Tea?

As you will find out when you pay a paltry amount to see our fantastic, amazing and brilliant play, tea is a very important part of my character's (Max's) personality. At the odds of probably about seven billion to one, by some amazing coincidence, *I* like tea in in real life as well!

Today, I thought I would have myself a special cup of tea. We have a very large mug in our flat and I hunted it down. Then I put in TWO teabags and 3 teaspoons of sugar. With all the water that would fit into the especially large mug I wouldn't want the tea leaves to be too diluted, right? So, two teabags. This was going to be outstanding. I poured some boiling water into the bottom of the mug, just enough to cover the teabags and the sugar and stirred vigorously with a my teaspoon. This is the secret to good tea. You do all your stirring with only a little water in the mug. What you get is tea-concentrate. In the case of two teabags, it's super-concentrate. When I had stirred to the exact specifications that I had perfected years ago, I added more water, leaving just enough room for the milk.

The milk.

We were out of milk.

My girlfriend (our stage designer) had used the last on her Weet-bix. Admittedly I'd used more than my fair share on hot chocolate a couple of nights previous so we are still talking. Now, I've had tea without milk before, and I don't really mind it. In fact, sometimes I can prefer it when I'm feeling all analytical and start imagining human females in the place of dairy cows and think how absurd the whole notion of "milk" really is. But today wasn't one of those days. Today, concerns about mass-production had taken a backseat to the quest for a perfect cup of tea. But it seemed I had been thwarted, taken down by a rookie mistake! Forgetting to check for milk is for amateurs, was I losing my touch?

I refused to be beaten, but I also refused to walk to the diary. I live atop a large hill and exerting any sort of effort would certainly just negate the soothing properties of a good cup of tea. So, I decided to use my incredible ingenuity and devise a solution. This consisted of looking in the fridge for an alternative. Diary products were all essentially the same right? I've never really cared about the difference between full and skim milk, these differences were all just packaging, surely. Hmm, we had cottage cheese, garlic flavoured. I knew, insticntively, that that wouldn't work. Ever. The only other alternative was yoghurt. Passionfruit cheesecake flavoured, Lite Yoghurt. I rationalised; the tea is sweet anyway so that shouldn't matter; some people add lemon to their tea, passionfruit can't be any worse. In fact, maybe it wll be ten times as good! Maybe it was fated that on the day I tried to make a super cup of tea, passionfruit yoghurt would be my only diary option. Hands shaking, I took the yoghurt from the fridge. I steadied myself and removed the lid. I poured the desired amount into my tea and stirred.

The tea started going that familiar light brown colour, "this is working!" I thought. But alas, after I stopped stirring, the yoghurt seemed to disintegrate and instead of one solid light brown colour, my tea became a mottled colour and full of floaties. I decided to simply stir and drink very quickly, so that I was only drinking from the tea whilst it remained that familiar and desired uniformly light brown colour. I used a tea strainer to get every ounce of goodness out of the teabags and then I stirred vigorously. Quickly, while the tea looked like regular tea, I drank.

It was godawful. Disgusting. I made a face like this:



















Or maybe it was more like this:



















Either way, it wasn't pretty. And let's not try to imply that there was no hope of it "being pretty" in the first place, OK people? Because look at this:



















See what I mean? G-damn gorgeous.

This has been a blog by Chris. I hope you've had some giggles, peaked some interest in our play and mostly; been subconciously influenced to take up smoking (Blogger.com is actually run by Laramie cigarettes, mmm mmm).