A call to tea

In an ideal world, we should work at what we love and love our work. The cruelest lie perpetuated by career advisers, human resource officers and other starting marshals of the rat race is that this is possible.
Certainly I tried - in a life previous to marriage, parenthood and the compulsory home-ownership dictated by a racist ‘welfare state’ - to do that. I was quite content with my shabby genteel existence and, I hope, brought mostly happiness to those around me.
But then reality intervened. As with Mr Crisp: “For me, it was in middle age that mundane activities claimed so much of my time. For my own sake, and for the sake of other people’s survival, I tried to take part in real life.”
My experience is far from unique. The venality of estate agents and property developers, and the policy of banks run by spotty adolescents (rather than middle-aged, fatherly pipe-smokers) to smirk at those who pass off their hobbies as ‘employment’, means most of us spend our best years engaged in the utterly pointless for the benefit of the utterly unspeakable. We can do little else, but we need not sink to the level of our oppressors. As another great individualist said: “We may all be in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Each morning we arrive at work, and even before the drudgery starts there is an opportunity to raise the standards. We can make a difference.We can, for a few minutes and with a deceptively simple ceremony, reintroduce in a small way the concept of living to generate pleasure, not pain.
In my earliest working years it was still the practice, be that workplace an office, a factory or a building site, for the most junior employee (or more usually the lowest status female employee) to make the tea before the day’s work started. When I moved to right on arty ‘collectives’ the sexism of this was challenged, though my co-workers - inevitably from privileged backgrounds - rarely (if ever) worried that younger, less formally educated working class folk seemed to do all the tea-making while they got on with ‘important’ things.
Even more recently, it was still the working custom that people took turns throughout the day to make tea for their immediate colleagues. With the retirement or weeding out by other means of older workers this instinctive camaraderie has vanished, leaving the workplace like a sinking ship in which everyone, supposedly, is out only for themselves and yet the individual and true individuality is not valued. Certainly these values are not cherished, because that would involve action rather than resigned indifference or even abject passivity in the face of corporate crud.
We could reintroduce the custom, at least by making that first cup of good cheer to greet co-workers.
Mostly the gesture will not be reciprocated, mostly we will not even be thanked. We should not expect to be, because the life of the individualist is an uphill struggle, though that struggle itself brings some purpose to an otherwise dull day at work.
But firstly the mood is lightened for a few minutes, which means the cranky comments and miserabilism which dominate most office culture do not prevail until later in the day, by which time we are better able to deal with them.
Secondly, it is curious to see what happens if we are absent one morning. Co-workers inevitably comment the next morning, which means that – at least briefly – they notice and may even join the campaign.
We can take things further.
No true individualist, for example, is content to drink tea made from a tea bag in a chipped mug sporting a corporate logo or bad joke. We should aim for tea in a teapot or coffee from at least a cafetiere served to our immediate circle. At the very least use a cup and saucer for yourself, preferably of Spode quality.
And even the worst workplaces perpetuate some custom of workers buying cakes on their birthdays for the office. Inevitably, these are awful supermarket sludge, while even senior management only stretch to corporate catering written off as ‘hospitality’ in the company accounts. We can do better here too. Home-made cakes – even if restricted by budget and pressure of time to immediate colleagues – raise the game considerably. As do, say, scones with jam and cream, which have the added advantage that people need to take time to assemble them individually.
Chairman Mao may have claimed that a revolution is not a tea party, but he was wrong. In fact, in my case a good tea party has sparked the best revolutions I have personally lent my hand to.