Breakfast Tea and Ten-Year Friendships
I love Tea. I especially love cradling a cup of Breakfast Tea in my hands and sipping it slowly. It might be one of the few British things that I hold a lot of love for - a good cuppa.
This week I caught up with a friend and ended up crashing at hers. In the morning, I went downstairs and made us both a cup of tea.
Me at 10:30am: “I’m going to have this tea and leave”
Somewhere around lunchtime - dregs of tea cold in the bottom of our cups and one vanilla cream wafer roll sitting lonely in the corner of the previously full pack - my friend turned to me and said, “We’ve encouraged each other about a lot of things at this table”.
It took me a second to register what she was saying but she was right. 10-years ago our friendship was forged around that table during late-night chats until silly o’clock.
We spoke about who we thought we’d marry, when we thought we’d get married, about how excited we were to move out, about how excited we were to be parents one day, about jobs we wanted, people we didn’t like, movies we loved. Everything.
One of the reasons I love hot drinks in general is that you’re forced to slow down as you drink them. As you go to sip, you have to regulate your breathing, try your best to cool at least the surface-level liquid, and sip just enough to satisfy your thirst without burning your tongue. If I let it be, there are times when drinking hot drinks feels like mindfulness.
As we sat drinking our tea we reminisced over the significant moments of the last 10 years of our lives. Some of our desires had become realities, some turned out to be naive hopes and others are still to be categorised.
In the business and speed of our lives these days, as women with homes to take care of, careers we’re figuring out, and marriage and relationships to tend to, I was grateful for a second to regulate my breathing, to take stock of how far we’ve come and to sip my cup of tea.
A song for today’s post. Listen with a cup of something hot.