Lockdown and the Opportunity

As has been observed many times, tea is a simple process. Put leaves in a pot or gaiwan, add water, wait, pour. While you can get better at it, and use better tea, it’s an essentially achievable process.

As I once said in another blog post about a similar topic to today’s, “You could train a spaniel to make tea, assuming it had opposable thumbs and could read a thermometer and use a timer. Well perhaps not a spaniel, but maybe a Kardashian.”

When it comes to making coffee, the array of choices is bewildering. Assuming, dear reader, that you are not so coarse, so lacking in humanity, so deserving of a lifetime of incarceration that you would consider instant coffee, then you are going to need some sort of device, from the humble plunger to a stove top espresso, or a home espresso machine which themselves vary from basic capsule machines that put out very poor quality, to near barista quality (especially, if like me, you happen to be something of a barista. Shhhh)

But I don’t know if you’ve seen this modern trend, mainly in apartments, but spilling into the mainstream, where homes are constructed with tiny kitchens with no features. Some of them these days do not even have an oven, just a microwave, Because today smart 20-something is far too busy to make their own food.

Or coffee.

Instead, they pop downstairs or next door and buy one several times a day.

Sometimes, these people are consuming more than the recommended 4 cup maximum per day.

and then… LOCKDOWN.

My home state instituted a six-day lockdown. No coffee outlets are permitted to serve it.

So lockdown will lead to withdrawal symptoms for coffee addicts. According to healthline.com, they are headache, fatigue, low energy, irritability, anxiety, poor concentration, depressed mood and tremors. Medical News Today chimes in by adding constipation.

Hands up if you want headache, fatigue, low energy, irritability, anxiety, poor concentration, depressed mood and tremors and constipation.

Not too many hands up!

However, there is a simple, medically backed alternative: tea

Just switch to tea.

Now, tea will affect you differently to coffee. The hit from tea is smoother and longer lasting. There’s no jolt, you get sustained energy boosting. You can also sneak in a few extra cups per day.
Best of all you can make it yourself with a pot. You can buy a pot for about the price of two cups of coffee and you can buy some tea for about the same – enough for maybe thirty cups.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. It’s dumb not to switch out coffee for tea in the best of times, but during lockdown, tea has an even more pressing case.

I’d like to say I’m not judgemental, but fair go, how can I not be? Watching zombies bouncing off the walls of closed coffee fix dispensers is sad. I saw several in the foetal position on a lawn outside a chain cafe.

Do it now. Do it in lockdown. If lockdown has ended, do it anyway to protect yourself from the next one.

After all, you’re not dumb… are you?