The Thirst: Tea is Addictive

Tea can be more addictive than smoking cigarettes; there should be a government health warning on each bag.

The first time I drank tea was when I was about eight years old. My mother had brewed a large teapot of the narcotic substance and offered me a cup, cream and two sugars; after that, I was hopelessly hooked. I can't get enough tea, I drink it and I get high.

The old lady that used to live down my road would regularly invite me over for tea and biscuits. The old bag eventually dropped dead; no doubt, it was due to the culmination of a life time of tea addiction. 'Would you like a cuppa?' she would ask me as I sat in her kitchen which had become a rat infested stink hole with discarded used tea bags on the floor. Then she'd open the cupboard and pull out a tin of tea bags, and like the junky I was, my eyes would light up and stare at them greedily.

After the long wait for the bags to brew, which often seemed like an eternity, we'd prepare the tinctured water with cream and sugar. The cream would take the bitterness out of the taste and the sugar enabled the active compounds in the leaves to be easily absorbed by the body. A side-effect of tea use is to ramble on incessantly about life and the neighbours. She was a nice old lady, but the years of tea abuse had made her senile and unable to string a sentence together.

I am drinking tea as I write this. It keeps me calm and uncollected. I hope that I do not ever become as bad as old man Fred, who would sit in front of the television all day long and suck tea bags; he has lost all his teeth.