the brilliantly leaping gazelle

This morning has gotten off to a truly dreadful start.  Appallingly bad, in fact.  I haven’t felt this low since… well I can’t recall but not for a long time anyway. 

I got up this morning and LMS made me a cup of tea.  I write ‘made’ but ‘made’ doesn’t cover the half of what she does. She makes tea in the same way a tailor makes a made to measure suit. Some people when they make a cup of tea turn the kettle on and then make a phone call or are otherwise distracted and then make the tea with water that boiled some minutes ago.  Or they make the tea, add the milk and the sugar, give it a stir and that’s it.  Or even worse, an unholy combination of the two. 

But not LMS, oh no. 

She waits by the kettle until it has boiled then a few seconds later she adds the boiling water to the cup.  Then she takes the teabag out and puts some milk in.  She then adds the sugar, which is where most people would stop and think their work here is done.  But no, she’s only just begun.  Like a chemist in a lab she carefully takes a sip of the tea from a teaspoon and decides if it needs more sugar or milk puts, the teaspoon down and if it dies, uses another teaspoon uses another one to add more sugar.  She gives that a stir, and repeats the testing element.  Sometimes, she will put the teabag back in and add more milk.  Her reasoning being that she wouldn’t serve me a tea that she wouldn’t herself drink.  Which is fine and dandy in my book. 

However, the reason I am so appalled this morning is because it has just dawned on me that the maker of consistently outstanding cups of tea will very soon be in a different part of the country to me.  Not an especially good start to the day.

Sherlock Holmes was given to remark that some of his problems were so fiendishly difficult to solve that he’d need three of pipes of cocaine to help him deduce. A three pipe problem, he’d call it. LMS has refined this so that making a cup of tea can become a three teaspoon problem.