Tea and Sympathy

I guess I came here for change, the shock of the new and the chance to see how the rest of the world does things. But similarities are also comforting, like finding Irish breakfast tea and English premiership football on TV. It’s hard to describe the pleasure a good cup of tea brings and its place in Irish culture. Tea was of course invented by the Chinese as a way of purifying water (we Europeans came up with beer for the same purpose which is an interesting cultural comparison). It was then cultivated by the English colonists in South East Asia and exported through the trade routes to Europe. Indians drink their tea sweet with milk in the way Irish kids do until their mother weans them off the sugar. This is normally done by making 8 year olds give up sugar in their tea for lent. One of the few partnerships between spiritually and dental health I reckon.

The Chinese like to drink their tea light with warm water and a sprinkling of leaves, which makes it taste pretty much how it is written. It seems to be more about the serving than the taste, which is the polar opposite of the Irish experience. Unless of course you are serving tea to the parish priest in the “good” room at the front of the house which is reserved just for that purpose. In that case the best delft gets dusted down and the tea pot that Aunty Maggie gave you as a wedding present gets delicately removed from the cupboard where it has stood since the day of your nuptials.

But in the normal course of events, we Irish like to drink our tea strong and bitter with a touch of milk to take the cut off it. Grannies would make it like treacle, adding twelve large spoons of tea to the pot and leaving it to stew on the cooker for a day or two. You could generally stand a spoon upright in it and rich tea biscuits would not so much melt as spontaneously combust when coming into contact with it. But nothing could better a cup of that tea after a day spent in the summer sun on Granny’s farm. The standard greeting on entering an Irish home is not “how are you doing” but “will you have a cup of tea?” Even in the remotest parts of the West, Irish mammies will have a pot of tea ready on the remote possibility that a stranger might call.

So it was with great delight that I found “Irish Breakfast tea” in the local supermarket. It’s not quite Lyons (you don’t stand to win a car every month for example) and it is horrendously expensive, but it leaves a comforting stain on your teeth and is dark enough that you can’t see the bottom of the cup.

Likewise with Football. If you’re willing to swallow your pride and to suckle from the teat that is Rupert Murdoch, then you can get English football to your hearts content in Australia. Which is just as well when Arsenal seem set to dominate for the next decade. ESPN even have Tommy Smyth doing commentary. Tommy grew up 5km from where I did in the rolling drumlins of North Louth. He moved to the USA in the 50s but hasn’t lost his distinctive Dundalk accent, which now brings pleasure to millions of ESPN viewers around the world.

I went to my first Australian wedding last Saturday looking for differences to the Irish experience. But the similarities are what stand out. A nervous man marries a nervous woman. There are guests looking uncomfortable in suits and big hats and there are hyperactive kids running around on sugar-fuelled acts of destruction. You’ll have at least one argument between a couple who have had true love exposed to them on stage and therefore feel a piercing light shone into their relationship. There is nothing like vows of adoration between the newly married couple to make other couples feel inadequate in their own relationship. There is food and wine in abundance and speeches that vary from the bizarre to the sublime. At Saturday’s wedding, my sister took on the role of Chief Bridesmaid. It was her 5th such outing which makes her seem like a character in a Jane Austen Novel. She delivered a marvellous speech, which was well received; although I’m not sure the groom appreciated the threats to break his legs if he ever disappointed the bride.

After the official reception, we retreated to a rented house in the middle of the Blue Mountains (which aren’t very Blue, but I won’t go there). We partied until dawn crept like an angry bouncer across the porch and shuffled us off to bed. Earlier, the three Irish people at the wedding fulfilled the prophecy of James 19:88 “Wherever two or more Irish people meet in my name and alcohol is involved, they will sing the Fields of Athenry”. And low it came to pass. We gave the Fields socks in the most reggae version ever heard.

Then I did the same thing I’ve done at parties since I was 17. I found a nice girl and sat in the kitchen talking about life, politics, history and why there are always sea-gulls at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Kitchens have always been my favorite place at parties, you have easy access to the fridge and it creates the kind of cosy domesticity that makes conversation natural. We talked until 5am and then she went back to the living room where her boyfriend was asleep on the couch. That’s the problem with beautiful interesting women. They are rarely single. You can look for differences in the world, but more often that not, what disappoints is that most things are just the same.