Part 1 www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog/tea-or-coffee-a-romance-in-seve ral-parts-91788/  
Part 2 - tea for two?

If you are English, tea is a way of life. While few of us sit down these days at four o'clock for tea and cake, we use as a grease for easing social situations, an icebreaker, a catalyst. The lord in the manor house, the plumber rescuing the flooded bathroom, the shop worker on a break, the nervous conference delegate - all reach for a cuppa. Isn't that a lovely word, cuppa. So friendly, so welcoming.

But the way you take your tea, and the type of tea you take can "matter".
I remember vividly the last visit we made to see my great aunt: "Earl Grey or builder's tea?" she asked my mother. It was clear which was the correct answer. Builder's tea meant PG Tips or Tetley, in bags rather than loose, can be made in a mug rather than a teapot. Builder's tea was not to be thought of in polite society.
Of course my great aunt had rapidly developing Alzeheimer's at the time - it may just have been that she couldn't remember what type of normal tea she had in.

I never really drank tea at home, but I had the same box of jasmine teabags with me throughout university and a box of Sainsbury's red label to take with me whenever I went abroad. Not for me, really, but for people out there who thought you couldn't possibly be English if you didn't have tea and would expect to drink it if they came to your flat.
Real English people actually miss Marmite and sometimes Dairy Milk, even if we know it's not really chocolate. And we know the vital things about making tea that so many non-Brits miss. Orwell's 11 rules of teamaking, from the 1940s http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm. If you don't like tea, it might be that you are not using boiling water. Unlike coffee, a cup of warm water just won't cut it for tea, it just comes out insipid.

Another relationship came and went, its passing aided by hot sweet tea, the universal panacea. The next man I met though had a real passion for tea. More than anyone else I ever met - but it turned out that it was a passion born of knowledge. His father was a tea trader! Sadly I never got to meet him. Visiting his mother was a revelation though - separate bedrooms, the only contact in the bedroom felt to be permissible was the delivery of a cup of tea at 7.30am. And I once got the order wrong and added tea to the milk I had already put into a delicate teacup.
I was gently chastised... while it was of course possible to make one's tea that way would I mind taking that cup and pouring another putting the milk in second because it was a silly thing but the hot tea might scald the milk in the cup. I felt terribly socially inept - rather like the second Mrs de Winter in "Rebecca".
Since then it seems that the science is actually against this view http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/jun/24/netnotes.sallybol ton, as is the social etiquette prescribed by Twinings, the teamakers http://www.twiningsfs.co.uk/extrainfo/howto.html. So who knows?

Living abroad again meant more coffee and what the Belgians call "infusion" - herbal tea to us Brits even if there is no actual tea in it. It became part of the Tuesday night home group ritual - whoever arrived first filled a flask with boiling water and put the box of mixed herbal teabags on the coffee table. We would gather, hugging the mugs against the bitter cold of a Belgian winter, sharing a teabag if there weren't quite enough to go round. I really valued that time together, the social bit before the bible study proper, sharing our weeks and our thoughts in a way that's so different from other social environments, feeling genuine pleasure, pride in others, empathy and sympathy.

I've come to realise that I'd rather drink a bad tea than a bad coffee. Both interminable meetings and the NHS have taught me that.
When my son was born I spent ten days in hospital waiting for him to recover. The orange builder's tea was just about drinkable (unlike the coffee which fitted the old joke "tastes of mud? Well it was ground only a few minutes ago"...) The tea stained the cup and my teeth and was infinitely improved for a teaspoon of sugar. Sitting on one of those trolley beds, watching my tiny son sleeping fitfully in a plastic fishtank beside me, unsure how to help him but knowing the only way to feed him was to take in as much fluid as possible, the tea was strangely comforting.
Similarly the wake after my grandmother's funeral, held in the methodist church hall and provided with incredible generosity by the other old ladies there who had known her for decades, was a teetotal affair and again that industrial urn-brewed tea was a comfort.

Good times and bad. But I know for certain that our experiences make us who we are, and I wouldn't trade where I am now. Not for all the tea in China.