A BOX OF TEA

A Box Of Tea
Episode 1 – The Music in Aisle 9

Let me tell you what happened to me a few days ago.

Actually… I’m not even sure how to tell this story because it’s so unbelievably weird that, if someone else told it to me, I probably wouldn’t believe a single word of it.

It all started at my local supermarket.

I was there to buy a box of tea.

So I wandered over to Aisle 9, the aisle where you’d find tea, coffee, sugar and a hundred other things I wasn’t remotely interested in. All I could think about was getting home, putting the kettle on and enjoying a nice hot cup of tea.

Tea is a funny thing, though, when you think about it, isn’t it?

The Japanese often think of it as part of their culture. The Chinese proudly claim it as theirs. The British couldn’t imagine life without it. Persians and Arabs love it too. Come to think of it, perhaps we’re all far more alike than we are different. Wherever we come from, when it’s cold outside, very little beats a steaming mug of tea and a couple of biscuits.

Anyway…

There I was, standing in Aisle 9, when I heard music.

It sounded vaguely Scottish… or perhaps Irish. I’m no expert, so don’t hold me to that. There was nothing strange about the music itself. I actually quite like that sort of music.

The strange part was where it seemed to be coming from.

The tea aisle, of all places.

I paused for a moment and looked around.

Perhaps the supermarket was playing it through the ceiling speakers, I thought.

That seemed like the most sensible explanation, so I ignored it, picked up a box of Aboxotea and headed for the checkout.

The girl at the till scanned the box, looked at it, then looked at me.

“Hmm… something, something, something,” she said.

She paused for a second.

“Yeah?” she asked.

At that exact moment, I thought, Why is this girl making my brain burn precious calories?

I had a job interview later that day, and I was already trying to save every ounce of mental energy for questions like, “What’s your biggest weakness?” or “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

The truth was…

I hadn’t actually heard a word she’d said.

I had my earphones in.

I took the left one out, smiled confidently, tried to look cool, nodded as though I’d been paying close attention and replied,

“Yeah… totally.”

Then I silently prayed she hadn’t realised I’d just answered a question I hadn’t even heard.

“Cool,” she said.

A tiny twinkle flashed in her ocean-blue eyes.

Her smile told me I’d somehow given the right answer.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

I like it when the autopilot version of me handles everyday situations without getting the Walter Mitty version of me involved too much. I call it multi-masking, and I’m surprisingly good at it.

I really liked her.

A lot.

I liked her more than the World Cup, fried chicken, Bumblebee and Dobby combined.

I just never found the courage to ask her out.

Instead, I dealt with her the same way I watch football.

Music in my ears.

Eyes glued to the screen.

Completely oblivious to anything capable of making a sound.

Which, looking back…

…probably wasn’t my finest moment.

A Box Of Tea
Episode 2 – Chloe

I put the box of tea down on my kitchen table and put the kettle on. I watched the kettle and discovered it’s simply not true that a watched kettle never boils.

I’d always thought all those gurgly, blurbly noises the kettle makes were its way of saying, “You’ve got thirty seconds, mate. Hurry up, or your cuppa’s going to be an embarrassment.”

So grab a mug… just don’t be one.

Back then, I remember thinking, Oh, sugar! And no, that’s not me masking a swear word. I’d literally forgotten to buy a packet of fucking sugar, even though I’d gone to the shop specifically to get one.

I thought to myself, It’s alright. I get to see Chloe again. That alone made up for the otherwise boring trip to the shop.

All of a sudden, Alexa started playing some sort of tap-dancing music. I shouted, “Alexa, shut up!” but Alexa was broken, as per usual, ignored me completely, and carried on blasting the stupid music.

The second time music had distracted me that day. I’d probably forgotten to buy sugar because of the music I’d heard in the shop earlier.

As soon as I got to the shop, I noticed Chloe wasn’t on the till.

Brilliant, I thought. She’s not here, and this trip’s been an absolute waste of time.

So I grabbed a packet of sugar and started walking towards the till when I heard the soft, beautiful voice of an angel behind me.

It was Chloe.

I’d known Chloe since Year 7. We went to the same school, sat through the same assemblies and walked the same corridors, yet we never really got to know each other. Then school ended, life happened, and we drifted apart. Funny how someone can disappear from your life without ever really leaving your mind.

In her lovely Manchester accent, she called my name and asked if I could grab her phone, which was balanced on top of a huge stack of boxes of tea she was carrying over to the tea aisle.

Her hair was naturally blonde, but she always dyed it jet black with blue, pink and yellow tips at the back.

I helped her stack the boxes on the shelf and, when we were finished, she gave me a huge thank-you hug.

I never thought young people were capable of hugs like that. I’d always assumed parents and grandparents had monopolised that particular skill.

Her hair smelled like an expensive perfume shop.

She smiled and said, “Thank you. I’ve never asked a guy to help me with anything before.”

I replied, “No worries. I’ve never walked a girl down the aisle before.”

Although I’m almost certain it came out sounding like Porky Pig from Looney Tunes.

She somehow managed to make me blush, stutter and feel warm in both my face and my head all at the same time.

Yet, for some reason, I never woke up thinking, Today’s the day I’m going to ask Chloe out.

That sort of thing was for brave people.

I was a coward and, strangely enough, I was quite comfortable with that.

That day I learned two fascinating facts about Chloe.

Firstly, like an ant, she could apparently carry fifty times her own body weight.

Secondly, she had the most infectious giggle I’d ever heard.

She laughed so loudly at my joke that almost everyone nearby stopped what they were doing and looked in our direction.

Did she like me too?

I only wondered because my joke really wasn’t that funny.

She lowered her voice and said,

“Someone must’ve dropped a phone in the middle of the tea aisle. Every time it rings, it plays this ridiculous tap-dancing music. Me and my colleague have been tap dancing to it since we started the shift. It’s been hilarious. We looked for the phone as well, but we never found it.”

I couldn’t help thinking how weird it was.

The exact same thing had happened with my Alexa at home earlier that day.

Bloody hackers, I thought.

I paid for the packet of sugar and went home thinking about Chloe the whole way.

A Box Of Tea
Episode 3 – Tea Milk 2 Sugars

I put the packet of sugar next to the box of tea and grabbed my favourite mug.

The mug said, “Tea Milk 2 Sugars.”

It was exactly how I liked my tea. It also happened to be the name of my favourite podcast. I loved it, and I still do, because they never hold back. They always tell it like it is. That’s how people live their lives up north. It’s woven into the fabric of our culture.

I put the kettle on again.

My grandad taught me how to make a proper cup of tea. He always believed that how you do something is how you do everything. And if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

Thanks to him, I knew exactly how I was going to make my tea.

The right way to make tea is simple: teabag in, pour in the hot water, add the milk, then add the sugar… if you’re not sweet enough already.

Then there are the people who pour the milk into the mug first, dunk the teabag into the cold milk, and only then add the hot water.

Grandad had a name for those people.

“Teadiots.”

I reached for the box of tea to grab a teabag when the music started playing again.

“Alexa, shut up!” I shouted.

The music stopped for a split second… then started again.

Only this time, it wasn’t coming from the speaker.

It was coming from the box of tea.

I frowned for a few seconds.

Then it clicked.

Chloe and her mates hadn’t been able to find the phone because they’d overlooked it.

It had to be inside the tea box.

“Absolute divs,” I muttered.

I was already imagining how impressed Chloe was going to be when I handed her the missing phone with its ridiculous ringtone still blaring away.

I picked up the box and turned it over in my hands.

Everything looked perfectly normal.

Except…

It definitely felt a little heavier than it should have.

For a moment, I pictured some poor worker at the ABOXO TEA factory frantically searching for their missing phone while it was making its way across the country inside a box of tea.

I smiled.

It looked like I was about to become the hero who returned it.

To be fair, I’d heard of people finding stranger things in boxes of tea.

Pebbles.

Human hair.

Even wedding rings.

And, in one particularly bizarre case, someone in China reportedly found an entire dried frog inside a packet of tea.

But a mobile phone?

Now that really took the biscuit.

I guess I was having a Jimmy B. Rabbit moment because my arms were heavy and my palms were sweaty.

Speaking of heavy, the box felt slightly heavier than usual.

The suspense and anticipation were killing me. The music was no less loud, and whoever was ringing this phone really needed to talk to its owner.

It can’t be a Samsung or an iPhone, I thought. The box’s extra weight was nowhere near heavy enough to be a phone.

I removed the cellophane.

Slowly and carefully, I pulled the lid open and looked inside the box.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

There were some teabags, which was normal.

However, I couldn’t put into words, or even process, the rest.