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You will have noticed that I always include a featured book in my tea reviews. This started because I thought it would be nice to include objects from my house in my tea photos, and it turns out that apart from tea (and two elderly cats) pretty much all the objects in my house are books.
How it usually works is that I select the tea I want to review and then find a book which has a link (however tenuous) to that tea. It’s a bit different today. For this review I started with the book, and then chose a tea to go with it.
Moths by Jane Hennigan is a chilling and absorbing work of dystopian fiction. It is set 40 years after the beginning of a horrific plague, which almost destroyed – and then radically altered – the world we know.
I loved this book. It plunges you into a strange new reality which is literally nightmarish. And I do mean ‘literally’, this book worked its way into my dreams. I’m trying very hard not to spoil the plot for you here, because I went into it knowing very little about it and I don’t want to deny anyone the same pleasure.
I will give away one aspect of the story though. If you’re like me, the first things you’ll want to know about a fictional post-apocalyptic dystopia is: “Is there still tea?”
And in Moths, the answer is very clearly “no”. Whenever Mary, the protagonist, is seen drinking tea, it’s either chamomile or peppermint, which makes sense in the world that Hennigan has created. In a future where most of the population has been decimated by dying, suddenly going violently mad, or being murdered by people who went violently mad, trade with tea-exporting countries, was apparently one of its many brutal casualties.
This just makes the thing more horrific, of course. I don’t think I’d be much cop in an apocalyptic scenario anyway, (I assume that my role in a zombie apocalypse, for example, would be ‘zombie food’) but if I had to get through the whole thing without a decent cup of tea, well I’d really have no chance.
So it seemed appropriate that today’s tea should be something that could be drunk by the characters in Moths. I didn’t have any chamomile or peppermint teas about the place (mostly because I don’t like them) so instead, I opted for Cuppa London’s ‘Easy Does It’. This is a blend of lavender, lily, hibiscus, lemon verbena, orange blossom, rose, valerian and borage. With the exception of orange blossom, these are all things which can be found growing in a suburban English garden, and would be available to Moth’s Mary as a tea substitute.
‘Easy Does It’ mostly tastes of hibiscus. I am fast coming to the conclusion that I don’t actually like hibiscus, I thought I did because I love Whittard’s black-tea-and-hibiscus-based Piccadilly Blend. That just contains flavouring rather than the real stuff though. I think it gave me an inaccurate reading as a hibiscus-appreciation control.
I often describe herbal teas as being rosehip-y even when there are no rosehips, and I think that’s usually down to the hibiscus-y ubiquity in red colour tisanes. ‘Easy Does It’ certainly looks very pretty. And I like that they fitted a whole flower garden into the mix.
It’s not something I would voluntarily drink again though. And happily, because I live in a (currently) non-apocalyptic, non-dystopian world where proper tea is regularly available, I don’t have to.
