teabags

Yes, I have 640 teabags.
Being a cultural hybrid of Belgo-English, or Anglo-Belgian, or Belgish as my mother-in-law calls it, I have some engrained habits of both nationalities. My British side is tea obsessed. And one thing that is almost impossible to get in Belgium is a Decent Cup of Tea, mainly due to the lack of Decent Teabags. Belgians swear by the Lipton Yellow stuff which does a very good impression of being tea but tends more to the colour and flavour of sawdust.


You can find decent British tea in Brussels, even in ordinary Delhaize or Carrefour sometimes, but they seem to think proper tea is some kind of delicacy and they sell PG Tips in boxes of 20 teabags at an extortionate rate that only a true addict would pay (more on that later). 20 teabags would probably last me about 3 days.

So as a family we engage in regular teabag smuggling, getting PG Tips supplies brought over by whoever can do so. Last time Matt went to London on business, he bought 3 boxes of 80 teabags and lugged them all the way to the Eurostar terminal only to have the bag disintegrate, leaving him with no other option than to decant the teabags from the boxes into his overnight bag and laptop case. It’s a wonder none of them ended up getting run through the washing machine with his socks after arrival back home. We had to store them somewhere and this is where my jar collection came in handy.

A few months ago a terrible thing happened. I had mistakenly assumed I had another jar of teabags stashed in the back of a cupboard but no! No tea to be found, and my mood darkened for it was a Monday morning at 8 a.m. when the only thing that saves me from a pit of gloom is a cup of tea with my tartine. I frantically called my mother, my PG Tips back-up supply, who by coincidence had also run out of teabags that weekend. Alarm and despondency on both ends of the telephone. Whatever shall we do? Carrefour had stopped stocking them…Stonemanor might have them but it’s out in the murky depths of Vlaams Brabant, or in the desperate ribbon development of Waterloo, and we have no means of transport! Could we face the trek? I’ve never been to Stonemanor. I expect it to be a place full of grim-faced British expats queuing in an orderly fashion for their fix of 8 euro jars of Branston pickle and cans of Strongbow while whingeing about the awful Belgian weather and absurd Belgian bureaucracy. Basically a shop full of people just like me. Nightmare.

An emergency supply of Yorkshire Teabags (not a patch on the old PG) was found in a local Delhaize that evening (where it is also marketed as some sort of exotic beverage with a pricetag to match), but everything British I have ever found in Delhaize mysteriously stops being sold there within a month or so, so it wasn’t long before I was back on the Liptons….

Thankfully we were due a trip to Norfolk a few weeks later, and were able to raid Tesco. I was gripped by tea panic and picked up as many boxes as I could carry, the 240 bag boxes causing havoc with our packing as it meant we couldn’t also fit in all the Fray Bentos pies Matt wanted to bring back. After some negotiating and rearranging of bags, we set off with 6 boxes of 160 teabags, 5 tinned pies of various flavours, 2 bottles of Ribena, a few jars of chutney, a box of shortbread, half a kilo of cheddar and some hot cross buns.

Needless to say the train journey back from Norwich to London on a Sunday with 2 suitcases, one laptop, one backpack and half a grocery store was fun and games (National British Railtrack “Express” liking to make travel on Sundays as awkward as it can by sending passengers by stopping train to Cambridge, then by coach to Wensdon Ambo where you have to lasso your own donkey to trek over the runway at Stansted, canoe down the river Chelmer and finally pick up a disaffected 1950s school bus to Kings Cross.)

Getting from London to Evere was a piece of cake by comparison.

The pies and perishables did not last long, but I am still working my way through the tea. I have got through 2 boxes (320 teabags) since May, that’s about 100 teabags a month. I should be safe until Christmas.