Day 2281: Not tonight, I've got raw balls

Every cafe in this god damn city serves raw balls, even the teeny-tiny little independent hole-in-the-wall places that won't spring for real baked goods but will serve completely crap prefab croissants that come in bulk plastic wrapped boxes and are so pumped full of additives they will still be here for the eighth coming of Jesus. How can raw balls, food items named after an extremely unpleasant waxing accident, trump actual baked goods and become the food fare of choice for small businesses and vast coffee chains alike? I ask of you, internet, have you EVER met ANYONE who eats raw balls? I don't mean that one time you tried a raw ball because you were presented with a choice between it and a decades old croissant made of polycarbons. The enduring, nay, growing! rawball market is not being propped up by single, ill-advised test purchases. I am talking about a friend, relative, colleague or enemy who actively consumes raw balls on a regular basis and seeks them out as a snack of choice. Who are these people? Why are these people?

I can see how Sweden was easily seduced by the look of a few raw balls. This is a country enraptured by all things alternative, vegan, natural choice, organic, gluten free, and vaguely-PR-spun-to-symbolise-a-healthy-lifestyle, as long as these do not clash with the other strong Swedish traditional snack values of being ridiculously sugar dense and served in ball form. I'm looking at you, chocolate balls, cocoa balls, snow balls, coconut balls, and especially you, scum balls.

If I am to be perfectly honest here, I think my dislike of raw balls has less to do with their rawness (ooh, ouch. Don't touch them they're RAW) and more to do with the fact that I don't like the chocolate balls, cocoa balls, snow balls, coconut balls, or especially, scum balls that inevitably paved the way for this stupid craze. Balls are a bad shape for snacks. Counting them off on my fingers here, one, they roll around and can't be put nicely on a plate, two, they're gone in literally one bite, where is the well-deserved moment of pleasure in that?, three, they're often such poor quality, almost on the same level as the Jesus croissants, that they are essentially just cough dust when you bite into them and, most importantly, four, they are shaped like bollocks opening them up to all kinds of scrutiny. Scrotiny?

Give me a nice slice of cake, people. And for Pete's sake, just fucking OWN your snack time, you guilt-nagging shitbastard. Sugar made from crushed dates and ground dried apricots is STILL FUCKING SUGAR. If it's going to be a guilty pleasure then at least have it on a plate, with some substance and some oomph, not rolling around like a dusty, partnerless, RAW, testicle.

Day 2263: That's not tea.

I work in a lot of different places so I can say with some authority that the picture above is quite representative of a generous tea selection at the office. Some places have NO tea, some places have worse than no tea, which is Lipton yellow label, and some places look like this. All workplaces have coffee. The coffee quality might vary, I wouldn't know, I don't drink it. Nevertheless, to be a tea drinker in this country is to be eternally disappointed. Look at that picture above. I mean, really look at it. Do YOU want to drink decaffinated green tea chai? Lipton raspberry? Lipton Russian Earl Grey? Energising blueberry? Rooibos with fake chai flavour? Someone's "on-second-thought-I'll-leave-it"-Lipton teabag? No.

Who is the mystery 1% who drink enough energising blueberry to encourage the caretaker to order in 2 more boxes? If it's you then do everyone a favour and fuck off.

Last week I had an American child laugh at me because he was mocking me for being British, making all kinds of jokes about how I probably love tea and carry it around with me, only to discover that I had emergency teabags in my rucksack. Yes, I may have contributed to the perpetuation of a stereotype but I am truly desperate when a forlorn sachet of Twinings English Breakfast counts as a better cup of tea than whatever is available in the staffroom. Once somebody at work made Tetley's and it was like a miracle. For reference, I wouldn't be caught dead drinking Tetley's in England. And don't get me started on the Swedish obsession with single-use tetra pack milk which makes tea taste like, well, milk thats been in a tetra pack on a kitchen counter for a year.

What hurts the most is the fact that coffee is such a religion in Scandinavia that you are never more than 6 feet away from a good cup of coffee. I would even wager, without even drinking it, that the shittiest coffee from the shittiest machine is still a better coffee experience for the coffee drinker than the discovery of a whole cupboard of NON tea is for a tea drinker, who basically won't drink any tea in that situation. I'll have a tap water and seething, deep-seated rage to go, please.

Even cafes here have shit tea, and I don't mean the cheapo places that give you a lipton teabag, a glass of tepid water and an ice cream spoon the length of your arm. I mean the good places, even they get tea wrong. Loose leaf tea here comes in a variety of flavours, often never just plain tea, always some kind of chai-ripoff bullshit that has as much to do with chai as a castrated man in half a furry cow suit has to do with a bull. Either that or it has summer fruits, or winter fruits, or autumn fruits or some other kind of season, monsoon moonbeam or WHATEVER WHO IS NAMING AND CREATING THIS HORRIBLE SHIT. Mostly I get stuck with Earl Grey (pronounced Öörl Grej) which bears no resemblance to Earl Grey, and tastes very much like what my Yorkshire friend calls "Gandhi's Flip Flop". I have to pay £5 for the PRIVILEGE of this experience, because I am bound by the traditions of the Swedish Fika to sit with a warm drink alongside my bun. And it's always a bun, because the cake selection is nearly as thin as the tea selection. But alas, that is a rant for another day.