When my brother was 16, he ate a box of teabags. I decided to interview him about this. Some names and places may have been changed.
1. Describe the events that led up to you eating the teabags. Set the scene for us.
I was a 16 year old boy in a well sheltered, market town world, whereby my weekends were mainly spent evading someone's parents to have a few drinks in an empty house or park somewhere. One Friday, late after a number of beers, a friend and I decided we were too hungry at ridiculous time in the morning, and with nothing substantial in the house made the half hour walk to town. Of course in 2002 the 24hour license had not yet come in and most takeaways were shut by 2am. In the state both of us were in we had forgotten this fact and therefore descended upon the local 24hr shop, where a friend from college was working. The walk to town had not sobered me in the slightest and seemed only to encourage our drunken tomfoolery and by the time we reached the shop, I had forgotten entirely why we were there. Instead I seemed to grab the three most random objects I could find, consisting of a bag of tea bags, a pint of milk and a lemon, obviously. Just as I was at the checkout with these items, the majority of a local football team walked in through the door after a night out 'on the town'. As jovial as my friend was who accompanied me, he decided to set me a challenge...
2. How many teabags would you estimate that you ate?
Well the challenge kept getting extended one bag at a time, with the eager anticipation and chanting and beating of the window in unison by the football team grew louder. At this point I must have been at around 6 or 7 bags. This is when the interest was lost from my local support, by my 9th bag no one was watching any more, so I stopped to wash these down with a cool refreshing bite of lemon (still unpeeled) and a glug of semi skimmed milk.
However, not to be put off by lack of interest, for this did not need to be a spectator sport, I continued to wolf down 2 more bags, before I start to feel the previous bags repeat...
3. What brand were they? Was brand important at this stage?
They were Tetley. I think even within my drunken state I would never have gone for a brand I could not trust, for who knows what my plan for them was at that point.
4. How did they taste? Like tea, or different somehow?
The initial taste was tea, that familiar aroma touched my tongue, but soon after the first bite, something foreign distinguished itself from the usual liquid form. A dryness not too dissimilar to dead grass (summer '97) came about, but even this was manageable until the sheer volume of tea between mouth and stomach was just too much to take.
5. Just so people don't try and get in on the action by claiming 'they were there', how many people actually witnessed the event?
1 challenge-setting best friend
8 chanting local football players
1 24hr shop attendant (hiding the guilt of the shop going into disarray too well with his own chanting and stomping)
6. Would you say it is something that everyone should try it once?
If they were to try this, I would suggest an alternative method, maybe as part of a balanced diet. For example a bag before breakfast on weekdays and then mid morning on weekends.
7. Did you feel the respect of the crowd go up or down as you ate the teabags?
It was definitely on a scale due to the nature and state of the crowd (mainly drunk adolescents).
Bags 1-2 were met with bemusement, however 3 - 6 were met with awe and I imagine an air of jealousy, before the shame spiral of 7 -10, with retained but still mild respect for bag 11 and the 're-emergence'.
8. What advice would you give to amateurs considering eating tea bags, you know, the rookies coming up in the scene?
Keep your act simple, don't try too much too early and be versatile, cut in some other forms of non-digestible foods, like lemon peel, banana skin, the tasty yet strangely papery feel of cupcake wrapping. But most importantly, keep it spontaneous, keep it real.
9. Did you even for a second consider taking it up professionally?
After a mixed response to my first attempt it was either do the research and really devote myself to achieving what is necessary to make to the big leagues or revert back to my studies and use it as a recreational yet beautiful sport activity. 10 seconds of thought went into this.
10. Any words of wisdom for our vast Internet audience?
If any of you lovely people find yourself hungry on a Friday night and no food for which to eat, don't make that trip.....you probably aren't ready. Ready for the sweeping statements, the false hopes, the overwhelming emotions of the sequence of events. And even if you surpass all of this and you have a semi-successful punt at it, don't go on a victory lap like I did, throwing the remaining 13 bags (24 pack) into the River Lemon, claiming it now to be 'TEA RIVER' - container of your triumphant soul.
