To all our new followers and to all those that have faithfully come before… let us remember, and share our passion brothers and sisters.

Please stand, actually you’re fine where you are… Just make sure you’ve got a brew in your hand and repeat aloud our rousing manifesto.

1. We want to sing the love of tea.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be loose leaf tea, boiled water, a tea pot, a china cup and a biscuit.
3. Literature has up to now magnified idleness, and slumber. We want to exalt these slow movements of ecstasy, feverish boiling of the kettle, the pour, the perilous stir, the rattle and the clink of the spoon.
4. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by an old beauty: the beauty of tea.
5. Beauty exists only in considered brewing. There is no masterpiece that has an aggressive character. Poetry is not a violent assault on the forces of infusion.
6. We want to glorify peace – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism; these destructive gestures kill the beautiful ideas of the human race.
7. We want to visit museums and libraries, encourage philosophy.
8. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work; the revolt, smashing the supermarkets; we will rejoice in the baking of bread; the polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern music as we play our ukuleles: the nocturnal vibration of the worms in our compost; our spirits suspended from the clouds by the thread of cup in sleeve tea bags; and the gliding flight of creativity whose propeller sounds like the sipping of enthusiastic tea drinkers.

Lucy Izzard very kindly allowed the Tea Appreciation Society to use her animation last year for a talk I gave in Bristol about tea and my forthcoming book about tea.

Here it is again for you now…

Animated look at the British obsession of Tea Drinking.
By Lucy Izzard.

Winner of the BBC New Animation Award 2005

Thanks Lucy (from Shayne)