Tea (and coffee) in Aberdeen

05 Dec Tea (and coffee) in Aberdeen

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late November. 13° – unusually mild for Aberdeen at this time of year but overcast since the sun shuffled off after a brief appearance in the morning. The city sparkles in the sun, earning its sobriquet, the Silver City. But it defaults to grey when the skies cloud over, its glorious granite turning sombre and oozing coolth. We’d walked out to Old Aberdeen in the morning, taking in the cobbled streets and quiet splendour of Kings College, the stone crown set over the chapel. Out front, Bishop Elphinstone in his tomb, his effigy on top, sculpted in bronze, full episcopal dress, staff in hand, mitre on head, a host of virtues and a couple of vices gathered below and two extravagantly winged angels standing guard. Quite a memorial! I sat all my finals in the great hall that has his name, just there across the grass. Across the years.

We stopped for coffee upstairs at Kilau’s and listened (unavoidably) to a young man who couldn’t stop himself talking loudly about the deals he’s doing here and there while he studies who knows what. His two companions were rapt, barely able to eat their crepes. Though since they were never called upon to speak, why not, I wondered? He claimed to be Russian but spoke with an accent straight out of the USA. I found myself getting annoyed at his slickness, the confident, know-it-all tone. We longed to ask him so many things, but mostly: “Do you mind keeping your voice down?”. Of course, we didn’t, being British and too polite. Which left us instead with dark thoughts and a knowing exchange of looks, as we dragged our eyebrows back from the place they’d fled to, unbidden, somewhere up near our scalps. I blew hard on my decaffeinated, gulped it down and we left. 

Never mind. The morning was just a prelude before the main event. 

We had been invited to a Japanese Tea Ceremony by Aya, a fellow student from Japan who has also just completed her Masters degree and had come to Aberdeen for our graduation the following day. From her home in Japan she’d sent a formal invitation: 2-4 pm, St Stephen’s Church Hall, Powis Place, RSVP. 

Japanese Tea ceremony? Aberdeen? Incongruous. Unmissable.

I had omitted to research what was involved and how to behave. We wondered whether ‘fashionably late’ works in Japan but decided it was one of their least likely cultural imports. So, probably best to be punctual. We joined the small group of about ten other invitees huddled at one side of the cavernous hall, looking as uncertain as us. One muttered to me: ‘All I know is you’re meant to keep your eyes down, look into the tea as you drink it’. OK. That’s a start. 

The church hall took me back to childhood when they were indelibly part of my life. They haven’t changed much in all the years since. Tall, narrow windows you can’t see through, high ceiling, dull lights, an unmistakeable air of the 1950s encased in stone and wood. Chairs are still stacked against the walls but they’re grey plastic now rather than the metal-framed ones with stiff canvas seats in muted greens or browns of yesteryear. Still the bare wooden floors. Foldaway tables have replaced trestles and plastic checked tablecloths have usurped cotton. I could almost smell the floor polish and the stewed tea, taste again the little iced biscuits and shortbread rounds, hear the hum of women’s voices earnestly discussing squares or triangles for the egg sandwiches and the best place to buy paper doilies, see the tweed skirts and sensible shoes, the tight perms and powdered noses… 

As a setting for a Japanese tea ceremony, it’s difficult to imagine anywhere more bizarre than a Presbyterian church hall in Aberdeen’s New Town. However, we were relieved not to have to sit cross-legged on the floor for the duration. Which proved to be long. The ceremony is a slow affair of quiet, deliberate movements. The host serves guests in a ritual cycle on repeat: rinsing the bowl, adding the exact amounts of green tea paste with a special slim spatula and water from a tiny porcelain kettle, mixing the brew with a small bamboo whisk then carrying the bowl sedately and placing it in front of each guest, one by one. The leaves for the tea have to be picked on a certain day in the correct season. Aya had done this, made the paste and brought it with her in her suitcase along with the necessary implements and a selection of Japanese pastries that promised sweetness but were often bitter. She told us she had trained for four years attending weekly classes in order to master the art. ‘Blimey,’ I thought but didn’t say, ‘there must be more to it than meets the eye’.

The day got me thinking about time. The morning’s walk to Old Aberdeen had been like rummaging in the drawers of an old chest in the attic discovering things you’d forgotten about, recognising fragments from the past but finding they were not quite in the places you’d assigned them in your memory. That where you’d spent those four precious undergraduate years was much smaller than you remembered, its place in your world scaled down, diminished by the intervening years and the person you’ve become. 

The tea, for all the eccentricity of the setting, was a reminder of how many things are lost as we speed through our days, driven by tasks and to-do lists, distracted by emails and Whatsapps, barely capable any more of withdrawing, of taking our time. I could feel my heart rate lessen as I gave myself over to observing and being part of an ancient ritual. Yes, it was strange, alien even, yet there was something universal about it – the care for cultural traditions and their meanings that we are inclined too often to dismiss, the quietness, the slow pace allowing the giving of time to one another.