Tea.

According to an article I have just read, the French "have been perfecting tea since 1636 - it arrived in France 22 years before it got to England". This interesting little nugget of information once again set me off on a tea-based thought trail. I blame my fascination on not having drunk a single drop of the stuff until the age of 20. That's two whole decades without tea. Pretty much the same period of time that the good folk of seventeenth-century England were happily going about their business, unaware of the hedonistic tea-drinking practice being indulged in by their French counterparts. (Though I wouldn't feel too sorry for your ancestors, apparently hot chocolate was the drink du jour at that time. Surely a worthy second to tea.) It seems that across the Channel they eventually became rather carried away by the activity: "In Marie Antoinette's day, the diarist Sévigne wrote that the court princesses drank 12 cups a day." I once drank eleven cups in one day, and am hoping never to again (unless I once again find myself in a Cornish caravan park on a rainy day).

A friend of mine once experimented with the tantalizing idea that tea might be the elusive miracle hangover cure everyone else has missed. Let's be clear about this tea does not mean your usual morning cuppa. Tea means a large pot of tea before going to sleep, followed by a large pot of tea on getting up. I think the theory hinged on the possibility that the tannins in the tea might somehow neutralise the excessive blood in his alcohol stream. Funnily enough, it didn't.

I'm looking forward to the start of an expedition from Calcutta to London entitled "Tracing Tea". Several Cambridge University students will be travelling by tuk-tuk (otherwise known as autorickshaws) along a route designed to cover places integral to the history of tea, passing through India, Pakistan, China, Central Asia, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and the Netherlands before finishing up in the UK. From the expedition's smart-looking website it is possible to trace the group's route, as well as to get a flavour of the book and television series that they hope to produce. In addition, it appears that there are plans in the offing to incorporate some kind of community art project. One to watch.