Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
- C.S. Lewis (courtesy of quotegarden.com.)
I've been a tea drinker since I was a young girl. It started with generic black tea - Red Rose, I think, was the kind my grandparents always had when I first started drinking tea. By the time I hit my teens, I would spend my evenings after school at a desk in the basement, 16-oz mug of tea in hand, writing crappy adolescent poetry. I eventually discovered Earl Grey during an RPG session, and that became my favorite tea for a long while. DH and I both still love Earl Grey, and drink it fairly often.

It wasn't until my late teens that I started drinking coffee, and not until I became thoroughly entrenched in computers that I started drinking it frequently, hot coffee being found more often than hot water for tea in company breakrooms. And I never have been able to drink coffee black. Lots of cream or milk - the real stuff, not that fake powdery junk. Generally without sugar.

But back to tea, the drink of civilized peoples everywhere.

My whole family drinks tea, even the 5-year-old. Whenever we've traveled to the UK on vacation with family friends, there's been a pot of tea around whenever anyone's been awake. Usually Tetley's, with good milk or cream. And maybe it's me, but Tetley's is far better there than the Tetley's you get in America. And I don't know how many pots a day we go through there. At home, we don't generally have a pot around, but maybe we should. Might be a good family bonding thing. I certainly have no doubt that the tea would be consumed.

When I gave up caffeine for Lent, I discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) that Celestial Seasonings has a very wide and delicious selection of herbal teas, including some relatively new flavors. Peach Apricot Honeybush is a sweet and delicate tea, and True Blueberry is very fruity. I also like the Madagascar Vanilla Red. There are a lot of their teas that I like. Now that Lent's over, I can drink caffeine again, but I'm still drinking tea. I think I've had maybe two cups of coffee this week, when before I was drinking 4-5 12-oz cups a day.

Granted, now I can drink black and green teas again, and there are some very good ones out there. Lipton has a lot of flavored green and black teas, and even Celestial Seasonings has some. So I've come full circle, and am a tea drinker again. Pass the Splenda.