The Right Place At The Right Time

Let's pop the kettle on...

Our overfilled and disorganised tea and coffee cupboard - absolutely no-one is coming here for the interior design tips

I bought a box of Yorkshire tea bags yesterday. Two, actually. This might not seem so extraordinary for a Brit, but I live in Copenhagen and the Danes don’t really go in for tea—they’re all about coffee. It’s the kind of place where cafes serve you tea by pouring out a pint glass of boiled water and placing the tea bag on the side. They’ll give you an awfully odd look if you ask for milk, too. I don’t even know where to start with the many ways in which this is Totally Wrong. 

There is only one supermarket in Denmark that sells British tea bags, otherwise you’re fighting for your life with those Lipton atrocities that may as well contain sawdust for all the substance you’ll get out of them. I had run out of Yorkshire tea bags over the weekend, and was starting to fray at the edges given I consume about three or four cups of the stuff a day. So I bundled my baby into his winterwear (because: Denmark) and we struck out for the good stuff in between hail showers. I always get a bit panicky when I turn the corner into the tea and coffee aisle at the supermarket, because one time they rearranged everything and I couldn’t find the blasted things and I got the classic shallow breathing and cold sweats when you’re in the middle of a crisis. Anyway, this time around it was a successful mission and on the walk back home with two boxes stuffed under the stroller, a rainbow erupted in the sky above us, and I thought, yes, that’s exactly the right response, thank you. 

Drinking Yorkshire tea in Denmark makes me feel at home. It’s a double-sided emotion, at once making me nostalgic for the place of my birth and upbringing whilst contributing to a deeply nurturing ritual I maintain in a different country where I have lived in for almost a decade. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I thought about why so many of us continue with the practices and traditions of our childhood or culture, even when we are exposed to so many different ways of living. I always assumed my biggest stumbling block to Danish integration was my appalling grasp of the language, but perhaps it’s closer to home—my warm drink of choice, and how I choose to prepare it. Can I ever really become Danish if I insist on drinking Yorkshire tea for the rest of my life amongst a nation of coffee consumers? Dan-ish, maybe. At best. 

In my forthcoming book, I explore the feeling of belonging as an expression of identity. I also talk about placemaking, and how we become who we are thanks to the places where we live and call home throughout our life. It all made me think back to a beautiful essay by Rebecca Solnit, called Abandon, in which she writes of a childhood friend:

“Perhaps rather than describe her as three characteristics, I could describe her as three places: the suburbs that made us and that we scorned and fled, the urban night she made into a home of sorts, and the pastoral world of a lyrical European culture and maybe of the hills past our childhood back yards.”

I love this idea of being forged from place rather than genetics. I love the notion that we acquire more of ourselves as we experience more of the world, like we’re digging around in the dirt and pulling up gems. But how do we commemorate these powerful placemakers in our daily lives? More often than not, it’s typically through the routines and rituals we perform. The way we make our food and drink, prepare for the day, clean and organise the space around us, play with our children, hang out with our friends, wind down for bed… The building blocks of life at home are steeped in different cultures and traditions, whether we recognise them or not. Some will be familiar to the place you find yourself in right now, and others will be brought over from times before. 

I remember when I first started dating my husband, and I couldn’t get over how often he suggested we go out for dinner. Like, multiple times a week. At that point in my life, going to restaurants for dinner was something you did as a special treat, not because you were hungry and needed a meal. But I was falling in love with this gentle and curious man with the beautiful nose and smile and so I always said yes to the invitation. We ate all kinds of meals out in those first months—nothing particularly fancy, usually in places with plastic tables or chalkboard menus—but they were always exceptional. It was only when I discovered he’d spent many years living in New York City where the culture is to eat out (or order in) almost every night of the week, that it finally made sense. I mean, he wasn’t quite at the level of using his oven to store clothes, in the spirit of Carrie Bradshaw, but he did also outsource his laundry to a place down the road which I found wildly mature.*

The way we undertake so many rituals in our life at home speaks volumes about where we have lived. So what if we took Solnit’s proposition a step further, and described ourselves as three rituals at home instead? I’ll give it a go:

I am the morning cup of Yorkshire tea (in bed, if I can swing it), and the Guardian Weekend Quiz with my husband. I am the Saturday morning pancakes slathered in maple syrup and the Sunday afternoon Disney movie on the sofa with my kids, with popcorn and hot chocolate. And I am the New Yorker crossword with a glass of wine, and the jazz burbling on the stereo whilst my children sleep.

Which three rituals at home would you tell me about to describe yourself? Are they rituals from the place you live today, or did you learn to do them somewhere (or from someone) else? 

I’ll pop the kettle on, whilst you have a think about it. I’d love to hear about them in the comments, below.

*I should say that my husband now cooks and launders at home with great proficiency and regularity, but he still loves nothing more than a black coffee with a copy of the New Yorker if we ever give him more than five minutes of alone time. You can take the man out of New York, etc etc.