46a De Beauvoir Crescent (by the canal)
Shoreditch
London N1 5RY
Closest station: Haggerston
It's never too late for a party and I'm pleased to invite you to help celebrate my new characters with some good music, good drink and good friends.
On Wednesday 7th August RIBEIRA, a fantastic new bar in Shoreditch, East London, will be the place to be for all things Jet Tea. There'll be a book signing with yours truly (£5 a book! That's cheaper than Amazon!), great music from some of the people that inspired the novel and a Q&A session. If you want to ask anything from where I get my inspiration to what I can recommend as a hangover cure then now's your chance!
Copies of Jet Tea will be limited on the night, so I'd strongly recommend you preorder a copy to avoid disappointment. This will be at a discounted promotional price too. To preorder, click here!
The event is hosted by Bird on the Birch collective and kicks off at 7pm with a FREE wine reception. There's even a chance that the real Jet Tea will be there...
Book Launch Event Page (good to add yourself as 'going' if you want some of that free wine)
Official Novel Page
"One of the most refreshing books in a long while ... a joy to read" - TeaTone.Net
"Elements of Douglas Adams ... Comforting, thought-provoking and hilarious throughout" - PaulSchiernecker.Com
Oh and one more thing. In anticipation of the event, just for you, here's CHAPTER ONE of The Life and Loves of Jet Tea, absolutely free!
Jet Tea awoke with an erection. He lay cemented to a spot half-under his duvet; the room had just come into being around him but he wouldn’t yet be able to interact with it as he couldn’t yet move. His consciousness was only half-formed and remained that way for a short while as he slowly attempted to muster enough energy to shed his waking paralysis.
Eventually he groaned, forced himself onto his side and caught sight of the duvet-shrouded mound between his thighs as it slipped away, like a magician’s assistant in a disappearing act. It seemed like the erection wouldn’t subside any time soon, but he didn’t want to take matters into his own hands, as Tara would be coming over in a couple of hours (which, incidentally was probably the motive for the erection in the first place) and he’d hate to tarnish the afternoon for both of them. It wasn’t really a problem, either. He was solitary in his tiny little kingdom and there was no issue with presenting his sleep-given state of arousal to himself alone. Nevertheless, he’d have to get up eventually to cook his breakfast and see what the world had been up to while he slept. It was Thursday, so he doubted his mum was even in the house, as she usually worked Thursdays, but his sister may have been.
He rolled over onto his belly, arms splayed out over the pillows, in an attempt to flatten it. It was a short-term success as it bent down pressed between his leg and the admirably resistant mattress, but as soon as he moved again it would spring back up, proudly and defiantly.
As the final shreds of his waking catatonia wore away and getting out of bed became an achievable reality, Jet Tea beheld his dressing gown. If the appendage hadn’t begun to find flaccidity by the time he wished to venture downstairs, he’d simply prop it up against his belly, then tie it in place with the belt of his robe. Simple. Nobody would suspect a thing, hopefully. He could make a quick trip to the bathroom for a direct extradition of the inconvenience; Tara wouldn’t be here for a while yet and surely things would have returned to full working order by then? No. He’d feel more uncomfortable interacting with his relatives having recently done that than he would simply concealing a loaded weapon. It wasn’t his fault that it was there, after all.
He got up, pushed the offending phallus up against himself, bent forward slightly from the mild pain of it and tied his dressing gown around it and his waist. Looking down, he could only make out the tiniest of protrusions amidst the shaggy fabric, and it was a lot higher up now so was much less likely to arouse immediate suspicion in the unlikely event that it was noticed by anyone.
Jet Tea left his bedroom with trepidation and went downstairs into the kitchen. Nobody was home, but either way the anxiety of his trip and the possibility of a family member spotting his guilty secret had paradoxically caused it to return to limpness – an inevitability he should have considered. He momentarily loosened his dressing gown to let things fall into their proper place then began to make his breakfast. It was, in actuality, close to one o’clock in the afternoon, so his meal was not strictly ‘breakfast’ in the eyes of conventional society, but given that he had only recently awoken, the time-frame of the day was still relevant to Jet Tea so it was breakfast to him, nonetheless. People on the other side of the planet were still yet to partake of their breakfasts, so his point was valid. Two Cumberland sausages glistened beautifully under their coats of sizzling-hot oil while a neighbouring saucepan full of creamy-white liquid bubbled away and eventually mutated into scrambled eggs.
Jet Tea took his breakfast upstairs, back to his bedroom, and put the television on. He flicked through channels past footage of blue skies and rolling green hills to a light-hearted, daytime documentary; Mythbusters. Before eating he changed out of his dressing gown and into a baggy t-shirt. Doing so, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He looked proudly at his trim, youthful body, his chiseled and pronounced jaw line and his effortless, shaggy head of hair. His glasses enhanced his appearance and made him look intelligent in a handsome way; he glimpsed the copy of George Orwell’s 1984 on the shelf behind him and smiled. Its presence complimented his aura of intellect. No wonder he was in love with a beautiful, mature woman who loved him equally in return. Jet Tea was deliberately self-deprecating most of the time; he considered it part of his charm, but today he felt amazing. A real man.
The phone rang. He answered it. His world ended.
#
Jet Tea met Tara one and a quarter years prior to the Thursday of the erection, the midday breakfast, Mythbusters and the phone call (exactly one and a quarter years, as he would later come to realise). They worked together at Fozzy’s Lebanese Pizzeria and Other Foods in Pinner. He was an apprentice chef, having recently completed a food science course at Watford College, and Tara was a waitress on the brink of becoming assistant team leader. She was also fifteen years older than Jet Tea, making her thirty-seven when she began to grow fond of the timid, introverted, twenty-two year old chef.
Sex and romance had, up until this point, been of little concern or interest to Jet Tea, who filled the early part of his teenage life with neighbourhood and school friends throwing dairy products at buses and playing knock-down-ginger, and the latter part of it with college and work, both of which he enjoyed enough to not bother looking for a girlfriend. However, a previously unexplored curiosity awoke from a long slumber when he met a beautiful older woman who took a shine to him.
For Tara, who was already of a reasonable age to begin considering having children, the relationship with young Jet Tea began life as a kind of fond motherhood, but turned to physical attractiveness the more she grew to know him. It was also a matter of curiosity for her, who’d had as little intimate experience with younger men as Jet Tea had had with older women. As one would imagine, the difference in age was the source of immediate fun for Jet Tea’s friends, despite Jet Tea himself not considering it unusual or unnatural in the slightest. It was not the source of fun for Tara’s friends, as her then current simultaneous involvement in a long-term relationship with a media sales executive from Kenton called James meant she could not be particularly open or vocal about her budding love affair with Jet Tea.
This slight complexity meant that, despite their homes being an approximate six-minute drive from each other, Tara and Jet Tea would be compelled to take long, thrice-weekly tube journeys to Kings Cross to be with one another. Tara would only visit Jet Tea at his home if James’s job forced him out of town for a few days. On those rare occasions, one would be lucky to see the door to Jet Tea’s bedroom open at all.
On those precious few evenings during which they would be able to spend time at home together, Jet Tea would delight in cooking Tara and himself a hearty, romantic meal. Although such a gesture is common throughout the worldwide relationship community, there was far more to cooking dinner for his girlfriend than being irresistibly romantic and ultimately enticing her upstairs; the prime thrill was in the cooking itself for Jet Tea, rather than the subsequent payoff. Having been enthusiastic about all things food preparation since a curiously early age, the culinary side of life had become Jet Tea’s number one passion. That first sizzle of chopped vegetables hitting a greased frying pan, the grind of sea salt into the steamy, bubbling abyss of boiling pasta, the way a chicken breast shed its image of a dismembered animal part as it turned white on the grill; cooking, more than anything in his life other than Tara, literally made Jet Tea happy. During his time with Tara, Jet Tea would leave Fozzy’s Lebanese Pizzeria and Other Foods, acquire a position in a three Michelin-Star restaurant in Swiss Cottage, have an unsuccessful job interview with Antony Worrall-Thompson and temp in the cafeteria of the school he used to attend.
Jet Tea’s best friends were both musicians, and where he lacked a kinship with their kind of creativity, he excelled beyond them in the kitchen and that was his talent and his alone. Being creative with food would never fail to push Jet Tea’s troubles to a dark, cloudy place seldom visited at the back of his consciousness. With this in mind, over a year later, one may perfectly understand why Jet Tea would solemnly regret cooking his breakfast before receiving a particularly upsetting phone call, rather than after. At least it would have numbed his despair somewhat.
Because of their constantly deviant liaisons, Jet Tea had to take out a rather large bank loan to pay for such things as bed and breakfast, romantic bistro dinners (during which he would never relent from begrudgingly commenting on the quality of the meat, the speed of service and how particular vegetables should have been cooked, silently envying Tara for her ability to just enjoy the meal) and birthday, anniversary and unnecessary greeting-card shop cash-in day presents. He was not overly bothered about the loan, because, quite simply, he was in love.
Five months after Tara and Jet Tea first made love, Tara opted to end her now virtually redundant relationship with the understandably distraught James. This decision drastically altered the nature and course of her formally simultaneous relationship with Jet Tea, for the two of them no longer had to travel across an absurd portion of the capital to be with one another, and it also meant that they could adopt a mutual social life, integrating with each other’s circle of friends and not having to worry about being seen together outside of the house, or the Metropolitan line.
The first thing Tara’s friends chose to notice about her new love was his age. This caused something of a friction in that Jet Tea’s mentality was simply not yet in tune with their idea of a pleasant social event; which more-often-than-not consisted of drinking red wine and eating pitted olives at a cocktail bar in Ealing, whilst usually discussing mortgage payments and complaining that Craig still hasn’t proposed, or implied that he will propose (for Jet Tea had decided that Tara’s female friends’ collective boyfriend was probably called Craig, and her two male friends that never really bothered involving him in their manly discussions were probably both called Craig as well. He wasn’t sure why, he probably heard the name crop up in conversation during a particularly dull and arduous evening).
The second thing Tara’s friends chose to notice about her new love was that he was quite clearly not enjoying himself on such evenings, nor was he attempting to engage with them on any level. Tara’s friends were not attempting to engage with him on any level either, of course, but they steadfastly felt that it was not their responsibility to. Tara also noticed the first two things her friends noticed, but she did not allow them to burden her, instead she stored them somewhere within her psyche to be later conveniently revealed to her boyfriend on a day which saw her feeling lower and more irritable than usual. She did not, however, notice the third thing that her friends noticed.
The third thing Tara’s friends noticed about her new love was that they did not like him. Furthermore, they liked Tara a lot less when Jet Tea was around, simply because it was solely her fault that Jet Tea was there, burdening their evenings with his ugly social and generational differences. When eventually Phillipa mentioned the third thing to Tara, amidst lamentations on Craig’s new haircut, the possibility of such a relationship turning problematic first became clear.
The first thing Jet Tea’s friends noticed about his new love was her age. However, being rather young, they did not react in the same way that Tara’s friends did. It will come as a surprise to few that many a teenage boy and young man often wish to have some kind of an intimate experience with a woman who is older and more mature than he, and as such the mentality of Jet Tea’s male friends in the company of Tara swung between curious awe and polite envy toward their fortunate friend. This was of course nourishment for Jet Tea’s often starved ego, and the otherwise modest young man was pleased to discover that his relationship with an older woman was the most relentlessly talked about topic among his friends, regardless of Tara’s actual presence.
On future nights out, Jet Tea would struggle to cope with not being a constant talking point, not because he was particularly egotistical, but because being talked about had become the norm, and it saved him the unpleasant effort of having to do something different for them to talk about, or ask them about how their music was going, which would cause the conversation to wander off into territory Jet Tea could not comprehend or contribute to, rendering him the proverbial ‘third wheel.’ Maurice and Hayden may not have been particularly talented chefs, but they could each comfortably hold their own in any conversation about food. Jet Tea would concur that whether or not a person actually knew anything about food, at least they liked to think they did. The same can be said for music, but Jet Tea had far too much integrity to pretend he knew more than he actually did about something, so would quickly tune out of any such discussion in a manner similar to how he would tune out of a conversation about Craig or mortgages with Tara’s friends.
In meagre attempts to fill the eventual hole left by no longer talking about Tara, Jet Tea would either gratuitously bring her up in any conversation, regardless of her proximity to the subject matter, or do something outlandish and at random, such as choosing to be the only one in the pub to dance to the music (regardless of the actual presence of a dance floor, and which he deliberately did in the style of someone of the opposite sex in order to ensnare as much surrounding attention as could be), or raising his skinny arms high into the air and shouting at the top of his voice a falsetto incoherence, before collapsing in a fit of giggles as his sense of self-awareness gradually returned. If all else failed, he would do both of these things. This often worked too well, as it garnered not only the attention of his two friends, but that of everybody in the room, mistakenly leading to the general notion that Jet Tea was someone with extreme confidence.
The second thing Jet Tea’s friends noticed about his new love was just how often she felt the need to argue with him. This would only occur when Tara would spend time with Jet Tea’s friends, due to the heightened frustration she felt at being the oldest and therefore most mature person in the room, a frustration which often led her to persist in starting arguments for no reason. While Jet Tea would tackle his anxieties around Tara’s friends by closing off and letting them get on with their evening by themselves, Tara was slightly less introverted than it is required to be for that kind of approach to work successfully. Instead, she would pick on any slight thing Jet Tea said or did, and express her disapproval, disdain, or disagreement with it. Jet Tea would then opt to defend his words or actions with more words or actions, resulting in a serious argument over a less-than-serious matter. For although Jet Tea was rather reserved in many confrontational situations, he was happy and comfortable enough with Tara to let her know the problems he had with her.
Maurice and Hayden perceived that this was the constant state of Jet Tea and Tara’s relationship, as they had never observed the two of them in other environments (Jet Tea’s friends and Tara’s mixed only once, and on that occasion their relationship was considerably overshadowed by Maurice’s drunken attempt to put his tongue in Tara’s friend Gina’s mouth, much to the annoyance of Craig). On drunker and more honest late nights, they would sometimes ask Jet Tea why he was even with Tara, to which he would angrily retort that they were wrong about her, and that they didn’t know what she was really like which, of course, was true. But it is a fact of life that a drunk person knows more than anyone about anything, ever. Therefore the drunk Maurice and Hayden would shoot down Jet Tea’s contention regarding Tara with angry self-assurance.
The third thing Jet Tea’s friends noticed about his new love was that they didn’t like her. Or rather, they didn’t mind her, but they certainly didn’t like the state that she put Jet Tea in when she was around. After the novelty of a candid view to an age-gap relationship and the wonder of what doing things to a naked older woman would be like wore off, Maurice and Hayden conceded that their friend was not happy, or particularly fun to be around, when Tara was present. When eventually Maurice mentioned the third thing to Jet Tea, the problems of a social relationship first became clear.
Eventually, Jet Tea and Tara stopped ocializing as a couple, instead spending their time together in the privacy of Jet Tea’s bedroom. Neither of them were particularly interested in watching films, and being constantly in each other’s company meant they had little to say that the other would not already know, rendering conversation pointless (a problem), so they found themselves spending almost all of their time together making love. Jet Tea possessed the sexual eagerness of a young man, whilst Tara retained the sexual willingness of a middle-aged woman. These traits combined assured that the pair of them were rarely out of bed, let alone out of doors. The constancy of their physical intimacy led to Jet Tea routinely awaking in a state of arousal, purely in anticipation of a visit from Tara. This was basically an instance of Pavlovian sense memory.
This relationship was ideal for Jet Tea, who was simply having constant sex with an older, more experienced woman. He felt he was a teenage daydream made real, and that there was little need to change or rethink anything about his life with Tara.
Tara grew to think otherwise. While it may very well be the desire of many women close to forty to spend all their time on their backs with a young boy bouncing around on top of them, it was the desire of many other women close to forty to raise a family, with a financially dependable man of a similar age and therefore mentality to them, get married and live out the remainder of their days meeting friends for dinner, tending to their gardens and picking up their children from school. Unfortunately, Tara belonged to the latter group, and it was for that reason that one Thursday afternoon, at 12.46pm, three hours and twenty-four minutes earlier than she intended on arriving at Jet Tea’s house for yet another day of rolling around naked with someone fifteen years her junior, she opted instead to call Jet Tea on his mobile phone.
But none of that mattered now, Tara was gone.
#
Jet Tea had felt no apprehension or alarm upon answering the phone call. His assumption was that she was probably phoning to ensure Jet Tea had an ample supply of contraceptives, or if he would like her to buy any food for dinner later. He did not at all suspect that she was calling to inform him that she would not be coming round any more, and that he would no longer be able to have sex with her, see her regularly or consider her his girlfriend. Due to the immense shock they were causing him, Tara’s exact words were paradoxically inaudible to Jet Tea, but the essence of what she was saying was clear as day.
‘Hello?’ he answered, with the same combined tone of formality and familiarity that anyone adopts when answering the phone to someone whose identity is already known to them. Tara spoke, Jet Tea replied. ‘What? … Why? … But, I love you … come round, come round and talk to me here … that’s not true! … Please come round … Tara? … Don’t … I love you.’ He fell back into the armchair beside his bed, as though he had just been thumped in the gut. He had been, to a degree.
Immediately, Jet Tea felt he should finish his breakfast; perhaps as a means of comfort, or perhaps in a meagre attempt to proceed with a normal, routine life. Like an abused dog trying to continue eating from its bowl whilst being repeatedly kicked in the ribs. After he forced the last forkful of scrambled egg into his mouth, he took his plate downstairs and then returned to his bedroom, switched off his television, sat back in his armchair and cried.
Shortly after he began crying, Jet Tea felt a hot, sharp pain, akin to heartburn, poke at his chest. It didn’t so much clear, as subside slightly and take a perceived back seat to the emotional pain he was feeling.
Jet Tea wept for what would have been the remainder of Mythbusters, had he still been watching it, then wiped his face with his dressing gown sleeve and considered what his life would be from then on. He stood up and looked in the mirror again. He beheld his pathetically skinny body, his large head balancing on a twig-thin neck; his overgrown mop-head and glasses that made him look not unlike a boy wizard. He hadn’t even read the copy of 1984 that sat in his reflected periphery, and that made him feel like an idiot. Worse, an idiot so insecure with their idiocy that they must overcompensate and parade a fictitious intellect to people that really couldn’t care less. No wonder Tara wanted nothing more to do with him. He was just a boy. A pathetic, little, crying boy.
The rest of Jet Tea’s day was spent veering between soft crying and attempted sleep. Roughly an hour after Tara should have arrived (they’d just about be ready to go again, thought Jet Tea), his phone rang for a second time that day. It was Hayden, asking if Jet Tea would be at the pub later that evening. He replied before even wondering if he wanted to;
‘Yes, I need to get pissed!’ he told a pleased Hayden, before being informed that they would most likely get there for about 7 o’clock, a good hour to get seats but not be the only ones starting their evening.
He opted to walk to the pub, hoping his head would be clearer and more refreshed by the time he got there so he could drink more mind-numbing alcohol. On his way he thought about Tara, particularly her motives. His feelings flowed from the initial upset he had felt all day, to anger at her cowardice in not meeting him in person, or allowing them to discuss the problem properly, for that matter. Then he briefly felt empathy for her, understanding her reasons somewhat, which somehow mutated to hope that perhaps it was just a temporary solution to an unrelated personal issue. That switched to self-deprecation at such optimistic naivety, which in turn became another kind of optimism, that now he had freedom and the possibility to meet somebody new and different to Tara. Then came the resignation that he didn’t actually want somebody new and different to Tara, which was also upset once again.
He reached the big, looming doors of the pub. Laughter, incoherent chatter, soft music and the clang of glasses sounded from within. There were people in there, lots of people. People who, with two exceptions, didn’t give a shred of a shit about what he was going through and thus wouldn’t make kind concessions to him. They might laugh at his hair and glasses. The bartender might ask him for identification because even though he was in his twenties, he still looked like a fucking weedy little boy. Embarrassment, hostility and scrutiny were in plentiful supply beyond those doors.
But there was also beer, lots and lots of beer. And his two best friends in the world. These were both things he couldn’t fathom going without right now, and no amount of hostility or scrutiny would outdo that need. Without further hesitation, Jet Tea pushed the doors open.
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