Storm in a Teacup

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare, and Sara Nonu of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing how to make tea. And unusually, because of the lockdown, we're partly recording this remotely with Sara dialing in remotely. Nick, why are we talking about this? Yes, well, a few weeks ago, a lovely American lady by the name of Michelle shared a video on the Chinese intelligence gathering application TikTok, which purportedly showed us how to make British tea. Yeah. Would you like to know how to make British tea? Yeah, I mean, this sounds great. Go for it. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, you put water in a cup out of the tap. Right. Okay. You put the cup in the microwave for one minute. What? Yeah. Then you add milk. And looking from the video, it looks like lots of milk. I'd say about one third of the cup is milk. Sounds a bit bland. It sounds like it needs sweetening up a little bit. Yeah. So then you add sugar. What looked to me like, I would say about three or four teaspoons of sugar. And then finally, pop in a little thing called the tea bag and give it a bit of a stir. Hey, presto, British tea. Now, I thought, well, part of me still thinks that this was a fantastic troll on her part to... Well, I'm sure the mild-mannered British public took this in their stride. Yeah, exactly. And we weren't outraged at all. No, in fact, we almost went to war with the United States as a result. Apparently, this was the most outrageous thing people had ever seen. And it struck me as something I can't believe we've never really talked about on the podcast is tea. How do you make tea? What does it mean? Yeah. Okay. So I think that's the... I think it's interesting. Yeah. Two parts to it. How do you make it? What does it mean? How you make it? So let's talk off. First of all, do we all like tea? Do we all? Yeah, we all. I know we three do. Sarah, do you like tea?

Speaker B: 00:02:05

I'm happy to drink tea. Okay. All right.

Speaker A: 00:02:10

If that makes sense. That sounds a bit noncommittal to me.

Speaker B: 00:02:12

Yeah. It is a little bit noncommittal. I mean, I just prefer my coffee black. Right. But there are the occasions that I do like a cup of tea when I can have a biscuit with it. But I don't often have biscuits in the house. Do you prefer your tea coffee flavoured? Yeah, I do actually prefer my tea coffee flavoured. Let's just say that.

Speaker A: 00:02:28

Well, look, I mean, I'm pretty obsessive about tea. I probably drink about 10 cups a day and it needs to be made just perfectly. So look, shall I kick off how I make my cup of tea? Go for it. So first of all, I generally only make one cup. I don't bother with these teapots or anything like that. I find that it just gets a little bit too difficult to control. Too many variables. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's yeah. But so chuck one sort of normal teabag, none of this posh stuff. Teabag. So bag of tea, first of all. I know what a teabag is. But let me assume that our listeners will have heard of a teabag. And I have one sugar with mine. So I put that in right at the beginning and I just have the bag and the sugar sitting there together. Boil the water, get the boiled water, chuck it in. I cover it. Okay. It must be covered. I now have like a special, like also a used teabag holder. I must say this is getting a bit weird. Yeah. So I cover it up and just leave it. Walk away at least two minutes. Okay. Come back. I like my tea quite strong. Fish it out. I don't, none of this stirring nonsense, none of this squeezing into the side. No, it's fine as it is. Take it out. A little bit of semi-skim milk in, fish, balsam, off we go. Drink a lovely cup.

Speaker B: 00:03:41

So when you say cover it, do you mean you put a lid on it?

Speaker A: 00:03:44

Yeah. Okay. Because otherwise it will get cold.

Speaker B: 00:03:47

Okay. And you're two minutes of letting it sit there.

Speaker A: 00:03:49

Yeah. I would say minimum 90 seconds. It can probably take up to about three to four minutes.

Speaker C: 00:03:55

Yeah. That's what I do. Peter. Very simple teabag, hot boiled water. It's got to be boiled. I give the teabag a bit of a smash around. Take it out, milk, drink. Okay. None of this covering up nonsense. No, it's really important. But that's like the everyday, that's the first cup of tea in the morning when I just need a cup of tea. I would prefer, and if I'm doing tea properly, I've got guests, I'll use nicer teabags, still bags. If you don't know what a teabag is, it's a bag of tea, in a pot. I find teapot tea better than cup tea.

Speaker A: 00:04:30

I have some data about that, which we'll move on to in due course. How do you make your tea? Anything wildly different from what Peter and I have said? No, not really. Although I think I take a similar approach to how I do with my bread when I'm making bread in that there's basically two ways. One is that you just let it get on with it and you can just put the ingredients into your dough and leave it for 12 hours and more or less just bake it and it'll be fine. Or you can be active and knead it and do all that stuff and then you can get it done much faster. Sounds a bit needy. Oh God, that's bad. But same with tea. So if I want to get the tea done, then I'd do the squishing method. Otherwise you do the steeping method, leave it for maybe two or three minutes. But essentially it's the same.

Speaker B: 00:05:21

Sarah, anything wildly different? I think I do a bit of both. Not putting a lid on it, but I definitely let it seep and then I do the squish around and then I'll just chuck in a little bit of milk at the top. But that's about it.

Speaker C: 00:05:32

Okay. So where are we going off this fascinating segment?

Speaker A: 00:05:34

Well, I've got some data. Do you want to hear it? Yeah. Well, I'm not sure actually whether it would make sense to present the data before I presented some of the kind of what people say about how you should make tea. Because the way that we all do it is the way that people make tea. It's fairly normal, right? It is entirely normal. However, if you ask people, and if you look at the literature on tea, you'll find that it's apparently riven with class distinctions, that there are millions of different methods, that a lot of people have really precise views about exactly what you should do. And so, you know, George Orwell wrote about this whole issue of milk in first. Massive issue this, you know, do you put the milk in before the tea bag and the hot water or the other way around? Milk in first, of course. So he said the milk first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own is unanswerable. That is by putting the tea in first and then stirring as you pour, you can regulate the amount of milk. That's why I do it. It seems insane to put the milk in first because you might end up with the wrong amount of milk. Exactly. Evelyn Waugh, however, I mean, he was firmly on the sorry, he was on the he was also of the milk in last, but for him, it was much of a class thing. He said all nannies and many governesses when pouring out tea, put the milk in first. It is said by tea fanciers to produce a richer mixture. Sharp children notice that this is not normally done in the drawing room. To some, this revelation becomes symbolic. And people at the time, you know, upper middle class people at the time used to use the phrase they use the acronym MIF, milk in first, meaning someone of low social status who put their milk in first. This whole thing about, you know, which order you put milk in, what kind of tea you drink, whether you have lemon, whether you have sugar, whether you have milk, whether you obviously whether you use a pot or not. If you look at the literature on tea, you'd think that this was a big, that Britain was a nation who drank tea in 150 different ways. And every single way you have of drinking tea is going to say something damning about you. Well, I've done a survey on Facebook and I can tell you this isn't the case. I'm here to tell you it's not true. Yeah. OK. So, you know, we are Facebook mates and I saw only Facebook mates, of course. And I did see you sort of putting stuff out there and on purpose I stayed away from it because I was intrigued to see what the results would be. Go for it. Tell us. Well, I asked people in a survey of nearly 30 people. I didn't select them. They were self-selecting. I asked them how they make tea, then how they think they ought to make tea and why there was a difference. And more or less everyone says the same. The way that they make tea is in a cup, bag, hot water, milk. Very few people take sugar, or at least admit to on Facebook. How people think they ought to make tea, the people who answer that question in a pot with leaves. Yeah. Yeah. And the main reason people didn't was time. So I think we're a nation who've convinced ourselves that there's loads of different ways of making tea and it's hugely important to get it right. But actually, we all do the same. I wonder if there's a correlation, like decline of British society. Decline of the British Empire. There used to be variety of ways to make our cups of tea and now it's all just gone down to more or less one way and no one's that bothered as long as it's quite quick. No. Yeah, well, that's what I don't understand. The amount that people write about tea and how important it is to the British and stuff is disproportionate to the amount of kind of actual real life controversy there is about tea. Because there isn't any. We all make tea the same way. Yeah. So yeah, maybe it becomes controversial in terms of recent events like this American person on TikTok. Well, exactly. It's almost like we rally around and say, no, this is totally wrong. But it's not a million miles away from, you know, we're still being made in a cup or a mug. Now, I'll tell you, there's a few things I did find because I rated people by what social class their background was. Yeah. Not them. It's quite hard to make that judgment. Yeah. You know, especially because a lot of people, you know, if you grew up in a working class household and they went to graduate school and they have a professional job, what class are you? Hard to answer. Much easier to answer what social class they were born into. Yeah. And so kind of what I unearthed was upper middle class people are more likely to use a mug. Yeah. And lower middle class people and people from working class background are more likely to use a cup. In general, the tea bag and the milk do not come into contact with one another. Hmm. But actually, some people do do that. I do that. I can't find a class. Is that not kosher? Oh, I find the idea of adding milk to a cup with a bag in it extremely weird. See, I do that. So most people remove the bag, then add the milk. I also add sugar, which also doesn't seem to be very kosher either. No. And in fact, the two sugar people in my survey said something which I found very unusual, which is that they add the sugar before they add the water. Now, I find that weird. I'll tell you why. Because I have a strange deep seated superstition that the tea bag will suck up the sugar. Yeah, I always think that. And so I feel like the sugar should go in at the end with the milk. Oh, no, I feel like if I put it at the

Speaker B: 00:11:12

end with the milk, it's less likely if depending on how much milk's gone in, I only put a dash, just to be clear, would be less likely to dissolve as well. Okay. Well, anyway, so one

Speaker A: 00:11:23

thing in the context of you. This whole tea thing is blowing my mind. But specifically with you, Sarah, there's, and I didn't, I have my, the foreigners in my survey, about three of them. Okay. And they, they do weird things with tea. So the, what we can say is the British, there is a British way of making tea. Yeah. And foreigners do all kinds of weird stuff. So they do things like they drink herbal tea. That's what I was going to ask. A standard. What's the view for British people on herbal teas and fruity teas? Well, but I mean, I mean, they're people, British people do drink herbal tea, but it's not standard. It's not like that's the type of tea you drink. They also would do things like put cinnamon in it. Oh, no. So one respondent, Taz Kay, who grew up in a Greek household, Greek parents, grew up here, but with Greek heritage, they put cinnamon in their tea, a cinnamon stick. I think this is quite fun. I'm going to give this a go. And, and just anecdotally, I didn't have any Americans in my survey, but Americans, 85% of tea drunk in the US is iced tea. And by standard, they, they put a lemon in it. And when they don't put lemon in it, they put cream in it. It's all very strange. So the, so the point is there's a lot of consistency about the way British people drink, make, make and drink tea. But it is quite, you know, it's certainly distinctive in comparison to the way that other, other nations do their tea. So it's a unifying factor, brings us all together. I think it is unifying rather than a dividing factor. That's what I've unearthed.

Speaker C: 00:12:49

Would you, would you, would you ever turn down a cup of tea made for you that was done, you witnessed being done in a way that you didn't like?

Speaker A: 00:12:55

It depends on the situation. No, I don't think I ever would. I recently turned down two cups of tea. So on that very basis.

Speaker C: 00:13:05

Did you seize the teaspoon and say, I'll do it myself. Thank you.

Speaker A: 00:13:09

One of them I felt really bad. It was, it was my son. He was only nine. And he made me one of the first cups of tea he's ever made me. And he rejected it out of hand. It is awful that you rejected a cup of tea. It's terrible. I turned it away. Did you throw it in his face? He's never going to want to make tea again. He's lucky because it wasn't hot enough. So that's, you know, but I did feel really quite bad about that, actually. But I can't, I can't let my standards drop, you know. Well, the funny thing is tea is one of those things where you don't realise how hard it is to get right until you try and teach a kid to do it. And you realise how bad they are at it. Um, let's see. It's been a lot of me and Nick. I think Zara was about to say something. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: 00:13:44

I was just, I was just going to say, um, one of the most nervous tea making experiences I have is making tea for English people. It is actually nerve wracking. Like I'm very precise in exactly how I think they'll want it. I've, I've nailed it. I've been told, but still, it's very, it's very nerve wracking making tea for the British. I don't like it.

Speaker A: 00:14:17

more or less in the same way in the UK, more or less, we found out from people from overseas, like Zara just now, they get a bit nervous about making it for us. And that actually the differences we found in the survey that you did, Nick, with the main division was between people based in the UK and from elsewhere. Um, yeah, what's our point? Where do we want to go from this? Peter?

Speaker C: 00:14:40

I wonder if the SOE ever used tea making technique as a way of sniffing out spies. That'd be quite fun to find out. Yeah, that would work. I'm just thinking of the scene in Inglorious Basterds where they, they, they sort of, the, the, the main antihero sniffs out the American agent because he sort of uses his hand to gesture a number incorrectly.

Speaker A: 00:15:02

Yeah. No, that literally is a scene in Ice Cold in Alex. That's how they rumble who the German spy is because he doesn't know how to brew up in a British army way.

Speaker C: 00:15:11

Yeah. So yeah, but what are we, what are we talking about here? We're talking about sniffing out, we're deciding on people's status or their, whether or not they're in group or out group based on their behaviours, aren't we? That's what we're sort of, we're sort of talking about.

Speaker B: 00:15:29

I was just going to say, it's just that quick assessment you can make if someone is friend or foe just by the way they speak or the actions that they do.

Speaker C: 00:15:36

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, broadening it out, we're looking for those tells in behaviour that, that indicate, that trigger our xenophobia or not, to see if somebody's sort of, if somebody's one of us or not. But in a sort of insidious form, you see it's a form of snobbery, isn't it? We're, we're, we're being, we're being, we're, our disgust reaction is being triggered by the way somebody's making tea. And so if this, this TikTok video is not, not intended to be ironic, then, you know, we're being, we're being rude about this, this poor woman because she doesn't understand how British make tea.

Speaker A: 00:16:14

Although I do think we give foreigners a pass. Well, apart from the French. Well, they, no, that's right. But I tend to think that we put, that we put foreigners, like they don't fit into the class system. So I don't think,

Speaker C: 00:16:25

But they're all naturally a lower class though.

Speaker A: 00:16:28

Well, of course. They don't, they're no threat. They're not a threat. So let's go through this. And we talked about, you know, well, there's other ways. So apart from how we make tea, are there other ways, other kind of shibboleths? So we talked about, I mean, one that springs to mind straight away is cutlery, you know, how you hold your knife and fork, right? That immediately, that can be a class thing in the UK. But as you say, I think, foreigners definitely get a pass on that. What else is there?

Speaker C: 00:16:56

Well, there's a great list actually on Wikipedia of historical examples of where these shibboleths, particularly this pronunciation has been used as a tool of ethnic cleansing or as a tool of war. So there are examples, lots of examples in Europe where an invading army has gone in, seized people late at night and forced them to pronounce a word. And then if they get it wrong, then they're either cast out or killed. So it's quite a serious thing, this. And it's something that we do naturally as human animals all the time, is judge people based on what they say, what they look like and how they feel. So this is very, this is a very sort of hot topic at the moment in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and in the general wave of anti-discriminatory sentiment that's going on, the MeToo movement, etc, etc. But it's like, so I mean, for me, it feels like something that one should actively try to manage in oneself is how one is judging people as they engage you. Because otherwise, that way lies dragons. We've gone rapidly from tea to genocide. Well, I know. They're kind of related. But it's the same mechanism in your head, that when you go, oh, this stupid woman can't make tea, is the same thing that's saying, in some people's heads, say, I don't like black people.

Speaker A: 00:18:30

Yeah. It's like, oh, damn, I hate Croats sort of thing. Yeah. Okay, look, but where do we go from there? I just feel we're not really penetrating this, we're just kind of going round and round a bit. We need to kind of try and focus ourselves. We need to, we're sort of drifting, we're swirling around like a tea bag in a poorly made sort of lukewarm cup of tea, water rather, that's just not really diffusing. Yeah, well, I think there's a question for me, which is why we believe that tea is a class thing when it isn't really. Because if you look at some of the explanations people have given for those, you know, the historical class issues with tea, there's a story that makes sense, you know, which is, first of all, that tea obviously used to be expensive. Now, of course, even high quality teas are within people's reach now, economically, within everyone's reach. Bit like sort of having a suntan, you know, used to be a sign that you could go abroad. And well, originally, it was a sign that you worked in a field and it was bad. And then it became a sign that you could go, you could afford to go on holiday somewhere sunny, and it was good. And now it's once again, it's naff, because everyone can do it. Yeah. And I think, historically, you know, people have said that the drinking tea at all, of course, originally was a sign that you were rich, then being able to drink the good tea, and therefore possibly not putting milk and sugar in and or having a lemon was an upper class thing, because your tea was just tastier, and you didn't need to put those things in this whole issue about milk. And first, there's a story that it's to do with having better quality China, that you didn't need to cool your water down if you had high quality China. I don't really believe that. But it's funny that the perception that something is a class thing can persist for far longer than that it actually is. I mean, now you really can't based on my survey, you could not look at the way that someone made tea and infer no with any confidence what social class they were. No. So why do we think we can? I don't know. I just I just think I suspect that there's a lot of things which have been which have been completely democratised now. Yeah. And almost homogenised that that's still for some reason, we feel have class connotations. Yeah. Sarah, Sarah, how does the how does the people see tea as a class thing? No, this is the thing like I'm,

Speaker B: 00:20:54

I, to me, tea is just tea and back home in New Zealand tea is just tea. Coffee is just coffee. It's just something you do like I, it's interesting to look at it as a from a class perspective. I

Speaker C: 00:21:06

mean, I'm not, I'm not necessarily convinced that people do consider it as a differentiator.

Speaker A: 00:21:11

Yeah, I don't think they do. No. However, but we haven't talked about coffee. I mean, I don't really want to talk about coffee too much. I haven't done a Facebook survey about coffee. Oh, what? Yeah. Because one of the things that annoys my wife about the UK, and that's what I've said, she's Brazilian, is how we bang on about coffee. And like why how coffee is such a big thing about whether it's you know, mocha choca, whether it's a latte, whether it's a flat white, whether it's espresso, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because to her being Brazilian, coffee is just coffee. That's that. Okay. And that's kind of how I feel about tea. Let's not let's not mess with it. Yes, I know how I want it done. But it's just tea. It's not a big deal. And so it's coffee, the new tea in the UK as a class signifier, because I definitely look down a bit on people who are fussy about what kind of coffee they have. And whether it's, you know, I think they should be like I am with tea. But is coffee a new kind of signifier, signaler of maybe maybe what you're

Speaker C: 00:22:08

touching out there is something that challenged strongly in my mind. It's like the, the propensity to be to be fussy about something is an indicator of a person, not a class, but of a particular personality type. Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I mean, I'm not, I'm not fussy how I get my tea. I gladly accept a cup of tea if someone makes me one. If it's a bit weak or a bit milky, I don't mind too much. But, but so I know some people really are. And they are a bit picky about how their tea is.

Speaker A: 00:22:36

I think that is a well known class indicator. I mean, the, you know, certainly, so the theory of signalling is, and we talk about signalling quite a lot, the theory of, you know, the theory of signalling is that to be effective, a signal has to be harder for one group of people, the sort of in group or the out group rather, than it is for the in group. So, you know, pronunciation works well, because it's very hard to learn how to pronounce something in a different way. So it's a very good differentiator. You know, it's easy for people to be brought up that way, very hard for someone who hasn't. And, you know, anything that correlates with things like wealth, or education, you know, so being having a workable knowledge of Latin, for example, it certainly, you know, in the past, showed that you must have gone to a good public school.

Speaker C: 00:23:26

An indicator of frivolous education.

Speaker A: 00:23:28

Yeah. But, but, but, and of course, you know, so that's why things like, you know, drinking, drinking tea in the past would have, would have, would have been as effective signal, because it was, you know, easier for rich people to obtain tea than it was for people. Yeah, so now, now, the, so the idea is that people who are sort of upper class, don't need to worry, you're not gonna, there's not gonna be any danger that you look at the way they make tea while they're sitting in their stately home. And, you know, they can make tea in a mug, but they're in a stately home. So you, you know, there's not an issue. But people who are in a suburban semi, and wants to illustrate that they are better bred, have to worry about those things, which are potentially other signals, because they, they, they've got a harder job to differentiate themselves from, from sort of the next class down. Yeah. So fussiness about your sort of social signaling is an indicator of social climbing. It has to be right, because the whole point is that the higher status you are, the less you have to worry about it, because you give off those signals naturally. Well, it's nice to be vindicated that I'm

Speaker C: 00:24:35

high status then. Because you don't, you don't, you don't care. Yeah, that makes me feel bad,

Speaker A: 00:24:39

because I worry about my kids' table manners and how they hold their knife and fork stuff. I'm always banging on at them about it. But that's because I'm just some terribly aspirational, lower middle class person trying to desperately get to be middle middle class. Well, I think that's right. I would love to be, to not care about that. But I am still not confident enough my social class to be able to, you know, to not worry about how my kids showing me up.

Speaker B: 00:25:02

Yeah, maybe, maybe I've got this wrong, because I'm thinking of this differently. Like, if I necessarily like back home, from a lower class, I'm not really going to care about how my tea and coffee is made. But if I'm from a higher class, I'm definitely going to be caring about how my coffee is made. Like, where's it coming from? Who's making it? Which sounds

Speaker A: 00:25:20

like it's the opposite of what we're saying here. I think it's more about not necessarily like, you might care about having really good coffee, because you really like that kind of coffee. And you could afford to do the very best kind of that kind of thing. But worrying about what people will think of you, that's a sign of being a social climber, and therefore low status, right? Yeah. So the the, that's, that's the thing. I mean, I think you're, you're, you're right in that, you know, it's perfectly fine for you on your own, to sit there and go, I really like this expensive type of coffee, I shall order it from Amazon. It's, it's people who worry that they might accidentally say they like the right, wrong kind of coffee, when they're at a social occasion. You know, just really worrying about that is enough to mark you out as a climber. So just to finish things off, there's a question I want to ask, which is, what do you judge in other people? What do you find super naff? If someone says a certain thing, or does a certain thing, you immediately go, well, that's not that's non you, as it were, it's non me.

Speaker C: 00:26:25

I've got loads. Well, I'm British. I've got loads. Yeah. Obviously, being high status,

Speaker A: 00:26:30

I would never say. Yeah, that would be naff in itself. That would be naff in itself. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:26:35

Let's start off with Sarah. Oh, please don't start with me. Because I'm still thinking of something because you guys all have something already. Yeah, okay, fine. The thing I hate is when people can't think of something to say. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I hate what I hate is being put on the spot when I'm not prepared. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So in fact,

Speaker A: 00:26:53

I think you're living in the: 1970

Speaker B: 00:27:41

hate was actually the proper way of doing it. Like that was starting to come. You've just fallen. I

Speaker A: 00:27:46

think I think it's one of those things which which thinking that saying hate is right. Is one of those things that the people who say hate think differentiates themselves from the people who say age, who they see as below them, but actually, it's the other way

Speaker C: 00:28:01

around. Give it 50 years, it might flip and become the correct way of saying it. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:28:05

Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. Where I work, I can guarantee you that 90% of people say hate. That's wrong. But are they low status people? Yeah, that's the problem. It makes me feel bad about where I work. And so in turn makes me feel bad about where I'm at myself. Do they all look down on you as an H-sayer? I tell you what, they all look down on me as just being old, and like absurdly traditional and out of sort out of place, you know. So that's hate.

Speaker C: 00:28:30

What else? White trainers with jeans or any other kind of dark non sportswear.

Speaker A: 00:28:37

That sounds like an again, another 80s thing. No. I wear jeans with white trainers all the time.

Speaker C: 00:28:43

No, but people still do it. Sorry, Sarah, what are you gonna say? I was gonna say I have white

Speaker B: 00:28:49

sneakery type shoes and I wear jeans with them all the time. They're like my favorite type of

Speaker C: 00:28:53

shoes. I'm feeling a bit hurt and attacked here, Peter. You can you can assume that I'm judging

Speaker B: 00:28:59

I'm just judging you for judging me. It's gonna be this constant judgment. Nick?

Speaker A: 00:29:05

Yeah, for me, it's people who are fussy about the way that their things look, you know, people who want to kind of look good for Instagram. And or they or they when they they want their, you know, dinner party to just look absolutely perfect. And everything has to be neat. And the upholstery has to match the curtains. And there's coasters down to protect the table. That kind of all that all that sort of obsession with things looking perfect. I take much more of a kind of sort of Japanese approach that things ought to look used and worn. And that's that's what things are really beautiful

Speaker C: 00:29:41

when they're just nice. Things tend to things tend to nothing. So yeah, yeah, that's sort of

Speaker A: 00:29:48

wear and decay are good. They're good things. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker B: 00:29:55

Sara? Something that would really like kind of annoy me and it really does grind my gears is people eating with their mouth open. I think the reason why I'm bringing that up is because you were talking before about cutlery and the way you should be using cutlery and stuff. And I just think it's good manners to eat with your mouth closed. And just in your upbringing kind of shows it in

Speaker A: 00:30:15

terms of how you eat and all that kind of stuff. It's good manners to not gross out everyone else when you're eating, right? Yeah. Okay, look, I think we've got it covered there. I like that little bit at the end to know what we judge other people about. And trust me, I've got loads more as well. I'll park those for another time. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare and Sara of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye.