Book review2-14: British life

I read British life. British and tea interested me.

The British population (over the age of ten) drinks about 200,000,000 cups of tea a day. That is an average of nearly 1,040 cups of tea a year for each person. Tea- mostly green tea from China- came to Britain in the late 1500s, but it was only for the very rich. It became cheaper about three hundred years later, when it was planted in India and later in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). People from all classes started drinking it. But some people thought that too much tea was bad for your health. So they started putting milk in it, to make it healthier!

Afternoon tea, high tea, lunch and dinner

Afternoon tea is a small meal, not a drink. Now most ordinary British families do not have time for afternoon tea at home, but in the past it was a tradition. It became popular about a hundred and fifty years ago, when rich ladies invented their friends to their houses for an afternoon cup of tea. They started offering their visitors sandwiches and cakes too. Soon everybody was enjoying this exciting new meal. But the British working population did not have afternoon tea. They had a meal at about midday, and a meal after work, between five and seven o’clock. This meal was called ‘high tea’, or just ‘tea’. Some families in Scotland and the north of England still have ‘high tea’ and some restaurants in these areas offer it too. High tea is a big meal with a main dish – meat for fish – followed by bread and butter and cakes. You drink lots of cups of tea with tea. Today most people have a meal between 12 and 2 p.m. In the past, this meal was called ‘dinner’ in working families. But now most people call it ‘lunch’. ‘Dinner’ has become a bigger meal in the evenings.

Reading this book, I thought it is important for British to drink tea. I like tea very much, so I understood British feelings.

[340 words]