That Swedish Dick

I have been drinking tea since I was able to choose my own drinks. During high school tea was my drink of choice, not beer. I had other means of expanding my mind and freeing my spirit. I started every day of my working life with a cup of tea. Sometimes I would skip breakfast, but never would I skip my morning tea. I still have a tea every morning, it seems to be right somehow in a way that coffee doesn’t. There are days when I don’t have my tea, but somehow those days just don’t feel complete.

I talk a lot about having coffee in this blog and I do drink a lot of coffee. However, if I had to make a choice to never drink either coffee or tea again, I would have to choose tea. I am not likely to ever have to make that choice, but I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. When the family gets together for dinner, the meal is always topped off with a steaming hot pot or two of tea. It isn’t something that is even discussed, the kettle boils and tea appears. It is partly because there seems to be a lot of weak minded people in the family that have bought into the fantasy that coffee will keep you awake at night.

The first teapot that I ever became attached to was a little one cup, yellow metal jobby that would leak when you poured and if you weren’t careful it would give you third degree burns. It looked like the pot in the foreground of this picture.

I carried that pot around for quite some time and took it with me when I first left home and worked at Sunshine Village. If I recall correctly, my daughter Arwen took over ownership. I’m not sure if she kept it, tossed it or left it here. Over the years we have had more than a few teapots and most have been faithful servants that were retired from service with honours. We have had teapots that did their job and didn’t worry about how they looked on the table. Well, until recently…

Our last teapot, one of the classic teapot designs, chocolate brown with two stripes of darker brown around the top. It was a teapot, short and stout, one side has a handle, the other a spout. It lasted us for years before it developed a crack or two and then lasted a couple of more years, until the fear of it breaking and a full pot of boiling tea splash Hurricane or Tornado. I couldn’t get rid of it, and thought that I might somehow re-purpose it into a herb pot or coin bank.

We needed a new pot, so we went to Ikea and bought a kind of modernistic rendering of a teapot. It was pure white and looked as if it would hold quite a bit of tea for those after dinner gab fests. The problems started as soon as we got it home and tried to wash it. Neither Louise nor I couldn’t get our hands inside and had to use a brush. It came with a rubber ring that fit over the spout to stop spillage. That would have been great if it had actually worked, all it did was hide the drips and was hard to keep track of when it came time to clean it. Why sell a teapot that needs extra bits to fix what shouldn’t even need fixing? What fucking Swedish dick designed this piece of shit! We suffered with this thing until today.

Today, we were at Ikea again and saw a teapot that was more or less like a regular teapot. It was white with a blue design, but I have faith that it will do what a tea pot is supposed to do. Hold hot water, dribble a little and pour out conversations, laughs and love. I can’t get my hand inside, but Louise can. So far it hasn’t disappointed, but I have yet to make any tea in it. If you hear a primal screech and see something flying through the sky, you will know that I have been had once again by that Swedish dick.