George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father | Hacker News Reader

George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father

theguardian.com

73 pointslermontov25 comments

As a Brit, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment

| “Use tea from India or Ceylon (Sri Lanka), not China,” it starts. “Use a teapot, preferably ceramic. Warm the pot over direct heat. Tea should be strong, six spoons of leaves per litre. Let the leaves move around the pot. No bags or strainers. Take the pot to the boiling kettle. Stir or shake the pot. Drink out of a tall, mug-shaped teacup. Don’t add creamy milk. Add milk to the tea, not vice versa. No sugar!”

That comes from a 1946 essay by Orwell named "A nice cup of tea". He published it directly after the second world war when rationing and limited imports were a recent memory. But as you say it broadly describes how we've drunk tea in the UK up to now. The main difference is probably that teabags are now much more common than tea leaves.

Britain has a complex history with tea due to historical reasons. For a nation that claims to love tea, it's surprising that we generally don't care about drinking whole-leaf or single-origin. A British cup of tea is some sort of Baudrillardian simulacrum. Just compare it to wine or coffee, where blends are the cheap stuff which you avoid if you can. I believe the same was once true here, but WW2 - combined with our colonial history - changed everything. The book "Infused: Adventures In Tea" by Henrietta Lovell [0] has a nice section about this.

For any "builders tea" drinkers interested in expanding their horizons, I'd recommend giving Yunnan gold leaves a go. You can buy a sample from online retailers like Adagio [1] (although have to pay delivery). Just boil and drink with milk in the normal fashion. The natural sweetness and earthiness of it blew my socks off the first time I tried it. Interestingly, Twinings' "Everyday" tea bags include some leaves sourced from Yunnan [2].

[0] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/196229938560

[1] https://www.adagiotea.co.uk/black/yunnan_gold.html

[2] https://twinings.co.uk/products/everyday-80-tea-bags

Perfect, thanks, I'll try that out. Obviously in additon to my Yorkshire addiction.

What does a typical British "Tall, mug-shaped teacup" look like?

Genuinely curious, since I can only think about tea party with the Queen with some delicate china when I think of brits drinking tea. And I don't like small/wide teacups.

I would love to get a genuine British cup/mug.

I don't think we have particularly different mugs to what you'd drink coffee or herbal teas out of in the US.

This is probably the most common shape you'd expect to see in someone's house: https://i.etsystatic.com/7320577/r/il/c46fa1/1742208467/il_f...

A more stylish approach would be like this: https://teaunboxed.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/tea-...

This is what you'd probably get in a standard cafe: https://1975.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Great-British-...

This is what I think of when someone says "tall" mug: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/269441990179867455/

Thicker walked ceramic mugs are definitely common in the UK, and probably more common now than anything else, but me and my gran both agree that a proper cup of tea needs serving in a thin-walled, fine-china cup, like this: https://fegghayespottery.co.uk/product/plain-270ml-bone-chin...

In the States indeed these mostly look like bog standard coffee mugs. The tall one exists as a design but it’s rarer. I can’t speak for the OP but my experience is that media about Great Britain in America often depicts tea mugs as different (I’ve seen many shorter, smaller and flatter variants) than those mugs. Perhaps it is to highlight that the beverage is tea and not something else like coffee to the viewer.

Ok, thanks! That was a wide variety, and what you'd probably call a regular coffee mug here in Sweden.

But that is information too, that there is no true tall British tea mug.

Orwell's original essay says:

> one should drink out of a good breakfast cup—that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold—before one has well started on it.

So I suspect that "tall" is a byword for "not shallow".

I know this is going to sound like heresy, but I’m a milk first person. Warmed up milk not cold.

It's simply so you don't put too much milk in. Whether rationing or not, without eyeballing if the white liquid you put in the white cup is enough, or you need 1ml more. If you put the tea in first and milk last, you see the colour change as you carefully titrate the milk in and disaster can be averted :)

Orwell's detail on that point is as follows:

> The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I wonder if wasting milk was a greater concern at the time, when the country had recently come out of rationing.

Personally, I am also milk-first. There's less risk of the milk denaturing as it heats up more slowly. This is especially true for alternative milks such as oat or soy (which Orwell no doubt would have despised).

Very good point about the rationing during Orwell’s time and also non dairy milks

What a great interview, with an unusual perspective … the son mainly knows Orwell secondhand, but understands him in a way that no scholar or fan or friend or journalist ever could.

I happen to be re-reading Burmese Days at the moment, which I think is his best after 1984. The movie 1984 with John Hurt is also very powerful - I watched it with my teenager a few years ago and he was transfixed.

Burmese Days is my favorite Orwell. It captures the state of the colonies under British rule extremely well - the British new-arrivals who are derisive and at best ignorant of the local customs, the British who've grown up in the colony and are more sympathetic but stuck in a world where they'll never truly belong, the extremely corrupt rich locals, the poor mob who are easily misled, the endemic corruption in everything...

This novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes would have rung true.

> novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes

The colonialists did, but the baggage never left. Turns out oppression/corruption/subjugation/feudalism/communalism/obscurantism/cronyism is politically and/or economically profitable. The current ruling class learnt well from their predecessors.

I've read 1984 as a poorly-drawn frame story meant to convey* Orwell's sincere argument, in the form of Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which baldly states that even without colonialism in the picture, you ("the Middle") probably will still have to live with the extremely corrupt rich locals ("the High") and the poor mob who are easily misled ("the Low"), etc. etc.

* or at best to provide a motive filling in the implicit blank left by TaPoOC's truncation: "deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists..."

ПЖ would claim later that the oppression and continuous warfare are merely unfortunate side effects! (Joke?)

The motive consists simply of helping society be more effective!!*

(Riffing on 2-ish Nussbaum-Sen derived questions:

1. How to hand out capabilities to the effective/viral but not necessarily wise.[0]

2. How to immediately extract the foremost interesting issue with any framework... that some undergrad can fix before you even sit down at your studydesk in your chalet tonight.

*at learning/earning as a team. "too much information" is consensually the thing to insure against in the Overton; other things detractors ("prigs"/殺氣者) warn you about are to be reflexively dismissed as acts/will of god(s)

**Otoh info asymmetry foments corruption. "moral hazard" is translatable to irl outcomes.

***not touching the CFG analysis directly atm, indeed, because those tractability monsters pull you under when you forget to focus on interestingness

https://aarushgupta.com/2024/03/30/procrastination

[0] S-N's "thresholds" I read as a placeholder for a thermodynamically grounded app of "festina lente". Colloquially: When your heat baths are way too mismatched, your Carnot efficiency...

I actually wish more people knew about not only the 1984 and Animal farm from Orwell

> I happen to be re-reading Burmese Days at the moment, which I think is his best after 1984.

Better than Homage to Catalonia?!

I can't decide what my preference order would be, but I can admit that whatever literary criticism has to say on the matter, and I suspect it disagrees with me, I found "A clergyman's daughter" more fun to read than "Keep the aspidistra flying".

You can read all nine of Eric Blair's books here:

https://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell

Sadly, those texts are not perfect. I noticed a number of OCR errors. Also, in "Down and out in Paris and London" there's a whole chapter about slang and swearing but nearly all of the swearing is replaced by ——! Perhaps all the printed editions are just the same; I don't know. Perhaps someone here has a modern critical edition and can answer that. It's chapter 32 and the 7th paragraph, for example, starting with "The swear words also change", has the sentence "The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ——." Does anyone have an edition that has the last word of that sentence?

When I read a physical copy of the book published by Penguin I don't remember the slang being censored.

I have a 1980s edition of Burmese Days and the swears are censored. Bollocks becomes B____s.

The editor who decided to censor a book from Georges Orwell must have had a very interesting sense of humor…

I doubt they had the insight to find it ironic. The banality of just following orders, etc. etc.

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