July 2025

Sometimes in our weekly convos, Frank Mitchell and I don’t see eye to eye, and our chat this week demonstrated such an impasse. This time, the hot topic concerned making a cup of tea, a matter I hold strong opinions on. It appears that the Gen-Z’ers are at it again. As if their love of matcha and mullets isn’t bad enough, they’ve only gone and taken to making their brew in the microwave: the horror! And Frank’s response?  Fairly ambivalent. He then confessed to not even owning a teapot. Readers, I was scandalised. To make matters worse, he admitted, (with no hint of shame) that he is a dunker of teabags, and that sometimes, should his mood need bolstering, he could finish his hot beverage with no fewer than three bags lurking at the bottom of the mug!

What an abomination! This is more than taking liberties with your Lipton; it’s a crime against tea; a bastardisation of a brew; a plague upon your Punjana.

I mean, the clue is in the name, isn’t it? A brew is something that you, well, brew.  A decent cup has to infuse a while to let all the tea-y flavour emerge in all its delicately piquant goodness. The Mothership takes her tea-making very seriously. Down in the Ballyholme kitchen, there live an assortment of teapots, but only the stainless steel are in use, the ceramics are a mere decoration, as they don’t keep the tea hot enough. When I was growing up she preferred loose tea, but that was bloody awful as I was always forgetting and ended up with a mouthful of leaves. Desperate altogether.

‘Will you like a cup of tea?’ she’ll ask, with seconds of your arrival.

‘Obviously,’ I’ll reply.

‘Who else is taking tea?’ she will enquire, and I will have to secure an answer quickly, because this will dictate which teapot will be employed, and how many teabags are used, as a strict drinker to bag ratio prevails. Should there be more drinkers than tea, another bag could be added, but this is done under duress as apparently it diminishes the quality of one’s cup. On to the hob it goes, and then, you wait, for precisely four minutes. When, and only when the microwave timer has pipped, can your tea be poured. And the milk goes in first, by the way. And the Mothership milks her own tea, always, as she takes barely a whisker and how she hasn’t burnt the oesophagus off herself is anybody’s guess.

I mentioned the ‘m’ word there. Gen Z’ers please note- the microwave timer can be used as a TIMER for for tea, and at a push, to reheat a cup. But never for the whole procedure. That’s a firm no. I’m glad we’ve that settled.

Once my friend Gayle had two Japanese friends visiting and my mum dutifully made them tea and homemade scones and served it up on a tray in her delightfully retro tea set. No joke, they said it was a highlight of their trip, in fact they referred to it as an Irish Tea Ceremony. The Mothership dined out on this for years.

So that’s a brief history of me and tea. I could go on, at length, but I won’t, and shall go now and relax and enjoy a cup. I advise you to do the same.

Every time I visit my reflexologist* she reminds me, ‘You can always say no. And ‘No’ is a full sentence.’ She’s right of course. I constantly take on too many things, feel overwhelmed, and stressed out, with the accompanying tension headaches and stiff shoulders creeping up towards my ears. If I do say no to something I find myself over-explaining, as though I have to justify my refusal. 

If you too are a chronic people-pleaser, I suggest you read ‘Please Yourself‘ by Emma Reid Turrell and ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k’ by Sarah Knight. Both are very helpful in making you check your ‘Yes reflex’; which I am convinced is a very female thing, where we feel we must acquiesce to others in order to appear ‘nice’ and ‘kind’, like the ‘good girls’ we were brought up to be. 

I really wish I’d learnt to say ‘no’ to things earlier. Saying ‘no’ would have meant that I didn’t have to go to a Hen Party of some random in Edinburgh as a favour to a friend, sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Horny Helen.’ Or going along to parties in my twenties when I knew rightly I was only being invited to boost the numbers or going to a piece of excruciating theatre to support a friend I never see anymore. Those are all hours I will never get back. 

But I am learning, albeit slowly, to say ‘no’ a bit more. A phrase that has helped me is thinking, ‘what am I saying no to if say yes to this? If you have built time into your week to put on a face-mask and sip a prosecco, or watch three consecutive episodes of Gilmore Girls with your kids, then that should trump someone’s last minute request. It’s just a thought to all those people out there who are constantly checking their phones and never feeling off the clock. It’s damaging. It’s unfair. And it’s unsustainable. Later this morning I’ll be on U105 about this very topic, based on a brilliant article in The Guardian yesterday. I am more than happy to admit, I’m very much still a work in progress when it comes to this. In the meantime, here’s a piece I had published in Mslexia a while ago, on a small word which has become a bit of a trigger…

Just

Of all the four-letter words, the very worst one, which sets my jaw a-flicker and makes my eyelid twitch, is the seemingly innocuous word ‘just.’ When used as an adverb I believe it to be multi-faceted in its odiousness.

‘Just’ can be the jagged edge tagged on to a compliment. ‘Your new hair’s lovely, it’s just…’ There you are, smile at the ready and maybe about to relax into the moment when you hear the ‘just’ and you know they actually hate it. I think anyone with an opinionated mother can identify with that one.

Then there’s the ‘just’ of rejection. ‘It’s just that it doesn’t quite work,’ or ‘it doesn’t just ring true,’ or the generic dismissal, ‘just isn’t what we need right now.’ Fine, you want to say, ‘Just don’t get my hopes up next time.’

Or perhaps it’s that time-thief colleague or the annoying neighbour you skulk behind the hedge to avoid whose opening gambit is, ‘I’ll just take a minute of your time.’ It’s never a minute though, is it? Experience dictates that unless you shut them down quickly you can wave goodbye to the next half hour.

Worse than all of these, though, (and I’m convinced that this particularly pertains to women in the workplace,) is when it is used to couch a demand. How often is a request prefaced with ‘just’, as though the extra work is a mere scintilla, so slight you may not even notice it atop of your already teetering to-do list. How ironic, that a word which stems from the Latin, meaning righteous, is used to undermine or play down a time-consuming task?

If it really is ‘just’ one small thing, a thing so small that is barely a thing at all, then you could be forgiven for retorting, in as sweet a voice as you muster, ‘Maybe, you could just do it yourself then?’ 

For all of the above scenarios, I suggest you delve into your other four-word arsenal for a response, even if you decide to ‘just’ whisper it to yourself. Mslexia, Elevenses Newsletter, November 2023

*Yes. I accept how middle-class that sounds. Don’t care. Geraldine is a gift from God.