August 26, 2013

Sweet Summer

I’ve been drinking tea with sugar cubes since the end of July. This came about while we were at the cottage and I was drinking my tea out of a pyrex mug, and it just seemed wrong to take tea in pyrex without sugar, so I bought a box of sugar cubes at the Foodland in Coboconk because regular sugar came in 2kg bags which was much too much for the cottage. Sugar cubes, however, proved impossible to quit, and even once I was home with my regular mug, two cubes had become necessary to keep my cuppa tea proper. Sugar cubes, it seems, are irresistible, part building-block, part sweetener. But they are made to be rare, I think. I don’t want to be the kind of person with sugar cubes always in my cupboard after all, which is the very definition of decadence. And so I’m drinking my final cup of sweetened tea as I write this now, the last two cubes from the sugar cube box dissolved within. (A spoonful of sugar would be sweet enough, but hardly offers the same appeal.) It’s going to be a difficult transition back to the unsweetened life, but I am determined to be brave enough to weather it.

And speaking of tea, I underlined this passage from Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt: “I went restlessly out and crossed the little garden where an American couple… were having tea. One of them was raising a little bag, like a drowned animal, from his cup at the end of a cord. At that distressing sight I felt very far away from England…”