Tea And Cucumber Sandwiches

Tea and cucumber sandwiches, anyone?

I have always had a slight feeling of underlying scepticism when it comes to things like drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches.

Coffee is the drink of revolutions, if not revolutionaries – and I drink a lot of it. Tea, on the other hand, has always struck me as the native Englishman's excuse for his austere streak, simply being prettied-up with porcelain and wild-picked flowers by the butler, maid, or mem-saab.

Cucumber sandwiches likewise; too simple, too austere, too, too, insubstantial!

So much for my 'slight feeling.' It's obviously a rampaging cultural prejudice. I constan

tly have to tell people that whilst I can accept being termed British, I am thoroughly no such thing as 'English!'

But am I missing something? I know that beneath it all, there is this kind of sense of wealth some decent English have in them, to do with their strong desire to quietly savour the wealth of total victory. Some Germans have it, too...

And that greatest victory is the one that virtually no one else ever sees but the victors – those sneaky victories that creep up and invade the brainspace of the conquered. It's not necessarily unstoppable, but you do have to have your wits about you or otherwise it's too late.

Unlike what all the tyros do, recently I spent three entire days doing nothing, watching the wave-tops on the ocean outside, from morning to night, napping quite a lot in between, and drinking tea what's more, and eating finger food including cucumber sandwiches. I'm not sure that I felt any real sense of privation during the episode. Okay I drank lots of coffee too. And I bought a bottle of another one of these glut-cheap young whites that may be had here for little money right now.

I learned something from the wave-tops. A 'disassociative sea of digital data' – and I am grateful to another person on a Bear Chat Board elsewhere for this phrase – may indeed contain sharks.

Reduced to a simplicitude, the medium that makes things float is water; but currency is the water that floats things, not digital data.

Right now I can see the sharks circling. It must be the clarity that tea-drinking brings. Though perhaps I'm mistaken.

Time for another tea, and a cucumber sandwich, and perhaps a Tiger or two later on still. Sharks, what sharks? What are you talking about, Calvin? Circling around a currency? No, not a currency. I think the sharks are circling around themselves and I don't want to be anywhere near the vicinity of any scratch on the precious reputations of all these unimpeachable, moral, honourable, patriots – of whatever country you want to talk about, not just the obvious one(s) - who are all just doing things not for money or sex but for the love of their countries.

You see? That's where tea-drinking fits in – when you just want to wallow in cynicism.

 

Calvin J. Bear