There are some news stories that clearly made a big impression on people. When I was growing up we would only have leaf tea, brewed up in a pot. Right up until the 1980s we never used teabags. My father always said that the stuff that they put in teabags was only the sweepings from the factory floor, not really tea at all. He had read it somewhere, and held on to that belief for the rest of his life. He would never make tea the way we usually do these days: teabag in a mug, boiling water on top, steep, remove the bag with a spoon. Add milk and sugar as preferred.

The ”sweepings from the factory floor” idea was repeated word for word by one of my favourite cousins, around 20 years ago. She too would generally make tea the old-fashioned way, with leaves, in a pot. But she and her sister (the ones who live in Dun Laoghaire) did have teabags too for the odd time when just one person wanted a brew: not worth going through the effort of making a full pot. I remarked that my father had always said the same thing, about the sweepings from the factory floor. We did an experiment, something I had never tried before. We cut open a teabag and compared its contents with some leaf tea from the caddy. We were expecting very different results, maybe a fine powder from the former, easily distinguishable from the latter. But the two little brown piles looked identical.

There was another news story, or urban legend, that I first heard in the 1970s, and still hear trotted nearly 50 years later. It concerned the fast-food chain now known as KFC, or Kentucky Fried Chicken as it was always known back then. Allegedly, health inspectors had found evidence of rats being coated with the unique blend of 11 herbs and spices that the Colonel was famous for, and being served to customers. I know that even now there are people of my age who, when discussing their late-night takeaway options will shy away from KFC. “Kentucky Fried Chicken?” they splutter, “Kentucky Fried Rat, more like”. Maybe they are the same people who would never make tea using teabags. After all, it’s just the sweepings from the factory floor, not really tea at all.