Psychogeography

Tea Time in Turkey

It’s no messing with Ralph’s Turkish black tea. We spoke yesterday on the phone to catch up after his return from holidaying in a Brutalist concrete block near Antalya. The Great Cham was largely confined — he told me — to the hotel compound by armed guards, where he was compelled to amuse himself by shooting people in the bum with an airgun. He did, however, manage to escape to the bazaar where he bought me an impressive meerschaum pipe carved so as to resemble a Turk’s head (not a kind of knot, you understand — the real thing).

Meerschaum is as Turkish as Kurdish human rights abuses, and large quantities of this hydrous silicate of magnesium are to be found along its coastline. The locals gather up the clayey mass and transform it into smoking instruments shaped like Kemal Atatürk, Jerry Lee Lewis, Iris Murdoch — indeed, just about any personage they take a fancy to. But I digress. It was the tea that gripped me, and Ralph, ever obliging, shot me a packet up by mail and I’m drinking a glass as I write this.

Turkish black tea got me through the whirling of the dervishes during Ramadan in Konya, central Anatolia; just as gallons of milky tchai sustained me on my treks into the Himalaya, and tiny bowls of fragrant green tea kept me chaste among the sex shows of Patpong. In Morocco it’s thé à la menthe, in Belfast it’s earthy Nam Barrie; indeed, I wonder if there’s any region — no matter how hostile — which cannot be braved given the requisite infusion? A cup of tea is both of this world and resolutely out of it; it’s a sideways step into a relaxing realm where time stands still for a few minutes.

The growing ubiquity of coffee is a testimony to the gathering pace of globalisation. The best espresso — say a tiny goblet of black go-go mud in Rome’s Tazze d’Oro — should be belted down, as its name implies, not mulled over; and while coffee preparation and blends may have their regional distinctions, they are being speedily and effectively annihilated by the Republic of Caffeine. Not so tea. We acquire a taste for coffee in late adolescence, when we leave home to join the Family of Man, but tea we imbibe with our mother’s milk.

Or father’s. My own had such a rigid view of his tea ceremonial that he might have been the Confucian sitting under the mulberry tree depicted on the caddy. The pot had to be warmed with boiling water before the leaves were placed in it (leaves — never bags; bags were as alien to him as crack cocaine or pederasty). Milk had to go in the cup before the tea was poured, then three cups were to be drunk — no more, no less. My father swore he could taste the difference if any one of these operations was altered. When I was about seven, he took me to Speakers’ Corner to witness British freedom of speech in action. There were the usual bunch of stepladder orators — Maoists, Bible-huggers, rank crazies — and a most interesting Kenyan gentleman, whose subject was the depredations of imperialism.

‘I tell you,’ the Kenyan proclaimed, ‘when I slaved on the tea estates during the Emergency I did my bit to help my brave brothers in the bush fighting Imperialism, yes I did. Do you want to know what I did?’ Of course we did — we were transfixed. ‘Every single sack of tea that passed through the shed where I worked I pissed in. Yes I did — I pissed in it heartily, satisfied that it would be ending up in your mouths!’ ‘Ahem,’ my father cleared his throat a little uneasily, ‘what an angry chap — don’t believe a word of it, I’m sure he’s fibbing.’

However, I did believe it. Not only that, I grew to consider it one of the shining lights of British democracy, that we could welcome a former subject to our shores and afford him a platform so he could tell us precisely how he’d pissed all over us. What’s more, this nameless Kenyan did more for my appreciation of the significance of world trade than a thousand economics tutorials. I can lift a cup of tea to my lips even now and be pungently reminded of where it comes from.

Which takes us back to Turkey — Istanbul, to be precise — where Ralph was pursued by this tea pedlar with a samovar strapped to his back. Either that’s what it is, or it’s a prototype, steam-powered jet pack. I too have taken to going about the place with tea-making equipment to hand: a camping gas stove, a small kettle, bag, cups and milk. Friends I’m out walking with scoff when I begin to brew up, but once they’re sipping they’re infused with gratitude. After all, nothing beats a good cup of tea save for a chimpanzee dressed up as a world leader.