Teapot

I have, of late, been puzzling two serious mysteries. They are related, and both are far beyond my mere mortal understanding. The first is:

Why can’t I find a teapot that just pours tea into the cup, instead of all over the table?

And the next, quite obviously, is:

Why won’t they let me road test teapots in the shop?

Now, these may not strike you as serious laments, but for one thing, I drink an awful lot of tea. I blame my caffeine addiction on my mother, who started me drinking tea at the age of, I think, 18 months. The older I get the more delicious and comforting a good ol’ cuppa seems to become, and now every morning I clutch at my mug like it holds the elixir of life.

I had assumed that when I left home for university the volume of tea I consumed would decrease (presumably replaced by alcohol). Instead, the opposite occurred; all the people I moved in with were serious tea drinkers, and the cycle of tea-making and tea-drinking soon became self-sustaining. Someone made everybody a cup of tea, and eventually someone else would feel motivated to make one by way of thanks. Finally, after seven or eight people had made you a cup of tea, you would suddenly be seized by guilt and make another round. With twelve people living in a flat, I wound up drinking roughly six thousand cups of tea every day.

A teapot, then, seems like a useful idea. Tea tastes better out of a pot, and you can put a tea cosy on it and maybe have another cup later. Plus there is something civilised and refined about pouring from a collective vessel into smaller ones. It makes you feel like a Japanese daimyo.

Or it would, if the bloody stuff didn’t just spill all over the worksurface. I must be on my fourth model by now, and that’s all they seem to do. It isn’t enough to just rely on the standard teapot shape, either, the last one I bought from Sainsbury’s betrayed me at the first opportunity.

Now, if you bought another product and it failed to fulfil its primary function, you would be well within your rights to complain and get a replacement. If you bought yourself a fridge and filled it with food, only to discover that the fridge was failing to keep things cold, you would understandably be annoyed. You’d get another fridge.

If the teapot just failed to pour out the tea, well, that’d be a bugger and I’d still probably want another one, but I suppose there are ways around the problem. You could get the tea out with a straw, and imagine how louche and bohemian you would look drinking out of a teapot! Can you imagine it? I certainly can’t, and it’s my blog!

But seeing as the tea actually does pour out, but all over the table, you’re actually getting a new, inferior function, that you certainly didn’t pay for. It’d be like if you filled the fridge with food it couldn’t keep cold and then when you opened it a boxing glove came out and smashed your face in.

The solution, obviously, is to test the teapot in the shop, but for some reason proprietors seem to have a problem with this. I can’t see why, frankly. I’m allowed to have a drive in a car before I buy it, just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off after I get out of the garage. Admittedly a teapot is less likely to plough off the road and kill me, but my point stands.

The moral of this story? If you get a teapot that works like it is supposed to, you should hang onto it forever and ever. Or send it to me in the post, as I’m clearly in desperate need of it, and apparently have little else with which to occupy my time. Well, as I said, I do drink a lot of tea.