep into the nuances of this love, but that's probably worthy of its own entry, and this piece is already far too long. Needless to say, I am a big lover of coffee.
Despite its Ethiopian origins, its Persian discovery, its Italian development, it is, in many ways, an American drink. At least, for the purposes of this argument it is. I suppose I should explain this logic leap briefly: one, I am not talking about the warm, goats milk-infused fecal matter that the large chains serve in hastily-deteriorating Styrofoam cups; two, if your pro-European or pro-African sensibilities require further clarification, I shall hereby refer to it as cawfee, as the northeast American dialect would have it.
I love my cawfee. I love drinking it as I write. I love sitting in cawfee shops as I read the newspaper. Cawfee is the training wheels to my life, except I have no desire to ever take them off.
The English love their tea. Call it a stereotype all you want, but it's incredibly commonplace. When I hear some of the country's more proficient orators talk about their love of tea, they do so with passion that I would use to describe my own, different drink of choice. The thing that nags at my soul is this: I don't like tea.
Well, I really like herbal teas, green tea and chai, but I wouldn't describe those as being "proper" tea. No, when these guys talk about tea, they're talking about traditional black tea, and black tea is the most commonly-drunk one, and it's the one I don't like. Or, at least, I didn't like it years ago when I tried it, and that was a powerful first impression.
So, right here and now, I am going to make one last ditch attempt at giving my English side a leg up. I am going to have a cup of tea.
I've been doing my research, and have decided upon the matter of my imbibement. I have been reliably informed that it's acceptable to use a tea bag if nothing else is available, and that this is definitely not the equivalent of drinking instant coffee. (Drinking instant coffee is just like drinking real coffee, in the same way that rubbing your groin against the side of a chair is just like having sex with Marilyn Monroe.) I have therefore chosen a nice-looking tea bag of Earl Grey with which to make my drink. (Note: I did try staring at my sink and telling it "Tea, Earl Grey, hot", but nothing happened...) I will be adding milk, but not lemon or sugar or honey, for fear of overpowering the taste too much and rendering the whole experience pointless. (Some people tell you not to add milk under any circumstances, but Douglas Adams says it's okay, and he's never steered me wrong before.) The water will be boiling at the exact moment I add it to the tea, and the milk will be added to the cup first so as to prevent scalding. As the water is now boiling, I shall go and perform said task and return here with the cup.
Okay, I'm back. I left the tea bag in for a long time, because I like my coffee strong and I like my herbal tea strong, so I assume I just like strong drinks. Here goes...
That first sip was strange. Strange in the sense that the taste is exactly as I remembered it, only now I appear to like it. This isn't the first time this has happened. Even though I don't like bananas, I can remember a time when I did, and I can remember quite specifically enjoying the taste of them. Regardless of that, if I had a banana now, I can tell you I really wouldn't enjoy it. I'm not sure why this is, but some expert in the human brain or the genus Musa can sort it out for us.
As I make my way through this cup, I'm beginning to understand what people see in it. I'm also getting a good sense of why this is such an English drink. Coffee gives you a real buzz, makes you excitable, and really does suit Americans. Tea, conversely, is quite a calming drink. Drinking it, I really do feel like reading Dickens or watching Dave Allen or colonising the West Indies. Drinking coffee makes me want to read Mark Twain or watch Johnny Carson or invade various countries in the Middle East. Not a huge difference, but the devil's in the details.
Obviously, it's too early to judge whether I'm a fully qualified tea drinker or not, but I can sense a conversion process has definitely begun. It will take some before, when choosing between a brewed leaf and a crushed bean, the Anglophile within me will finally take total control.
That's not a euphemism, despite the fact -- and this is a complete coincidence -- my "kettle" really is about to "boil". Such is life.
No, the actual kettle is on the actual stove, heating away on top of the gas flame, and I'm left pondering my identity as an Australian. Oh, these two things are most definitely linked. How? Well, it all comes down to Colonial Imperialism vs Cultural Imperialism.
My struggle as an Australian is markedly different from, say, the struggle of a drought-stricken farmer trying to irrigate their land with dust, or of someone living on the streets of Melbourne trying to figure out why people in much nicer clothes keep thanking his grandparents every time they open an art exhibition. My personal struggle is a very middle-class, WASPish one, and I preface it with an apology to anyone who has to struggle with, you know, actual stuff in life.
It's a struggle of duality. I've come to terms with the fact that one half of my family is Jewish and the other half is Christian; Hanukkah and Christmas usually meant lots more presents than my friends got, and so coming to terms with that as a child was like coming to terms with getting two desserts. I've come to terms with the fact that I live in the only country that's also a continent; our idea of a border is somewhere you put a towel down and lie on for a bit, not something you have to defend from the Mongolians. No, the problem is that, from a cultural standpoint, we are heavily influenced by both the English and the Americans.
The film, television, music and literature we get is almost exclusively a mix of US and UK, and though the scales tip more frequently towards that of the US, this is balanced out by the fact that we were colonised by the Brits. Case in point: the characters on Neighbours may be sounding more and more Yankified by the day, but they're still on a show called Neighbours, not Neighbors. Note the appearance of "u" in the program, particularly if you're a Melbourne-based actor who's been alive at some point in the past three decades.
It's not that we don't have a culture of our own, it's just that we're not entirely sure what it is. Once you've sifted through the things that were clearly brought over on the First Fleet (or any subsequent voyage), and guiltily dismissed anything distinctly Aboriginal (there's not a pale, city-dwelling person that feels comfortable claiming a witchety-grub snack as part of their own culture, though this is more to do with potential accusations of cultural thievery than dietary squeamishness), there's not a lot left.
There's the meat pie, but none of us should be too eagre to claim a food with unidentifiable contents. (In 2002, the Australian Consumers Association discovered that three supermarket meat pie brands did not meet the minimum 25% meat content. First, the minimum is only 25%?!? Second, you guys couldn't even live up to that?!? What, there's a supply shortage of pig snouts and RSPCA "recyclables"?) There's the song "Down Under" (where, reliable sources inform me, women glow and men plunder), but even that was largely written by a Scotsman (Colin Hay, born Scotland, 1953). And we can call Nicole Kidman "Our Nic" as much as we want, but that won't change the fact that she was born in Hawaii. (Side note: though I consider the finest Australian mind to be that of Shaun Micallef's, I loathe to mention him as an example of Australiana, because most of us simply don't get him. He is a product of British comedy more than anything, and would clearly be ten times more successful were he in the UK, a fact I selfishly hope is never made clear to him.)
As a consumer of art, this isn't really a huge problem for me. I can still jump from Monty Python to M*A*S*H without problem. I can watch Star Trek and Doctor Who without experiencing cultural whiplash. I'll buy the new Chuck Palaniuk book with the exact same fervour with which I buy the new Nick Hornby book. It's really not a huge problem.
Even though I'm able to balance so many disparate elements, I do still feel an undeniable pressure to commit to one over the other, as if I'm standing in the middle of a battle ground during the US War of Independence, with both sides beckoning at me and going: "Eh...? Eh...?"
There's no real way to settle this conflict (other than wait around for another few decades and then argue about it some more), mostly due to the fact that there are too many contributing factors. Far too many to consolidate into one single, spuriously-researched study, anyway. I have therefore decided to bring the entire debate down to one singular thing: I am going to drink a cup of tea.
You see, though I've thought a lot about the two familial cultures that pull me one way and the other, I've always thought they were pretty evenly-matched. There is, however, one area in which there is a clear victor.
Anyone who knows me know that I love my coffee. I love other people's coffee as well, but they tend to get upset when I drink it, so I usually keep to my own. I could delve deep into the nuances of this love, but that's probably worthy of its own entry, and this piece is already far too long. Needless to say, I am a big lover of coffee.
Despite its Ethiopian origins, its Persian discovery, its Italian development, it is, in many ways, an American drink. At least, for the purposes of this argument it is. I suppose I should explain this logic leap briefly: one, I am not talking about the warm, goats milk-infused fecal matter that the large chains serve in hastily-deteriorating Styrofoam cups; two, if your pro-European or pro-African sensibilities require further clarification, I shall hereby refer to it as cawfee, as the northeast American dialect would have it.
I love my cawfee. I love drinking it as I write. I love sitting in cawfee shops as I read the newspaper. Cawfee is the training wheels to my life, except I have no desire to ever take them off.
The English love their tea. Call it a stereotype all you want, but it's incredibly commonplace. When I hear some of the country's more proficient orators talk about their love of tea, they do so with passion that I would use to describe my own, different drink of choice. The thing that nags at my soul is this: I don't like tea.
Well, I really like herbal teas, green tea and chai, but I wouldn't describe those as being "proper" tea. No, when these guys talk about tea, they're talking about traditional black tea, and black tea is the most commonly-drunk one, and it's the one I don't like. Or, at least, I didn't like it years ago when I tried it, and that was a powerful first impression.
So, right here and now, I am going to make one last ditch attempt at giving my English side a leg up. I am going to have a cup of tea.
I've been doing my research, and have decided upon the matter of my imbibement. I have been reliably informed that it's acceptable to use a tea bag if nothing else is available, and that this is definitely not the equivalent of drinking instant coffee. (Drinking instant coffee is just like drinking real coffee, in the same way that rubbing your groin against the side of a chair is just like having sex with Marilyn Monroe.) I have therefore chosen a nice-looking tea bag of Earl Grey with which to make my drink. (Note: I did try staring at my sink and telling it "Tea, Earl Grey, hot", but nothing happened...) I will be adding milk, but not lemon or sugar or honey, for fear of overpowering the taste too much and rendering the whole experience pointless. (Some people tell you not to add milk under any circumstances, but Douglas Adams says it's okay, and he's never steered me wrong before.) The water will be boiling at the exact moment I add it to the tea, and the milk will be added to the cup first so as to prevent scalding. As the water is now boiling, I shall go and perform said task and return here with the cup.
Okay, I'm back. I left the tea bag in for a long time, because I like my coffee strong and I like my herbal tea strong, so I assume I just like strong drinks. Here goes...
That first sip was strange. Strange in the sense that the taste is exactly as I remembered it, only now I appear to like it. This isn't the first time this has happened. Even though I don't like bananas, I can remember a time when I did, and I can remember quite specifically enjoying the taste of them. Regardless of that, if I had a banana now, I can tell you I really wouldn't enjoy it. I'm not sure why this is, but some expert in the human brain or the genus Musa can sort it out for us.
As I make my way through this cup, I'm beginning to understand what people see in it. I'm also getting a good sense of why this is such an English drink. Coffee gives you a real buzz, makes you excitable, and really does suit Americans. Tea, conversely, is quite a calming drink. Drinking it, I really do feel like reading Dickens or watching Dave Allen or colonising the West Indies. Drinking coffee makes me want to read Mark Twain or watch Johnny Carson or invade various countries in the Middle East. Not a huge difference, but the devil's in the details.
Obviously, it's too early to judge whether I'm a fully qualified tea drinker or not, but I can sense a conversion process has definitely begun. It will take some before, when choosing between a brewed leaf and a crushed bean, the Anglophile within me will finally take total control.
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