| “Use tea from India or Ceylon (Sri Lanka), not China,” it starts. “Use a teapot, preferably ceramic. Warm the pot over direct heat. Tea should be strong, six spoons of leaves per litre. Let the leaves move around the pot. No bags or strainers. Take the pot to the boiling kettle. Stir or shake the pot. Drink out of a tall, mug-shaped teacup. Don’t add creamy milk. Add milk to the tea, not vice versa. No sugar!”
Britain has a complex history with tea due to historical reasons. For a nation that claims to love tea, it's surprising that we generally don't care about drinking whole-leaf or single-origin. A British cup of tea is some sort of Baudrillardian simulacrum. Just compare it to wine or coffee, where blends are the cheap stuff which you avoid if you can. I believe the same was once true here, but WW2 - combined with our colonial history - changed everything. The book "Infused: Adventures In Tea" by Henrietta Lovell [0] has a nice section about this.
For any "builders tea" drinkers interested in expanding their horizons, I'd recommend giving Yunnan gold leaves a go. You can buy a sample from online retailers like Adagio [1] (although have to pay delivery). Just boil and drink with milk in the normal fashion. The natural sweetness and earthiness of it blew my socks off the first time I tried it. Interestingly, Twinings' "Everyday" tea bags include some leaves sourced from Yunnan [2].
[0] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/196229938560
Genuinely curious, since I can only think about tea party with the Queen with some delicate china when I think of brits drinking tea. And I don't like small/wide teacups.
I would love to get a genuine British cup/mug.
This is probably the most common shape you'd expect to see in someone's house: https://i.etsystatic.com/7320577/r/il/c46fa1/1742208467/il_f...
A more stylish approach would be like this: https://teaunboxed.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/tea-...
This is what you'd probably get in a standard cafe: https://1975.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Great-British-...
This is what I think of when someone says "tall" mug: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/269441990179867455/
But that is information too, that there is no true tall British tea mug.
> one should drink out of a good breakfast cup—that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold—before one has well started on it.
So I suspect that "tall" is a byword for "not shallow".
> The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I wonder if wasting milk was a greater concern at the time, when the country had recently come out of rationing.
Personally, I am also milk-first. There's less risk of the milk denaturing as it heats up more slowly. This is especially true for alternative milks such as oat or soy (which Orwell no doubt would have despised).
I happen to be re-reading Burmese Days at the moment, which I think is his best after 1984. The movie 1984 with John Hurt is also very powerful - I watched it with my teenager a few years ago and he was transfixed.
This novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes would have rung true.
* or at best to provide a motive filling in the implicit blank left by TaPoOC's truncation: "deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists..."
The motive consists simply of helping society be more effective!!*
(Riffing on 2-ish Nussbaum-Sen derived questions:
1. How to hand out capabilities to the effective/viral but not necessarily wise.[0]
2. How to immediately extract the foremost interesting issue with any framework... that some undergrad can fix before you even sit down at your studydesk in your chalet tonight.
*at learning/earning as a team. "too much information" is consensually the thing to insure against in the Overton; other things detractors ("prigs"/殺氣者) warn you about are to be reflexively dismissed as acts/will of god(s)
**Otoh info asymmetry foments corruption. "moral hazard" is translatable to irl outcomes.
***not touching the CFG analysis directly atm, indeed, because those tractability monsters pull you under when you forget to focus on interestingness
https://aarushgupta.com/2024/03/30/procrastination
[0] S-N's "thresholds" I read as a placeholder for a thermodynamically grounded app of "festina lente". Colloquially: When your heat baths are way too mismatched, your Carnot efficiency...
The colonialists did, but the baggage never left. Turns out oppression/corruption/subjugation/feudalism/communalism/obscurantism/cronyism is politically and/or economically profitable. The current ruling class learnt well from their predecessors.
Better than Homage to Catalonia?!
You can read all nine of Eric Blair's books here:
https://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell
Sadly, those texts are not perfect. I noticed a number of OCR errors. Also, in "Down and out in Paris and London" there's a whole chapter about slang and swearing but nearly all of the swearing is replaced by ——! Perhaps all the printed editions are just the same; I don't know. Perhaps someone here has a modern critical edition and can answer that. It's chapter 32 and the 7th paragraph, for example, starting with "The swear words also change", has the sentence "The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ——." Does anyone have an edition that has the last word of that sentence?
