Here’s why I’ve gone to pot

Here’s why I’ve gone to pot
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 22, 2012
Section: Opinion

I have crossed to the dark side. A puddle of shame is staring up at me with eyes like saucers.

Actually it is a saucer, because I have given up coffee for tea.

I am well aware that as I sit with my lovely china cup, I am dangerously close to being cast out as a  pariah, that fraternizing in coffee shops and ordering a cup of Earl Grey may require a spell in the solitary confinement of a table for one. In Perth apparently, tea cannot match its leaf to the bean.

As the New York Times already knew in 1949, coffee is the ultimate ‘social binder, a warmer of tongues, a soberer of minds, a stimulant of wit, a foiler of sleep if you want it so’. For many, tea is just a scalding hot drink, weak in artistry and watery in disposition, requiring pursed lips and too much milling around waiting for the brew to brew.

Coffee however, is intoxicating , rich and exotic and entices lovers to swoon over its heady aroma . It tastes glorious in the hands of a handsome barista, or equally, a seductive bariste (one who by repetition alone, has perfected the art of a good pull.) Espresso is a notoriously persnickety drink. It demands to be coaxed from the bean at precise temperatures, with air and water in particular measure. Its charm, with deftness of touch, is sublime, and with 6-fingered clumsiness, an acrid slop.

I know the great divide in Perth is not between north and south, or the hills and the beaches, it’s between  those who drink coffee and those who partake of tea. And I know the gulf exists because I see it everywhere. In my frequent travels with pram and small child, I have realized that tea and coffee drinkers inhabit different time zones.

On a Saturday morning when the Tour de Freo arrives back in the ‘burbs in a cloud of sweat and caffeine desperation, the pavements outside my favorite cafes are littered with an expensive tangle of bike bling.

Cleats and carbon cast aside, you don’t want to get in the way of a peloton of middle-aged lycra converging on the coffee counter to order gallons of flat whites or short blacks. I wonder if they need it as vocal lubricant after long rides, because cup after cup, they mill about gasbagging for hours like old ladies at bridge. (Personally, I stay clear of cyclist queues because once I got jammed up against a gentleman in a codpiece so tight I got an eyeful of his frank and beans before he’d ordered any.)

In my experience, coffee drinkers are always desperate in the morning while tea drinkers, though equally needy, are unusually calm. At that early hour, they wouldn’t be seen dead riding anything but side saddle. Tea drinkers have husbands who bring them a cup of the Queen’s best in bed and have pretty cups and mugs and plates of hot buttered toast. I have two lifelong girlfriends who meet me most Friday mornings to discuss the Syrian crisis and how much we weigh, and we wouldn’t dream of having coffee – it’s tea that fills the space on our plates recently vacated by cake.

And that’s another thing – I note from my observations of café culture that coffee drinkers don’t eat. I suppose they get enough of a kick out of caffeine without needing a chocolate muffin to boot up the day’s endorphins. Perhaps it’s our Antipodean sensibilities that have demanded we throw off the shackles of penal servitude and dismiss the Blighty’s English breakfast variety in favour of the dark continentals?

Italian espresso machines only arrived in the colonies in the 1980s – who would have guessed we would soon have to move our children out of home to make space for them. That said, if you’ve bought one recently you’d know they cost as much as Guatemala. Ours is a hissing giant on the kitchen bench. Loved to distraction by the caffeine addict in the house, he spent more time researching which one to get than he did on names for his offspring. Either by laziness or design, it leaves a trail of coffee grounds and hot puddles on the bench, presumably to frighten unwitting tea drinkers into giving it a wide berth.

In search of the God shot, namely the perfect espresso, I’ve had to give up valuable tea-making space. Hence I have eschewed the pot and can no longer bear witness to the ‘agony of the leaves’. Aficionadostell me this refers to the unfurling of the tea leaf during steeping and can be quite a dramatic and mesmerizing process. I thought the agony of the leaves was having too many deciduous trees in the garden.

Lately, the gossip brimming in tea circles on the internet is that the lowly tea bag rarely contains more than floor sweepings, in fact, is usually a bag of dust. Dust! I live in denial.

There never used to be this rivalry did there? Did coffee always rule in café hierarchy? And since when did becoming a barista become a career?

My first job was at the once trendy North Cott café making cappuccinos on its new fangled machine, At 17 years old, I boiled the milk to within an inch of its life and prided myself on a layer of foam so thick you could stand a surfboard in it.

Later, living in Sydney and working a frenetic pace in television, coffee became a way to live permanently on adrenalin, which all went swimmingly until I was struck down by chest pains. I carted myself off to hospital thinking I was mid-coronary, only to be sternly reprimanded for the heart palpitations brought on by a caffeine overload.

After that I swore off strong coffee and had to drink lattes. Still getting the heart thumps, I returned to Perth in my 30s and resigned myself to drinking decaf, much to the consternation of coffee house bartenders who couldn’t be bothered with such pretence. Even then, it was considered inhumane to force people who had a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind ponces like me who apparently viewed the morning’s heart starter as some kind of recreational activity – a decaf skim milk latte, please, extra hot, in a mug, not a cup. I was a coffee toffee, and the laughing stock. So it became tea for me.

I always thought I’d postpone the stately pleasures of the leaf until I too, was an old lady having a tea break at bingo or sitting down to high tea in stiff whites after lawn bowls. But I can admit here and now, I am an early convert. It’s just the thing when the chips are down, and it’s always prescribed amidst a scandal. It was the drink that kept the Titanic temporarily afloat, was heavily rationed in World War Two as being vital to public morale and it’s what Her Majesty ordered with some urgency after being patted on the rear by the Honorable Paul Keating, PM.

So I have decided to be out and proud, and have bought a collection of colorful teacups and saucers to prove this is not a passing fancy. And now I will summon the nerve to rejoin the queue at my favorite corner café. I’ll shuffle up the line commenting blithely on the weather and if, when it’s my turn and I politely request  my cup of hot water and dustbag, I hear sniggers or sighs, I will turn to the waiting crowd, stand my ground and declare to all: ‘Yes, I’m drinking tea now.’ And then I’ll add: ‘Doctor’s orders.’