By Loraine Page
CORRESPONDENT

Tea is healthy, say some scientists, while others point to possible health liabilities from drinking your favorite cuppa.
I googled whether tea was or was not good for our health. “If it wasn’t,” said random internet guy, “us Brits would be dead.”
Fair enough, since it allows me to continue my discourse on tea, in which I go about “getting the tea on tea” in a sporadic manner.
My first thought is coffee drinkers may feel excluded. Please know that while I drink tea all day, I start my morning off with a large mug of coffee. My cat can attest to this because she sits on my lap waiting for me to finish so we can begin her day.
The word tea was often used in metaphor. These are the best of metaphorical tea phrases no one uses anymore:
- “Teetotaler” stood for a person who refuses to drink alcohol but is willing to have tea.
- “Not my cup of tea” meant you couldn’t stand the thing being discussed.
- “Tempest in a teapot” meant everyone was making something big out of nothing.
- If it were you trying to make something big out of nothing, you’d say “I wouldn’t do that for all the tea in China.”
What I’ve noticed in my TV and film watching is that someone will use tea as an excuse to leave the room when they sense things are about to get tense or scary or boring.
“I’ll just go put on some tea,” they say, and for the next hour they’re in the kitchen waiting for water to boil.
With the Brits, though, tea is not an excuse for anything.
They’re always drinking tea, usually with milk and sugar along with a biscuit, which they use for dunking. Their biscuit looks like our cookie, or so I’m told, since I don’t travel much.
I have friends, a married couple, who do travel a lot. When in the UK, they love to go to Bath, an ancient city they say is beautiful and has Roman Baths where you can take a bath.
There is this special tea place, though, which is the real reason they always return to Bath. It’s an old establishment called Sally Lunn’s Historic Eating House & Museum.
They serve a humungous bun there. It arrives with your tea.
It appears on the menu as “Lunn’s Bunn.”
Though I always appreciate a bit of Brit humor, it is Sally Lunn’s house blend tea and not necessarily her large bun that would get me on a plane to England.
My friends kindly brought me back a box of the tea, so that I could see why they’re always raving about it. It took some work, which involved buying a teapot and an infuser and figuring out how they and the bag of leaves in the box were going to produce tea.
It was worth the labor. The tea is absolutely delicious.
After a couple of months, I needed to buy more. But, alas, Sally Lunn’s does not appear to ship outside of the UK.
I was left with a curiosity, though—about its deliciousness and why my supermarket teabags were so bland in comparison.
The box read “Sally Lunn’s Finest Tea, 1680.” Sally herself was no longer with us, a shame because I wanted to discuss spelling with her. It wasn’t 1680 when she died, however. It was the year she arrived in Bath as a young French Huguenot refugee and delivered her now famous tea recipe.
The box featured a description of Sally’s brew: “A subtle blend of Indian, Ceylon & African teas. The flavor has depth without being too strong.”
I was fully intrigued, now, though not obsessively so. I wanted to take a peek at loose tea--what is it and where did it come from. I poured hot water over my Lipton teabag, added some milk, and sat down at my computer to investigate.
I read that tea is made by pouring boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of a plant called Camellia sinensis. The variety of teas sold, for instance, black, green, white, oolong, pu-erh, and purple teas come from this plant. The reasons for their differences lie in the processing methods used.
Oh, and all the tea did come from China, about 5,000 years ago. It was merchants who helped spread it around across continents and thus were the cause of it becoming so popular.
Hmmm. Lots of interesting facts and enough to satisfy my curiosity for now. I moved on to Quora and found a discussion of tea. Someone posted this bit of dialogue to depict its purpose socially:
Judy: I think my husband is having an affair.
Paula: Hang on, let me put the kettle on and you can tell me all about it.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”