Teapots and Coffee pots
I tried a new track with my pot of tea this morning. I put coffee with milk and sugar in the pot to see if it would stay hot with its cosy on long enough for me to write my morning journal. But what an odd thought - coffee in a teapot! It almost sounds indecent.
Strange how tea and coffee have to go into pots of certain shape and pouring styles. Even in India and China where the use of cha was first noted by European explorers, the style of pouring pot was different for different cha.

I suppose the long thin spout and taller shape for the coffee pot came from Arabia where the beans were first grown and used. The shape of the teapot is far more varied than that of coffee pots as far as I can tell. Although all of them have that round belly in which the tea can brew in comparison to the agitation from direct application of heat to the coffee pot. Yet some of the forms for both tea and coffee pots have developed quite architectonic shapes in the last 100 years. Just look at the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles at the beginning of this century. Yet never forgetting the enduring fat brown onion of a teapot shape that has been in use in England at least since heaven only knows when!

In a way it is a direct comparison between the style of our lives now and then. Then there was time for women to sit and 'take tea' and be involved with the process of brewing a cuppa. While the image that is always associated for me with coffee pots is that of the cowboy on the American prairie. Which implies quite a gender-specific role for tea and coffee pots, which I find quite amusing with consideration to the more 'masculinized' lifestyle that we live today.
We live our lives at a much higher speed today, cars drive past my garden at high speed, messages whizz around the planet in a matter of moments, compared to the weeks that it used to take.

Perhaps that's why we have dispensed with either tea or coffee pot for the majority of occasions and resort to tea-bags and instant coffee instead. And why, when I put coffee into a teapot it isn't that silly after all.