Why tea cups put me in a spin

KELLY ROSE BRADFORD takes a closer look at her own and other people’s strange quirks...

The tea just doesn t taste right in a patterned cup The tea just doesn't taste right in a patterned cup

Despite having put up with them for almost 35 years, some of my little oddities still leave my family reeling and, according to my mother, I am a “funny girl”.

Take my choice of tea cup, for example. It has to be plain white on the inside. Give me something that has a coloured inner or, even worse, a pattern and the tea just doesn’t taste right.

One relative has a hideous rack full of stoneware mugs. Brown and mottled on both inside and out, they are most unsavoury looking and ruin my enjoyment of a cuppa.

I even avoid coffee bars that use printed mugs. Once I went to a cafe enticed in by its cheap mega lattes and free internet connection. Then my drink was handed to me with the words “coffee bean” etched in swirly, script all over the inside of the cup. I swiftly retreated to my usual chain knowing my drink might cost 50p more but the cup would be unsullied.

When making a drink at home, I have to let the kettle whistle reach a certain pitch – one that comes in around 20 seconds after its first shriek. It’s great for making the perfect beverage but not so good on family eardrums.

But no tea-making ritual can beat the extremes of my friend Iain’s former girlfriend. “She has to divide all the tea bags along the perforated line when she opens the packet,” he told me, “to save them the trauma of individual separation later on.”

My own little foibles extend way beyond the realms of tea-making. A discussion the other day made me realise how hung up I am on the weirdest things. Men in polo-neck jumpers, for example. I just cannot look at them, especially

if they wear a smart jacket over the top. It makes me queasy. But not as much as flip-flops do – the sight of a male hairy toe protruding from a rubber shoe sets my stomach churning.

However, I can take some comfort from the fact that I’m not alone with my oddities. One friend confessed that not only does she have to sweep any stray gravel off her paving slabs every day, she also has to go along with a rake and adjust all the other surrounding shingle to a perfectly even, smooth finish.

Another friend revealed a complete neurosis about hanging out her washing: the pegs must match in terms of type and colour. “If I use a blue peg to hang up one side of a shirt, I have to use a blue one of identical make to hang up the other side,” she tells me. “And the only way I can break that is to have a pattern, such as a white, black, white, black sequence.”

While I am not too bothered about my pegs, I am fussy about my bed linen – surely I’m not the the only person who hates the thought of sleeping on patterned sheets or pillowcases or having a densely patterned duvet cover next to their skin?

My partner Andrew dismisses my whims with a wave of his hand and a terse: “Deal with it.”

So you’d think he’d be a paragon of quirk-free virtue himself. Wrong. At a picnic he’d rather starve than eat food from plastic plates or, worse still, use disposable cutlery. And if I so much as dare leave a drawer slightly open or things arranged just shy of symmetrical, he all but has a fit.

But that’s nothing compared to my friend Jill’s boyfriend. “Every Saturday,” she tells me, “we have ham, egg and chips. He eats his ham and egg first and then his chips. Then when he has about eight or nine chips left, he lines them up down the centre of his plate in order of size, faffing about with them incessantly and then, when he’s happy they’re in the right order, he eats them with his fingers.” Which of course is just plain crazy.

“I like odd numbers,” my colleague Sue tells me. “Even down to the volume control on the radio or the TV – it has to be stopped on an odd number.” I ask her what would happen if it wasn’t but she simply shudders at the thought.

“Coasters must be perfectly square under a cup, too,” she says and I’m quick to agree – coasters being another of my own little obsessions. I have to have some on almost every surface in the house, even in my five-year-old son’s room, in the bathroom and, naturally, I often travel with one in my handbag.

All of which is perfectly normal, reasonable behaviour for a “funny girl”.

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