Milk and sugar

As a child I did not much like tea, preferring water and only taking to tea at around the age of 15. At which time I took it with both milk and sugar.

At some point, maybe forty years ago, I came off the sugar. I forget why and I forget how hard it was to make the switch, but I do now find tea with sugar rather unpleasant, although I do do it, very occasionally, if for some reason I am very tired and need, as it were, a shot in the arm.

At various other points, I went through phases of or fads for tea without milk, to which end I switched to some kind of oriental (as opposed to subcontinental) tea, often oolong. I remember hunting down the distinctive yellow packets of a particular tea from the Sea Dyke range. More recently still, about the time that Chief Inspector Wexford overdosed on the stuff on ITV3 (see google, who knows all about it), the oolong started to disagree with me and I now restrict myself to subcontinental with milk.

Apart from one interlude when we had the use of full-strength milk fresh and unpasteurised from a Jersey cow in Hampshire, during which interval I don't think I thought about the matter at all, and until very recently, I used to insist on blue top milk, milk with some active ingredients, and used to make nasty remarks about the green top milk, more or less water with some white colouring matter, as used by BH. An insistence which also meant that we were a two milk household, a complicating factor in our household economy. But then there were a few unpleasant experiences with blue top milk which was slightly off, mainly because I got through so little of the stuff, not using it for anything else. Furthermore, BH alleged that I was drinking green top milk without fuss or complaint when out as that was what was in more or less all tea bought out.

At which point, I flipped without pain from blue to green and we are now a one milk household. But I can still make a fuss about long life and the stuff which comes in little plastic tubs, although to be fair to them, most tea outlets now supply milk in jugs.

PS: I had been quite sure that Wexford was a Chief Superindendent, but google seems to think that he was a paltry Chief Inspector, down among the Barnabys. Perhaps he got promoted towards the end of his run.