Tea

I really like tea. Nothing special, just ordinary council house tea; milk, no sugar.

We've never found it difficult to buy "British" tea since we first arrived here. In the early days it could be a bit of a fag going to the right supermarket or searching out a British food shop but nowadays Mercadona, probably the most widespread chain of supermarkets in Spain, stocks PG Tips and Tetley's so it's dead easy

Long ago I stopped buying tea in Spanish bars. It usually comes luke warm and, unless you are very precise in your ordering instructions made half and half with hot milk. Anyway the coffee is excellent so why bother?

Even for non tea drinking Britons tea is as much a concept as it is a drink. We are aware of the variations on tea from English Breakfast and Earl Grey through Darjeelings and Lapsang Souchong and we may even include decaff, fruit and herbal teas in the list but we all know that tea is tea and it has names like Ty-phoo, Yorkshire, Tetley's and PG Tips. It isn't the same for Spaniards and having a conversation about tea is a frustratingly difficult affair. The drink I think of as tea and the drink they think of as tea just aren't the same thing.

Lots of Spanish people drink what they consider to be ordinary tea from Spanish big name tea sellers such as Hornimans, Liptons and Pompadour. Don't be fooled by the names - Spanish varieties are remarkably weak in comparison to the worst floor sweepings tea you could buy in the UK. It's not a quality thing it's a taste choice. Drinking tea with milk is uncommon. Kettles are almost unknown in Spanish homes so most tea is made by either heating the water in a microwave with the bag floating in cold water to start or by nuking the water and then adding the bag. The water is never anywhere near boiling. To be fair the Spanish version of standard tea is a perfectly reasonable drink served warmish, weak and milkless but it isn't much like my idea of tea. Even more strangely, in my opinion, most Spaniards give exactly the same status to mint, camomile and lime flower infusions as they do to "proper" tea.

At times I wonder if the cultural divide is just too wide to bridge.