Colm O'Regan: I'm brewing ideas about tea leaves v tea bags

For the first time in decades, I’m back on the loose tea. Teabags have been mainstays since they first crept in years ago. Displacing the loose tea like a grey squirrel chasing away poor Sammy.

When they arrived first, the tea bags were cleaner. Or so we thought back then. They brought convenience. Peace of mind. Our teapots always allowed a significant amount of leaves into the mug. So if you were drinking tea in our house, you had to know that the last mouthful was a dicey, leafy prospect. You had to slightly pucker. A gulp was out of the question. I do remember visitors from the future who assumed we were using teabags wincing slightly as they drained their first cup and got a mouthful of essence.
Then teabags squirrelled their way in and the tea could be thrown back the throat. (Unless the tea was being drunk outdoors in which case it was compulsory to hurl the dregs ‘up the yard’.)

Over the years there have been lots of public debates about which teabag shape was better. I still remember the radio ads where two people had that forced discussion about “ROUND TEA-BAGS?” and the phrase “the tay-leaves get caught in the corners” is as imprinted onto my brain as “Bonzo wants to go out, dear.”

Teabag design was even the subject of a ruling by the British Advertising Standards Council where PG Tips complained that Tetley’s Round Teabag ad was unfairly dissing the PG Tipses pyramids. I won’t elaborate on the detail of the ruling as both of them are not that nice.

But as part of my ongoing Small Changes That Probably Won’t Save The Planet But Make Me Feel Better, I’ve eschewed teabags. As well as being not-as-nice tea, most teabags are still not properly compostable so they’re releasing tiny plastic bits into the soil. Just like virtually everything we do. And it always feels better to just reduce any bit of unnecessary packaging.

Obviously, this change is small compared to drinking tea in the first place. As a cash crop, tea has loads of other environmental issues but let’s take things one step at a time. Reforming intensive agriculture is on next year’s to-do list.

Now that we have loose tea, we have a tea caddy. And every tea caddy needs a resident spoon. For most of my childhood, the same spoon was a guardian of the tea, a small house-god. And its sound was unmistakeable.

Some sounds from earlier in our lives become rarer or extinct. They are not always as enigmatic and poignant as the corncrake or the curlew. They are often domestic ones. Like the muffled clank of a spoon-in-residence in a tea caddy. It’s almost Proustian in the way it takes me back. (Marcel Proust wrote a 3000-page book called Remembrance of Things Past, and a key theme in it is how involuntary memories are triggered by sensory experiences like sights and sounds and in one famous case, biting into a cake. I have never read Remembrance of Things Past, but whenever I remember something, I am reminded of it.)
Back to the present day and I have a proper tea-strainer now. It’s not clear why strainers never took off in my childhood home. Maybe we were all such skilled leaf-avoiders there was no need. Now the strainer is part of the ceremony. Sometimes I add a little flourish by raising it a high above the mug during the pour as if I am in some sort of Moroccan tea ceremony. If Moroccan tea ceremonies included Ginger Snaps. It feels good. Like I have turned over a new leaf.