#59: Teapot

 

Teapots in life

Time to say goodbye to a beloved teapot, due to a broken lid and chipped spout. This morning saw me in a charity shop examining another, but I reluctantly decided the lack of draining holes to the spout meant it was impractical. Plus it didn’t have that friendly chubby shape.

I wonder what is so appealing about teapots? Two things I think – first, they are a sign of company – ‘tea for two’, even if you are making tea for one (a teapot for one which holds exactly two cups is ideal, to my mind). Secondly, using a teapot is more of an event, a longer break, than bunging a teabag into a cup.

Tea for one

Teapots in literature

What about teapots in literature? There’s Intelligence Service landlady Millie McCaig’s ‘ministrations with the teapot’ in le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on the climactic night when the mole is unmasked. Then there is Fanny visiting Lady Polly in Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford. Fanny discovers Polly ‘amid the usual five o’clock paraphernalia of silver kettle on flame, silver teapot, Crown Derby cups and plates and enough sugary food to stock a pastrycook’s shop’.

But my favourite is Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy losing patience with the Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesiser which always produces ‘a plastic cup filled with a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea’. Arthur sits and tells the machine how to make a proper cup:

He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn’t get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished.

‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘that is what I want.’

‘You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?’

‘Er, yes. With milk.’

‘Squirted out of the cow?’

‘Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose…’

‘I’m going to need some help with this one,’ said the machine tersely. All the cheerful burbling had dropped out of its voice and it now meant business.

The machine joins forces with the ship’s computer to try to solve this problem, with potentially disastrous results (although the tea they produce is wonderful).

Back to Earth. I would nominate the White Horse Inn in Westleton, Suffolk, for ‘the most generous teapot award’ for this year – tea for one turned out to have about 6 cups. There are much worse ways to spend a sunny afternoon then sipping it away in an East Anglian pub garden. Now, time for another cup.

Tea at the White Horse Inn, Westleton