It’s the half-term holidays, so there’s been a bit of DIY going on in The Other White House, hence the slight gap in posts. There’s also been some GSI – Getting Someone In – to do the trickier bits, which naturally has resulted in lots of tea making: “Milk and two, if you please”.

We recently made the switch to loose-leaf tea because of the widespread coverage of the equally widespread use of plastic in teabags. We were surprised, to say the least, to learn that most teabags in the UK are sealed using polypropylene, to keep their shape apparently. According to the Co-op, which recently announced it is brewing up a fully biodegradable bag that doesn’t contain plastic, the tiny amount per bag adds up to 150 tonnes of [wholly unnecessary] plastic a year.

Funnily enough, as enthusiastic home composters (and tea drinkers) we had noticed traces of tea bag when strewing the fruits of our labour onto the front garden – where we grow our veggies, but had put this down to the quirks of compost-making rather than a plastic fiend in our feedstock!

Since the alarming discovery, we’ve been enjoying tea made in the traditional way – using loose leaves, brewed in a teapot and poured through a strainer, which was a piece of equipment we found surprisingly difficult to purchase. Once found in every house in the land, it took a significant amount of shop scouring to locate one amongst the infusers, steepers and filters …

Sure, it takes a bit more time to make tea these days, but it’s worth it – for a better brew all round. Cheers.