I can’t pour things. I don’t mean complicated stuff such as concrete, paint for road markings or a cake glaze; I’m talking simple fluids from simple vessels. I can’t get jugs or teapots to work for me. I’ve been dribbling and dripping all my life, making a mess whenever I am called upon to transfer liquid from one place to another. There is either a global issue here, concerning humankind’s inability to manufacture pouring apparatus that pour cleanly, or it’s just me. I think it’s just me.
Take a manoeuvre executed satisfactorily by everyone apart from me: the making of a cup of tea in a semi-formal setting such as a breakfast table in an old-fashioned hotel, or a tearoom in a wholesome setting – a National Trust asset, perhaps. Faced with teapot, milk jug and, perhaps, for added stress, an extra jug of hot water, I know with dark certainty that the tablecloth is in for a besmirching. First there’s the milk, a certain amount of which will run down the outside of the jug rather than into the cup. But then comes the deluge. For it is time for the teapot.
Be they made from bone china or cheap steel, lengthy of spout or merely lipped, I can never get the bloody things to pour nicely. It must be my technique. With my confidence at zero, I have become far too tentative. And tentativeness is fatal in this game. It results in anything from a bit of slop, right up to the creation of a triangular translucent film of fluid stretching from the end of the spout to the bottom of the jug. Setting aside the resultant carnage on the tablecloth below it’s rather beautiful, an effect expensively replicated in water features decorating the lobbies of investment banks and high-end hotels the world over.
Chastened, next time I pour I go bold, too bold, sending scalding fluid everywhere out of lid as well as spout. There must be a happy medium, but it is one I have abandoned hope of ever finding.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
