A nice cup ot tea

The English custom of afternoon tea, it is said, goes back to the late eighteenth century when Anne, wife of the 7th Duke of Bed­ford, decided that she suffered from a "sinking feeling"¹ around 5 p.m and needed tea and cakes to bring back her strength. Before long, complaints were heard that "the laborers lose time to come and go to the tea-table and farmers' servants even demand tea for their breakfast". Tea had arrived. Fashionable Tea Rooms were opened for high society, and soon tea became the national drink of all classes.

Today the British drink more tea than any other nation an average of 4 kilos a head per annum, or 1650 cups of tea a year. They drink it in bed in the morning, round the fire on winter afternoons and out in the garden on sunny summer days. In times of trouble the kettle is quickly put on, the tea is made and comfor­ting cups of the warm brown liquid are passed round.

Tea has even played its part in wars. When George III of England tried to make the American colonists pay import duty" on tea, a group of Americans disguised³ as Red Indians dumped' 342 chests⁵ of tea into the sea in Boston Harbour⁶ — the Boston Tea Party which led to the War of Independence. In another war the Duke of Wellington sensibly⁷ had a cup of tea before starting UK-Battle of Waterloo, "to clear my head". In peace time official approval of the national drink came from the Victorian Prime Minister, Gladstone, who remarked: "If you are cold, tea will warm you, if you are heated it will cool you, if you are depressed it will cheer you, if you are excited it will calm you.¹

What exactly is tea? Basically it is a drink made from the dried leaves of a plant that only grows in hot countries? The British first heard of tea in 1598, and first tasted it in about 1650, For nearly two centuries all tea was imported from China, until, in 1823, a tea plant was found growing naturally in Assam in India, Sixteen years later the first eight chests of Indian tea were sold in London, and today, London’s tea markets deal in tea from India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and Africa more than from China.

Christopher Columbus

Christopher became a sailor when he was fourteen. He was tall, and his shoulders were broad. But Christopher did not intend to stay a common seaman. He asked questions. He learned how to steer a ship by the stars, how to make maps, and how to chart a ship's voyage through strange waters: He was made the second mate to the captain, then the first mate, then captain in his own right".''He did not sail to India, but he sailed to all the different lands that bordered the Mediterra­nean Sea-Europe, Africa, Western Asia. He had bloody fights with pirates.

When he was twenty-four or so, he commanded a battle­ship for the city of Genoa in a war against her rival city Venice. He went on voyages of exploration - South along the coast of Africa; North along the coast of Europe.

Some men make fortunes at sea. Others lose them. In a terrible storm off the coast of Portugal, Christopher's ship sank to the bottom, and Christopher lost everything he owned. He did not even have money to get home.

He soon found work as a map maker in a bookshop in the Portuguese city of Lisbon, Scholars came to the bookshop, and teachers and travelers. Chris­topher was a grown man now, but he still asked questions, and he still learned. Always before he had asked question about the East. Now he began asking about the West. To the west lay the Great Sea of Darkness. Beyond that - nothing. The world stopped like the end of a plank, and if you went too far you would fall off. At least that's what most people said. But some learned said no. The earth is not flat like a plank. It is round like a ball. If you sail far enough to the west, you will reach the east —India.