It started when she gave up sugar in her tea. They had been hearing for years that Australians eat too many sweet things and that sugar was bad for you and they should cut down on it. She didn't just cut down; she gave it up completely.
There was no suggestion that he should do the same, but his well-cultivated Catholic sense of guilt nagged him: he shouldn't be enjoying things while his wife was silently and uncomplainingly doing without. So he followed suit, and after a while — a long while — he didn't really notice.
Then came fat-free milk. She decided that was healthier, while he stubbornly stuck to the old-fashioned kind with hairs in it. Again there was no insinuation that he should follow the good example so unselfishly set, but the guilt and the daily reproach of drinking tea with someone who was cutting out all those triglycerides got to him and he, too, changed to the fat-free milk. It was only then he found out that it was dearer than the proper stuff.
Then she gave up milk in her tea altogether — probably after watching television footage of staggering cows in Britain or maybe it was something she read about anti-oxidants being destroyed by milk. He drew the line there, although he tried the occasional black cuppa while she wasn't looking: it tasted terrible.
Finally, she came back from the dentist and declared that she was giving up tea altogether. The dentist! He told her that all the tea she was drinking was colouring her teeth and if she didn't cut down, then nothing less than twice-daily rinsing with Domestos would get the white back. He also told her it was a diuretic (the tea, not the Domestos), and removed water from the system. So she gave up tea completely and now drinks only water.
Tea is one of the great contributions made to civilisation by the English race. It is true that they don't grow the stuff, and that tea drinking has almost liturgical significance in parts of the Eastern world, but as the rest of us understand it, tea-drinking, small finger delicately raised, is a quintessentially English habit.
That great English bore Samuel Johnson drank it in vast quantities, as recorded by his faithful Boswell who called it by sweet names, 'that elegant and popular beverage' or 'the infusion of that fragrant