How to make the perfect cup of tea

Couldn’t tell you. Tea. The stuff turns me cold. I’ve never understood why companies would manufacture a product that tastes the same as boiling a dirty twig for three weeks and straining the result through a mouldy jock-strap – and even less why customers would choose to BUY it.

This antipathy likely stems from a childhood trauma when, innocent and impressionable, I was preyed upon by a great aunt who offered me a cup of Earl Grey.

The bitch.

My mother has always complained that I am incapable of making a decent cup of tea, which is hardly surprising given how I feel about the stuff. (I’m not a fan, in case you were wondering.) Personally, I’m not sure how you can make a ‘bad’ cup of tea – I mean, we’re only talking about degrees of foulness here.

Now, it has recently come to my attention that Husband cannot make coffee. Unlike me, there is no valid rationale for this failing, because Husband is pretty partial to a delectable cup of rich, warm, velvety coffee-flavoured scrumptiousness.

Instead, Husband prepares a menacing slop of scorched darkness, its oily surface simmering as if from the movement of tiny, stunted eels writhing in agony beneath. It is either so weak that the caffeine flavour is imperceptible, or so strong as to pop the eyeballs out of your head if you blink too suddenly. It makes milk curdle spontaneously. At times, I am driven to wonder whether Husband has mistaken salt for the sugar – or maybe rotten garlic, mouse droppings or arsenic.

In short, Husband’s coffee tastes like fear and rage and sweaty loathing in liquid form. Although he presents the coffee lovingly, drinking it makes me doubt his feelings for me, to the extent of suspecting he despises me and secretly plots my murder, the first step of his diabolical plan being to blitz my immune system with his vile concoction.

So coffee duty has reverted back to me indefinitely i.e for all time