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We've all been a little under the weather for the last few days and me and the kids woke up feeling pretty bad this morning. The kids successfully grifted their way out of going to school. It was borderline at best and as we all recuperated after the first couple of hours they came close to getting sent in late. I am sure that when I pretended to be ill as a kid I'd keep up the pretence all day, but they were arguing and getting a bit scrappy over a game of Monopoly by 11am.
They got the whole day off. To be fair, if they have what I have then they needed it. But comedians can’t skive off. Unless you count their entire career.
I once skived off school - and I'd have been at least ten at this point - because we were going to be making cups of tea and coffee in Home Economics and the idea terrified me so much that I pretended to be ill to avoid it. I think my mum knew I was pretending and she knew I was stressed about the incredibly difficult task of making a hot drink and so decided that the fear had actually made me ill. Bad luck mum. You were wrong. I was fine. Just terrified of making a cup of tea.
This is one of the weirder aspects of my admittedly occasionally weird childhood (and adulthood). I am not sure why the idea of using a kettle to make a drink filled me with such dread. It wasn't just when I was 10. Pretty much right up to University I found the idea of drinking (or even making) tea or coffee unbearable.
I liked cold, sweet drinks - I had a ridiculous sweet tooth and was incredibly fussy about what I would eat. I hadn't even tried tea of coffee. I was that fearful of them that I wouldn't let them near me. I didn't know how they tasted, I just knew I didn't like the taste. Perhaps fair enough with coffee, which I hated the smell of. There was a coffee shop on Weston-super-Mare High Street that I had to hold my breath and run past. But tea? It wasn't the smell I was worried about, so what was it?
I can only assume it was something to do with associating these drinks with adulthood. I didn't want to drink grown up drinks because I wanted to stay being a kid. Did they represent a terror of growing up and having to be mature and not finding it funny to say "wee wee, poo poo, bottom" any more? So scared of being asked to make a cup of tea and possibly then having to drink some.
It carried on into teenage years where I should have been cooler. I would be embarrassed if anyone offered me a tea or coffee and just feel awkward and unable to explain (or really understand) why I found all this so excruciating. It was like having to say I was a virgin to everyone I met. Which I was.
I had huge anxiety about not really knowing how to make a cup of tea (why did I skive off the lesson?), which I suppose still exists today in all my anxiety about not being able to do anything practical and agonising over setbacks with bureau keys and sofa legs, which I know will be ultimately resolved, but are symbolic of my redundancy as a worthwhile human.
How long do you leave the tea bag in for? How much milk are you supposed to put it? Why is anyone drinking this shit? There weren't even any rules because everyone wanted it differently, so I just avoided making hot drinks and if anyone offered me one, rather than saying "No thanks, I'm OK" I'd say, "No, I don't drink tea of coffee" and just look weird. Which was only right. Because I was weird. I still don't fully understand it.
Ultimately, though I still didn't start drinking tea and coffee til University (and rarely even then) I was forced into learning how to make tea when I went on an archaeological dig when I was 18 and was the lowest of the low on the site and so charged with making tea for everyone. And boy that was a baptism of a calor gas fire as I went straight into making tea for 20+ people at once in a huge kettle and had no idea what I was meant to do and had to ask someone. I was very useless at the archaeology but the fact that I didn't know how many teabags I would need for that many people (when it's pretty obvious it's one a person) must have made them wonder what they'd been lumbered with.
I must have done it though.
Now I love coffee and think tea is OK and an easily make the drinks for anyone that asks. It turns out it was ridiculously easy.
I might need to go into therapy to really get to the bottom of what is going on with all this.
I had a fabulous evening talking to Count Binface and James Acaster (same person? I'm not allowed to say) and only really starting to crumple through illness towards the end of the second interview. James' fabulous new special is out in December and is all about how quirky traumas in childhood led to him being who he is and hating and loving the job he does. So maybe my tea-phobia is something similar.
It was strange interviewing a man with a bin on his head for an hour, but then also weird to interview a man without a bin on his head for an hour. It's all quite strange.
