All These Teapot and Sultana Days

Of course, you may have spent the recent Bank Holiday Monday making sure that you’ve placed your sultana as close to your teapot as you dare, especially in this Royal Wedding year, but – maybe, just maybe – you are beginning to wonder if there is more to life than that.

When we were young – so much younger than today – of course we had dreams of the revolutionary ways we would arrange our dried fruit, especially in relation to the various items of kitchenware we would, one day – in the fullness of time – be the proud possessors of. What we did not, could not, realise at the time when we dismissed the cautious way our parents, and their parents before them, had placed their currants next the their rolling pins, or had an artful arrangement of three raisings placed carefully next to their bread bin, just what compromises growing up into maturity entails.

Of course, we had read of all sorts of exotica in the Colour Supplements of our endless young Sundays, of how in the Mediterranean region it was not unusual to arrange dried apricots in a semi-circle around the pasta jar, or, in Asian countries, place dried figs almost touching the wok, and how we longed for such sophistication.

As we grew older, though, we realised it was never to be, and that we – like our parents – would look at the TV shows showing dried dates in exotic locations and merely sigh wistfully as we made our way back to the kitchens of our own lives. There to stare at the sultana placed so carefully by the teapot as we waited for the kettle to boil, looking forward to that eternally reassuring and satisfying nice cup of tea.