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Tea Is Trendy--Again

This morning as I was groggily slurping my coffee, trying to clear away the early-morning brain fog, a news story on the BBC Breakfast caught my attention. Apparently, if you want to be mega-trendy, sit yourself down in a cafe or restaurant and have a long, lingering afternoon tea—presumably served with posh cakes and sandwiches.

Afternoon tea is so quintessentially English it’s become a cliché. But tea is becoming fashionable again and is being seen as a backlash against the coffee-bars that have sprouted up like mushrooms after a rainy British summer. The message of tea-drinking is that if you’re in a hurry and want a buzz, drink coffee but if you want to sit and relax and people-watch, drink tea. Ironically, afternoon tea, generally gone out of favour in the UK except in seaside resorts and posh hotels catering for tourists, has become trendy in places like Los Angeles and New York among Anglophiles and the trend has then been re-adopted over here—but only among the rich and famous. Tea is being seen as a status symbol; if you have the time on a weekday afternoon to dress up and linger over a cup of tea, you’re loaded. Tea is also seen as a more healthful drink than coffee because of its antioxidant properties. The Tea Council reckons that tea has the same allure as wine because different teas from different regions of the world have different tastes. And if the tea is fairly-traded and organic, all the better.

I’d love to tell this stuff to my employer so that I could be given an opportunity to be “trendy” and wile away an afternoon. At my place of work, an afternoon break is fifteen minutes, which is just long enough to glug a cup of tea dispensed out of a machine (although a lot of people, myself included, bring in their own teabags and just get some hot-water from said machine in order to have a brew that doesn’t taste of paint-thinner) and if we’re feeling really extravagant (or just plain famished), the drink is accompanied with one of those triangular plastic-wrapped sandwiches or a Kit-Kat (dispensed out of another machine). It’s hardly glamorous. But then tea-drinking, like a lot of things about British life, is different in the real-world than people’s ideal of it. I wish it weren’t, though!