The Worst Cup of Tea in the World

Today, the moon sees a little girl, clutching a hot cup of tea. Standing at the foot of the stairs, she peers up as far as she can see.

Just around the top, to the left, a bedroom door is firmly shut — that’s exactly where she’s headed, so she raises her tiny foot.

With confident shoulders and a skip in her stride, she makes her way to the door. When she arrives, she knocks with pride, then sets the cup outside, on the floor.

Commotion is heard behind it, a scrambling and shuffling kind of sound. She steps back an inch and beams upwards, as the door opens, the tea plucked from the ground.

Standing there in the doorway, a look of curiosity sparkling in his eye, is the excited little girl’s uncle, about to sip the tea — and tell a lie.

“Wow!” he says, “it’s brilliant! So tasty! Not too milky! Just right!” It isn’t, of course, it’s awful. But her uncle doesn’t want to dampen her light.

So, instead, he drinks the whole thing, though it tastes like a soggy, wet shoe. “This is your best cup of tea yet, treacle. I’m very impressed. I am. Well done, you.”

Now lying, as we know, is never good. But what he said wasn’t fully a lie. Though the tea was rancid and dire and gross, he could taste the love she poured with every try.

And in this moment, as he drank from the mug, the little girl couldn’t hold back her grin. She felt like she’d changed the whole world with one cup, and to her that was the mightiest win.

But more than that she knew that in her home on that day, her only goal was to quench her uncle’s thirst. So the whole world could wait, at least while the kettle boiled, because today she was putting him first.

That’s the thing you see, the world is full of people and fuller of cups of tea to pour. But each person has their own world, full of people they love, people that they want to make a nice tea for.

To her and her uncle it wasn’t the tea that mattered, but the people involved in its making. And there she stood, a smile so wide it almost reached the moon— now that happiness is worth a little faking.