What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas

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Every year, Britain’s consumer champion, the oddly named Which?, does a blind test of the nation’s teabags and picks a winner. Because, folks, this is important. You’re a consumer. You need the experts’ opinion on this before you wander cluelessly into a supermarket and buy the tea you, in your ignorance, think you like.

Besides, Which? gets some free publicity out of it. 

This year, in what one headline called a “shock result,” a budget tea, Asda’s Everyday–the cheapest of the contestants–came in first. The high-end Twinings was in joint last place with it doesn’t matter who. What does matter is that Twinings’ tea bags cost four times more than Asda’s. 

My favorite, Yorkshire, wandered in somewhere between the two. 

What qualities do the experts judge tea on? Color. Aroma, Appearance. Taste’s on the list somewhere. Ability to boot you into consciousness first thing in the morning isn’t.

Irrelevant photo: Last week’s post also had an irrelevant picture of Fast Eddie, but surely it’s not possible for a childless cat lady (who’re you calling a lady, asshole?) to post too many cat pictures. So here’s Fast Eddie in slow mode.

The advice column

If you’re in the market for free advice, allow me to offer you this: never try to communicate in an accent or dialect you didn’t come by honestly. I mention this because a local council–in non-British English, that’s a governmental body–tried to use the local dialect for an anti-littering campaign and got it wrong. In very large type.

The North Yorkshire Council put up signs–hundreds of the beasts–urging people to “Gerrit in’t bin’” 

Oops. That should’ve been “Gerrit in t’bin.”

What’s with the “t’”? It’s short for the and it’s a Yorkshire thing. 

Why? 

Why not? There’s no arguing with accents or dialects. They are what they are and they do what they do. 

But let’s not take anything for granted: “gerrit” means get it. “Bin”? It’s what I grew up called the garbage can–that thing you throw trash in. But that’s a Britishism, not Yorkshire’s own invention

To be fair to the council, I don’t know that they’re not from Yorkshire. They may just be people who had some apostrophes to spare and got caught dropping one in the wrong place. As I understand the apostrophe process, we’re born with a certain number and the instructions about how to use them were written by Ikea. So as the years go by, some people get desperate, and they drop theirs in any spot that looks likely. Or if not likely, possible.

It’s not entirely their fault.

A lot of the posters were put up in tourist sites on the theory, no doubt, that visitors would be charmed by a bit of local color, but whether the visitors are looking at the original version or the corrected one, 76.3% are locked in place while they try to unscramble the letters and think, What????

 

The ghost of prime ministers past

Fifty-six days after he became Britain’s prime minister and moved into his new office, Keir Starmer had a portrait of a former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, moved out. Apparently short of things to get outraged about, Conservative Party leaders pitched a fit.

But since I’ve been making fun of people’s apostrophe use, I should be careful about this: if multiple people do that thing I just mentioned, do they pitch a single collective fit or multiple individual ones?

Either way, they accused Starmer of being vindictive and petty, of spending his time rearranging the furniture instead of governing, and of appeasing the left wing of his party. 

To which the left wing of his party said, “If only.

That kept the news cycle fed for nearly a day, but when the nation failed to rise up in arms the outrage machine went into sleep mode, during which it appears to be doing nothing but is in fact searching the internet for new and surely more popular sources of potential outrage.

 

The Ig Nobels

A winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Awards, Saul Justin Newman, from University College Lonon, reports that the claims about extreme aging–living past 110–are, to be scientific about it, mostly bullshit. 

“I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world,” he said. “(The other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

To be clear: he only looked for death certificates for the people believed to be dead. The ones who were still alive? It’s pretty much expected that they wouldn’t have one yet.

A lot of the over-110s are concentrated in blue zones, where a startling number people are said to live past 100. “For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”

But in a 2010 review by the Japanese government, “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”

Don’t have anyone else register it either.

Okinawa, which was supposed to be a hotspot of extreme aging, turned out to have the worst health in Japan. The best way to find concentrations of super-agers in Okinawa super-agers is to figure out where the halls of records were bombed during World War II. 

“If the person dies [in the bombing], they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.”

As for hotspots in Italy and Greece, “By my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases. . . . [In Greece], over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.”

In England, several low-income areas–”the worst places to be an old person”–have a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds. Unfortunately, if you’re going to live to 100, one of the requirements is that you have to live through your 90s first, even if there’s no glory in it.

So will getting an Ig Nobel get people to take his research seriously? 

“I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”

46 thoughts on “What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas”

    • Oooh, that’s Old School, and I’m properly impressed. I used to brew loose leaf for myself a seriously tea-drinking friend, as a kind of special thing. Then she went over to decaf, where I just can’t follow, and I realized that I make a more reliable cup of tea if I use a tea bag anyway. End of loose leaf in this house. Maybe if has something to do with me originally being American. I make a decent cup of tea, but I know my limits.

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  3. Whoever tested the tea for Which is obviously not a connoisseur of tea, as you and I know from previous discussions that Yorkshire tea is king. I’ve had the ASDA stuff when our Asda ran out of Yorkshire during the pandemic times, it is a poor substitute. As for ‘gerrit in’t bin’ or ‘gerrit in t’bin’ it doesn’t really matter as we don’t actually pronounce the ‘t’ anyway, it’s more like a short, very fast ‘uh’.

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    • The T is (pretty nearly) silent? Holy shit this is a strange language. I wonder who decided to spell it t’I do appreciate the explanation. I’d been trying to convince myself that somehow TH had just naturally shortened itself to the as far as I can see unrelated sound T.

      The tea? My current theory is that the higher up the social scale you go, the weaker the tea. That’s based on a very limited exposure to the social scale and no research whatsoever, but I’m sure it’s right. So maybe they just recruited their experts from the wrong class.

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  5. I drink at least two mugs of black tea per tea, sometimes more when it’s chilly, and my only options for decent tea are Tetley’s British Blend and Yorkshire when I can get it. The latter relies on it being in stock in a nearby Irish store, which it rarely is. When they do have it, however, I buy every single box they have. So I agree that Yorkshire should have been the winner.

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    • When we lived in Minneapolis, the only place to buy decent tea was also an Irish store in St. Paul–just across the river. They carried Lyons, which makes a damn good cup of tea and which I never see now that I live in Cornwall. The Irish must–wisely–keep it for themselves.

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  6. Has Starmer ordered more Godawful draperies and upholstery ? If not, then they need to chill.

    I’ve read enough British mysteries (and the Andy Capp comic) to be able to decipher some regionalisms (I end up reading them out loud to the cats.) What I rally fai at i the Cockney “rhyming slang.” (I learned “an-kovies”(those salty little fish) and “res-PIE-retory” (the system one breathes with) from PBS.

    After my bout with kidney stones last fall, my doctor informed me that drinking tea encourages their formation, if you are prone to them. (calcium carbnate ones, anyway). Luckily I am not that addicted to tea so I survived the summer on ice water and lemonade.

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    • Tea and kidney stones? Eek! The whole nation panics and runs wildly in all directions.

      The clever thing about rhyming slang is that if you don’t already know what the words mean, you won’t be able to guess at them, because the rhyming word’s usually dropped. You can find lists online if you’re really into it, but then you have to remember it all. Maybe the cats can give you a hand with that. Assign one word a day to each of them.

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  7. I read somewhere that the late Queen personally handpicked Twinings’ Sri Lankan tea-pickers and one of the prerequisites HRH insisted on was that all the workers had perfect diction in their enunciation of “Her English”. Can this be true Alice? If so, why isn’t that slacker Charles continuing the tradition and fulfilling these quintessential Royal duties?

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    • Surely not.

      Not, mind you, that I can prove that. I asked Lord Google about queen, sri lanka, and tea pickers (Lord G accepts randomly lower-cased questions) and came up with the scandal of massively underpaid tea pickers–I wish I could tell you I’m surprised–but nothing about the Q’s English. So let’s call that a very weak debunking.

      My impression–and I won’t claim to know what I’m talking about here–is that the classier tea is grown in China anyway.

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  9. I’m a loose leaf tea drinker myself, but I will be using teabags today as I’m at a workshop. I don’t necessarily mind a teabag if it’s in a pot, but I’ll be making tea in a mug and a teabag, even if I whip it out within a second or two, makes tea that’s stronger than I like. On the other hand, if a mug of tea made with a teabag is the only thing I have to complain about today, I’m having a great day.

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  10. Fast Eddie is still adorable. Personally, I would find a picture of Margaret Thatcher in my home to be terrifying. But I’m also disconcerted by those homes that have portraits of a large number of dead ancestors.

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  12. I suppose, as a Yorkshireman, I ought to drink only Yorkshire Tea, but I confess I often buy something cheaper, as long as it tastes good. If I were a communist, of course, I would only drink herbal tea, since proper tea is theft.

    Thanks for completely bamboozling me with statistics about how many centenarians are actually dead, by the end of which I was thinking they might be like Schrodinger’s cat, and – as with quantum physics – gave up trying to understand. I think this might not be such a mystery, though:

    a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds

    Presumably this would follow from either a fall in birth rates about a hundred years ago, or a higher death rate for those within that later generation, at the time of doing the research. I may, at this point, be missing that you were making a joke, which wouldn’t surprise me at all. A hundred years ago, 1924, would be in the inter-war years, but that means by 1939-45 we’re into WWII, so many of those born around 1924 and just after would have died in the war. Prior to that, birth rates would presumably have been boosted after the First World War…? But I’m neither a historian nor much of a mathematician.

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    • TO? Sorry, I’m trying to translate that into full words and failing completely. I know the Yorkshire teabags have changed, presumably because they stopped using plastic, but whether they’re 100% plastic free I couldn’t say. It matters, I know, but I’m overwhelmed with things we should all be keeping track of and that one sank down the list.

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      • Ha ha I capitalized “to” for emphasis, not acronym :-) I know — so many things to think about all the time. I got worried recently when I learned about all the plastic that’s used to bind teabags together. Yorkshire is one of the good brands that doesn’t use it — safe to drink.

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  14. My first thought on the Thatcher’s portrait story was that I would have a suitably large equivalent of Clem Attlee (not a grand painting – to suit his style, it would have to be a sepia photograph) on the opposite wall to stare her down. But I gather Starmer’s explanation is that he didn’t want to be working with pictures of people staring down at him (rather defeats the object of going into politics, if you ask me, but heigh-ho, whatever floats his boat).

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    • I’m not sure I’d want to be sitting between those two portraits. The sparks could fly.

      Whoever tweets as Larry the Cat tweeted that the portrait had been moved into the kitchen and suddenly the milk was missing. I’d have loved to quote that in my post but it would need too much explanation for anyone who isn’t British, which would kill the joke. But hey, I just found an excuse to quote it. Thank you.

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