All those years later, I was still drinking lemonade in preference to tea, and Coke in preference to lemonade. He didn’t have Coke, so I settled on lemonade. “I don’t really like tea,” I had said when he had offered to make me a cup the first time I had visited his house. Now, at this stage I had sailed through four years of dating followed by three years of marriage without the dread ‘T’ word causing too many issues. And so, feeling decidedly unpatriotic and strangely alone, I carried on through life drinking coffee and cola and trying my best not to come into contact with tea. I shouldn’t have been trying to get away from it at any given opportunity.īut I did. It was – and is – the solver of all ills, and fixer of all failings. It was a part of us. Keep calm and have a cup of tea. It reminded them of feeling unwell and dozing on the sofa. It reminded them of snuggling with their mothers at story time. My friends had been weened on tea, had drunk it from bottles and beakers and sippy cups since they were tiny. Or gossiping through a mouthful of the stuff in the hairdresser’s. I should have enjoyed cradling a hot mug as I sat and listened to the radio. I should have been sipping tea until the cows came home, dunking Digestives and munching macaroons. What was wrong with me? Tea was my birthright, surely. Every time I saw the confusion in their eyes, the worry coursing through their minds. When visiting family, all great tea drinkers, I would, of course, be offered a drink when I arrived. I had to, on occasion, tidy up the remains of their crumb encrusted mugs, the biscuits they had dunked leaving behind remnants that floated in the cold, brown puddle at the bottom of the teacup. I had to watch them licking their lips and sighing in satisfaction. I had to listen to friends, family, colleagues slurping their way through never-ending cuppas.
I had to stay or risk being thought of as a fool. And I was not excused from being in the same room as tea – I could not run off and hope that it was gone when I got back. Odd looks, disbelieving sniggers, shakes of the head, yes, I got those. Anyone afraid of heights wouldn’t be expected to work up a ladder.īut I received no sympathy. A person afraid of the dark is allowed to sleep with the light on. Someone who is afraid of spiders gets sympathy, gets people offering to save them from the hairy little beasts. Jogging by me in a frantic commute, its consumer blissfully unaware that their beverage of choice had made me feel really rather unwell, it slowed down as it went by, wanting me to get a good dose of its goodness.Īnd it’s a strange thing, this ‘teaphobia’. Wafting its way past as a waitress carried a cup of the beige stuff to a nearby table, it seemed to leap out of the mug and assault my senses, slapping me round the face with its jolly old self. I’d be quite happy, minding my own business, walking down the street, or sitting in a café, when suddenly, that tangy, spicy scent – the smell that made my taste buds shrivel up and try to hide – would hit me.
The smell, the taste, the feel of a teabag… It was almost a phobia.Ī terrible phobia. Not just dislike it, not just not mind it, but actually, literally, hate it.
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