Category: Morning tea

Café Ole – a working brew

Café Ole plays jolly, sunny, house-ish music with chiming piano, in contrast to the overcast day and heavy roadworks outside. Intermittent drilling adds to the soundtrack. There’s a large counter that juts half way out into the café, with an enormous coffee machine and an impressive selection of cakes, and the interior is bright, warm and welcoming after the gloom outside. An old man sits in the window, dozing, his head nodding towards his knees. Every so often it dips too low and he pulls it up sharply, then starts dozing again. 

Check out the mug

There are plenty of people here, but there’s only conversation from one table because the rest of us are on our own, most with laptops and one with a headset too. Some only have tea on their tables, maybe a good sign. Agile waiting staff dodge and weave between the tables. There’s another writer, busily scribbling on A4 sheets, leaning on a magazine, the author stopping every so often to consider the roadworks and the HGVs lurching awkwardly into sideroads to avoid them.

My tea arrives in a lovely big round mug, with the bag steeping nicely and a spoon on the side, plus a very generous jug of oat milk. There’s no tag on the bag, but the brew looks rich and promising. I’m not blown away, but the tea is warm and satisfying, and the cup is delightful to hold.

It’s a lovely place to sit, and a pleasant place to work – it looks like quite a few locals have clocked that. There’s also a luscious looking menu as well as the cakes, and the lunch crowd are starting to trickle in. I might pop back later on, with my laptop. 

Graveney & Meadow tea – twenty out of ten for tea

Graveney & Meadow hasn’t been open for long this morning, but it already seems to have woken up. It’s dark inside, and it isn’t brightened by the retro décor or the fairy lights that hang from the ceiling. People are wheeling in buggies with toddlers trotting along beside them or wide-eyed babies, goggling at new surroundings, clutched on one hip. Snatches of squeeze box drift out of the corner where the buggies are lined up, drawing commentary. Toddler requests for lunch are declined, but plates stacked high with muffins and hash browns, with fluffy parmesan on top, are making me hungry too.

The bar man explains that he needs to take some food to people, so he’ll bring my tea over. I don’t mind waiting – my chair is really comfortable. Actually, all the chairs here look like they’d be good for extended sitting. It’s a nice change from the move-on-quickly-please hard chairs in so many places. The tea arrives shortly afterwards, neatly laid out on a tray. The cup is nice and thick, the oat milk is slightly frothy, and the teapot is of the metal, Tardis variety1 – so what looks like a one-cup serving should comfortably yield two full cups, hopefully without scalding the hands. 

Some excellent tea

It’s bag tea, without an identifying tag. I’ve left it to brew for a while, so when I pour it out – successfully, it’s not a true Tardis pot – it’s nice and thick. It’s a solid brew, with plenty of body, richly malty and slightly astringent. And it’s perfect. Twenty out of ten. I bet that’s why all the parents are here – it takes a brew of that stature to get the show on the road again after an exhausting morning of fielding toddlers.

I can just about hear gently ambient music above clattering cutlery and bubbling conversation, then the squeeze box kicks in again, this time with singing, plus the bar man banging coffee out of the machine’s filter. A doddering toddler keeps wandering to the main door and trying to push it. It’s too heavy to give access to the street, but nearly all the clientele look up every time there’s an attempt, just to make sure. 

Watching all this, I’ve managed to spill tea down my second favourite scarf. Although it makes me fit in nicely with most of the other people here, I’m going to head home and sort it out. Back for more twenty-out-of-ten tea soon. 

  1. Ben Elton’s The Man From Auntie, at 2:32, though it’s really worth watching the whole thing – it has aged very well. ↩︎

Night Riviera

I feel as if I’m on a ferry, not a train. The head end of my bed seems to roll backwards every so often as the train lurches round bends.

When the knock at the door comes, The Wife is already up and ready to retrieve the morning dose of the Sacred Liquid. Getting hold of it means navigating the suitcase that wouldn’t fit under the bottom bunk and which now takes up the entire tiny floorspace, then retrieving the tray from the steward while stopping the door from slamming the tray back into the corridor.

It doesn’t look promising. There are two paper cups of hot water, two plastic-wrapped pastries and two packets of biscuits, plus tea paraphernalia including bags in sachets, sugar, milk and those long wooden stirrers that pierce the bag and result in gritty tea, if you’re not extremely careful. I had banked on being given generic non-dairy milk in one of the plastic pots with the foil lids that contain very little liquid, but which can project their contents a surprising distance. Instead, there are sachets of actual milk.

While I hum and ha about whether to have black tea or add the milk, The Wife brews hers up. The bag is in a foil sachet with a Union Jack. ‘Tregothnan’, it says. ‘THE TEA GROWN IN ENGLAND.’ I’m hesitant, but The Wife has already got stuck into hers, and reports that it’s great.

‘I like the packaging,’ she says. ‘Bold and memorable. Very excellent colour very quickly, the water temperature was spot on, though I could have done with a bit more water in there because I could have done with a bigger tea in a bigger cup. I feel like a bigger cup would have done more justice to the tea bag because I felt like I could only dip the tea bag before taking it out. It was a quality teabag that had strength. I was happy with one milk sachet. Usually I only use a quarter of a sachet because the tea’s so weak. I liked that it came on a tray, it was a little moment of Agatha Christie.’ It went down far too quickly, she laments, and she could have done with another three or four cups.

I score a sip of hers to decide on the milk question. She’s right – it’s excellent, and she makes me an identical one. The paper cup is much better than a plastic one; I have no idea why. The Wife perches on the bottom bunk, bent awkwardly and without sufficient headroom to sit up and enjoy the ambrosial brew, while I sit back on the top bunk with my cup, watching the scenery, braving cold blasts of air conditioning and trying not to spill any when the train pitches and rolls. Like The Wife’s tea, mine is over too soon and we return the tray to the steward with grateful compliments, because this lovely welcoming drink was far more than we expected.

We and our awkward luggage stumble down the corridor, on to the platform and into the lounge, where there is more of the same and the quantity deficit is repaired. We are ready to do the day.