A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down

I like my cup of tea made a certain way:

• The tea should be brewed in a bone china teapot.
  
• The tea should never be Earl Grey [spit] or variations thereof. Plain Dilmah or English Breakfast are my faves.
  
• The tea should be made with tea leaves and absolutely not tea bags [more spitting].
  
• The tea should be made using boi-LING not boi-LED water (to pinch a phrase from Nell's Mum Daphne).
• The tea should be served in a bone china mug -not too big or too small- which must be white inside. Why that makes my tea taste better I don't know but it absolutely makes a difference.
• First you must put in two teaspoons of sugar, using the right size teaspoon. Then you add the tea. Then you add the milk.

Fixit knows exactly how to do it. My sister and Nell are a little bit scared to make me tea but that's all right, if Fixit can't make it I prefer to do it myself. And please note, this is how I like my tea in my territory where I have control of it. If I have tea at your house I can drink it from plain porcelain, made with a bag and the sugar put in last. Just in case you were scared of having me over now. But I still won't drink that Earl Grey muck.

This extreme high-maintenance around the tea ritual has also spilled over into my sugar bowl. There are two things I really hate where sugar bowls are concerned. One is when you work in an office and all the dirty instant coffee drinkers dip their coffee spoon into the sugar receptacle and leave grains of Nestle 43 Bean contaminating the sugar. So selfish. And coffee flavoured sugar is 'orrible in tea. The other one is more related to my home sugar bowl, and that is people using my perfect exactly right for measuring how much sugar I exactly like in my tea sugar spoon to stir their hot beverage. I provide other NQR sized teaspoons for their stirring needs so leave my sugar spoon in the bloody sugar bowl will ya?? When Nell lived with us she had several black marks against her name for this disgusting habit, but I soon bullied her out of it. It is quite comical to see the guilt in her face when she occasionally relapses. Endearingly she always 'fesses up too.

The advent of children into my life has provided me with a third revolting sugar bowl crime. When the adults are not around to do the breakfast thing, Climber (and now through his excellent example-setting, Cherub) have taken to liberally sugaring their cereal and then taking a nice big lick / mouthful of sugar before returning the spoon to the bowl. Honestly. Kids think we adults are stupid or something. Check out the evidence they leave, as IF I'm not going to notice THAT:

(I will just add here that this is Verboten when I'm around, I'm tough about any excess sugar and Weetbix is the only cereal they are permitted to minutely sweeten. However as I am not always around or fully functional for the morning shift, I cannot say with any surety that my edicts wishes are obeyed.)

At first I was just blaming Climber for the icky spoon, but Cherub has obviously joined the sugar-licking party and the reason we know this is a conversation he had with Fixit yesterday, when a second breakfast of Weetbixes was being organised (Cherub had 3, Climber had 5; I swear we keep Sanitarium in business). It went like this.

Cherub : (helpfully) Daddy you can go outside.
Fixit : (matter of fact) Yes.
Cherub : (coaxingly) Daddy, you can go outside if you want to.
Fixit : (getting suspicious) Yes. To do what?
Cherub : (helpfully) You can go and hang the washing up or hang the washing down.
Fixit : (also helpful) Do you want to do something you don't want me to know about?
Cherub : (matter of fact) Yes.
Fixit : (coaxingly) Does it involve something to do with sugar?
Cherub : (matter of fact) Yes.
Fixit : (matter of fact) Okay.

Subtlety, thy name is not Cherub.