Practice Patience: Irish Drinks

When I first started my current job, I bought myself a mug for the office. It had the pattern of a Freisian cow and her udder, complete with four stumpy-yet-engorged teats, was the base. It had character, whimsy, and the capacity for endless love and tea. 

Walking out of the shop post-purchase, the mug hit the ground and chipped off one of the cows teats, leaving my brand new mug forever off kilter and with a hairline fracture that threatened to crack the mug wide open at any given moment.

This post is about patience. Be patient. I’m about to explain why we’re all here.

That mug didn’t last long but I very recently found it again on Amazon and bought it. Since using this new mug, I have been having some of the worst tea of my life. Bad enough tea that I am realizing there is still half a mug of cold liquid when I look to consider boiling the kettle again. Too often, a family of little fruit flies have met their untimely demise deep within the cow’s udder. 

I should probably see where they’re coming from

In the time it has taken me to type these first ~200 words, I have been letting a tea bag steep in the mug. The cow mug is significantly girthier than my previous mug so the tea simply needs longer to steep. When I realized this, and gave my mug of tea more time to breathe, I found myself slowing down too. 

This is veering into LinkedIn lunatic territory but this is going somewhere. That extra 30 seconds allows me to gather my thoughts, to breathe, to think about what I need to do next, rather than rush to the next task with an empty tank and a subpar fuel source.

I was in Killarney recently on a work trip and I was having a couple of drinks in mixed company – that means there were Irish and Americans in the group. We were all standing a few feet from the bar. One of the Americans – let’s call him Bryan – bought a round, which included a pint of Guinness for one of the Irish contingent, who we’ll call Marc. Upon expert completion of the two part pour, which is an act of patience in itself, the barman left the pint down on the bar. Marc nodded at the barman to show his appreciation and continued to tell a story without skipping a beat. 

Bryan interrupted the story. “What, you want me to pick it up and fucking hand it to you to?”

“Nah, nah, nah, you need to let it settle,” Marc and I said, word for word and almost in unison.

“How did you both know to say that? Settle, what?” Bryan was both confused and mildly annoyed.

While Marc tried to explain the concept of settling to Bryan, another American (Vinny), who had his back to proceedings, noticed the pint on the bar with seemingly no owner. In a moment of well-intended and blind panic, Vinny picked up the pint and turned around to see who it was that was so forcibly detained as to be unable to immediately retrieve their own pint.

Vinny was next to receive the gift of a lesson on settling.

When Brooks Hatlen leaves Shawshank Prison after 50 years, he remarks, “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” While I don’t think we will find too many people disagreeing with this, it seems that the Irish people, in unison, seem to have rebelled against this idea by the choice of drinks that they have decided to embrace for several hundred years now. 

We haven’t even brought up whiskey yet, which the Irish invented, and famously (in meme form, at least) took three centuries off from inventing because they were so proud of themselves. Whiskey takes years to mature. Years! And the more years you leave it, the better it gets. 

Everyone could do with taking a leaf out of the Irish book and finding moments in their day to steep and settle. Steep and settle. 

It is also no coincidence that tea and Guinness are best enjoyed in the company of others.