by Shayne House

My name is Shayne House and I am co-founder of the Tea Appreciation Society. The Society began its life in 2007 as a loose collective of creative friends, artists, writers, designers, musicians, and photographers. What we all have in common is a love of the humble brew.

Field of Tea

The society has been steeping for a couple of years now, and although based in the UK, thanks to the internet it has developed into a worldwide collective of creative tea lovers, with 183,000+ fans on Facebook and growing steadily.

We created the society to celebrate, in a light-hearted way, the love of tea and its association with creativity. Tea in my opinion is a catalyst for fueling the creative spirit. Tea offers us an opportunity for quiet contemplation as well as shared moments of intimacy with friends. Tea enables us to reflect, be inspired and create.

I created a manifesto in keeping with the Society’s light-hearted approach.

Inspiration for the manifesto came from an art movement of the early 20th century known as The Italian Futurist Movement.

The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists.

I disagree with most of what they stood for, so with my tongue firmly in my cheek I based our tea manifesto on the futurists’ polemic, in essence I wrote an apologia, but to quote from the Idler magazine (issue 41), it is ‘a rousing manifesto in praise of the noble leaf’

TAS_logo

Manifesto of the Tea Appreciation Society

  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 splendor 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.

I shall be writing regularly on tea and creativity.

Shayne writes a regular blog for the Tea Appreciation Society entitled Tea & Creativity.