True lovers of wine postpone the encounter with their most faithful friend until sundown; meanwhile, however, the body demands liquids, if only to wash away the debris of the night before. Some drink water, which imparts a mean and self-centred healthiness to their features. Others prefer coffee, under the impression that it will reanimate the system. My own penchant is for tea: one of several things I have in common with Tony Benn.
In our family, tea was a symbol of class identity. Coffee was regarded with horror: it belonged with boardrooms, expense accounts, private yachts and that dreadful place known only as "abroad", from which Englishmen returned with vampire teeth and worm-infested bodies. We belonged to a different class than Tony Benn, but tea is a class symbol also for him: a symbol of his genial betrayal of the class that made him. And for both of us, it belongs to England, a country now being erased from the annals of world history but, in its day, the greatest political achievement of mankind.
It is a significant fact that our national drink should be a product of the Indian subcontinent: proof, if you needed it, that England became conscious of itself in India, much as Rome became conscious of itself in Greece. So far as I know, it never crossed my father's mind that the drink which, for him, epitomised the English working class and which was the true reason why the English had won the war, despite being led by officers all of whom were working for the enemy - that this drink was a product of the empire. Yet he made a huge distinction between the teas of India and those of China. The first were legitimate proletarian products, to be brewed to a deep mahogany colour and mixed with full-cream milk in pint-sized mugs. The second belonged with coffee, among the cosmopolitan temptations. Few sins were more culpable, to his way of thinking, than that of drinking Earl Grey - whose very name evoked the class enemy, and whose feminine aroma suggested dainty cups, crooked fingers and the genteel manners affected by people all of whom, in that blissful future to which he whisperingly referred, would be rounded up and shot.
Although my father's ideological embellishments of the tea question are not to my taste, I entirely endorse his taste in tea. And my subsequent career as a wino has confirmed that the best way to balance the night's enjoyment with a good day's work is with a pint of strong brown tea. But you must blend it yourself, from PG Tips or similar and the best Darjeeling (now hardly obtainable). Drink a pint of this in the morning for every pint of claret drunk at night and you will be granted a vision of England comparable to that which swims in the eyes of Tony Benn.
