In the psychiatric hospital, coffee was consumed more than any other drink, except for maybe alcohol by the dually-diagnosed. (No, that’s not true: even though I’ve seen my fair share of drunken patients, they probably still didn’t manage to drink on a daily basis.) We had set coffee times, but everyone knew the way to the coffee machine in the outpatient clinic’s waiting room; actually, a nurse showed me.
Even so, when we were unstable, we drank tea, specifically rooibos with strawberry and whipped cream flavor. I don’t understand how any of us liked it, but we did. I nicknamed it bat-tea, for it helped us when we were going batty.
This post was written for this week’s Six-Sentence Story link-up, for which the prompt word is “coffee”.
A Multitude of Musings 
Coffee does tend to exacerbate some things. Tea never did keep me up at night.
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True, and rooibos doesn’t even contain any cafeine, unlike black tea.
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Rooibos!
Someone very close to me is a great fan of that drink especially in its formulations.
Naturally it does have a very vanilla taste [I am talking about the condiment – not its conformance!].
And I do occasionally drink it when I am offered it.
I enjoy Vietnamese iced coffee with honey matcha [and it includes soy milk].
Coffee – ah, yes.
I am wondering if it were instant coffee and/or the ground variety?
Or did it come in pods of whatever your favourite flavour would be?
[now that would be a good thing to bring to psychiatric patients – their favourite coffee flavours from the outside – if you are doing voluntary work in the field].
Strawberry and whipped cream seem like things that would taste terrific on their own.
Bat-tea! What a great name. And a good example of your dark/mordant humour, Astrid.
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Thank you so much. In truth, I invented the term “bat-tea” for the purpose of this post, because the Dutch word we used was very hard to translate (and would’ve required a lot more explaining to make sense, hence doing away with the humor). By the way, the tea didn’t taste like real strawberries and whipped cream at all, of course; they were just aromas added into the rooibos. I’ve never had rooibos in any form other than tea. That sounds interesting that it can be used as a condiment.
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What a great invention of yours.
Explanations sometimes ADD to the humour.
We don’t know if we don’t take the risk, Astrid.
Aromas! Now those I can understand.
And our brains convert them into the “real” things – as I observed in your poem about the Sun.
In high summer – strawberries and [whipped] cream would be welcome.
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Ah, that’s so interesting about the aromas! Yes, that may be why somehow we did like the strawberry and whipped cream-flavored rooibos. And yes, sometimes explanations add to the humor, but I’m not all that good at packing a lot of info into just six sentences so far yet.
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Funny, while coffee is a necessary part of my day, since college, tea has never been a habit. In fact, I can’t recall ever drinking a whole cup (of tea).
I get the impression that tea is ceremony while coffee is triage. One is quietly enjoyable, alone or in groups, the other is all business.
lol
Enjoyable (and informative) Six
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That’s such an interesting assessment of the difference between coffee and tea drinking habits. It also occurs to me that men are rarely tea drinkers, at least not in coffee drinking cultures like the Netherlands. I do happen to know a few who are, but when they are at a restaurant with their wives and the couple order a coffee and a tea, the tea invariably gets handed to the woman.
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Coffee all day, cigs on he half hour. What else you gonna do one the ward when the TVs got nothing of worth on?
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Agree. I don’t smoke, but almost started when there and I did spend most of the time in the smoking area.
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