Two Cups of Tea

I sometimes find myself going calmly along a path of apparent insanity, as if it is the most conventional, well-ordered and sensible route to fine achievement that I could possibly have chosen. This morning, I awoke in a good mood, still rested from my lengthy April break, engendered by several warm days of London summer sun, buoyed up with the unassailable feeling that everything is going extremely well.

I slept deeply after being beautifully pampered as a result of going early to bed, having avoided evening television, which these days I find disturbing. My simple rule of thumb: any programme with either politicians or Bruce Willis, switch off. I do not want lies, explosions or Hollywood blood clogging my mental arteries.

I'm feeling quite fit and well, despite occasional bouts of sneezing brought on by early season hay fever (why is this not called "pollen fever"? - I see no fields of hay in inner London...) I have some sorting out to do with various business affairs, and I have some inroads to make, all of which are fairly unproblematic and of course now I am thankful for the great efforts I have made previously, since getting up frightfully early, travelling the world, explaining my particular creative take on internet media, and giving people good advice on podcasting seems to be paying off. I am enjoying my interactions with my friends and colleagues, who all seem to be talented, friendly and capable.

My underlying concerns are not too disturbing either, self-appointed tasks consisting of communicating the inner changes that I experienced in the mountains to the people in this and other cities who actually need to know. It's the age-old clash between urban and rural, as expressed via a boy from Croydon. And all this as a preamble to explain, no, to demonstrate my apparent sanity and level-headedness and to go some way towards proving to you, dear reader, that I don't generally do apparently insane things, like make two cups of tea at once, even though there is only me here.

Now it's totally clear to me how this came about. First, the initial cup of tea, made by GGF in a morning rush, was lukewarm and rather weak - unsatisfactory. Please note: this situation is often reversed, and we wait upon one other in a fair and balanced way, frequently attaining high standards both culinary and domestic. Since I love her, and she loves me, thus I have great compassion - particularly today, as she is I know still dazed from the excellent play we enjoyed before crashing out, stunned and exhausted by the sublime physical expression of the love we share. So, a model of tact, I said nothing, and merely waited until she was well into the clothes-donning part of her leaving sequence.

Then I went into the kitchen, and prepared my own cup of tea. Except that I calmly made TWO CUPS, as if compensating for the bad first cup. Making one cup immediately after the other, I can understand, but two at once? Then I get a hot cup and a going-on-lukewarm-again second cup. Actually, I rescued this outcome by using one of the ceramic lids which turn our cups and mugs into mini-teapots, and so, I'm drinking it now, and it's not too bad. But why did I make two cups at once? What was I thinking? I just found myself doing it, and went along with it, as if it were the most natural, normal thing in the world! For whom exactly am I making the second cup? Me! Me, and then me. Right. Right.

Now this may not seem all that insane to you, but I am convinced that this is how it begins - small actions, apparently insane, cropping up in the day-to-day melange of decisions and actions and consequences we call life, bizarre, counter-productive, non-sequiturs going unquestioned and unchecked. The brain, the regulating organ which is expected to keep us on track goes into a kind of "what the heck" mode, and the next thing you know, you're driving on the wrong side of the road with an oil-powered high-velocity wall of steel and glass moving towards you at a combined speed of 200 miles per hour, you're stepping off the very high balcony and whistling a jaunty tune as you cash in your kinetic energy and plummet fifteen floors into concrete, you're balancing the mains-powered music machine on the edge of your bubble bath...

Right now, I can live with the second cup of tea, enjoy it, feel good about myself. But what if this happens after some inconsolable badness has happened to me, when I am haggard and sleep-deprived after a mind-numbing credit-crunch of an argument with some deadbeat bigot, after the best bet I ever placed comes stumbling in last on broken legs and is shot dead at the finish, and I'm reeling like a tanked-up homeless piss-smelling drunkard looking for smack to take the edge off the brew? What then?

This is the fabric of the world - we are trapped beneath the warm duvet of stultifying convention and scared to be without it. Like Reggie Perrin, who faked his own death to escape, after ordering ravioli followed by ravioli followed by ravioli until he was sick, what we need is not more of what we like, but the freedom not to care about what we know to be valueless.