ABSTRACT
In 1999, the first ever non-stop circumnavigation of the world by balloon was completed. The crew consisted of a Swiss psychiatrist, excitable, flamboyant, Bertrand Piccard, and an undemonstrative, pragmatic Englishman, Brian Jones, who celebrated, appropriately with a drink: ‘I’m going to have a cup of tea, like any good Englishman’ (Author Unknown, 1999). There is little to surprise here. Jones implicitly identifies a ‘national drink’ and few would quarrel with his choice. As we argued in Chapter 1, the link between Britishness and a ‘nice cup of tea’ is well established, taken-for-granted and very much a part of the ‘national culture’. George Orwell observed as much in 1946, in his essay ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ (1968a: 58-61) and Brian Jones’s words proclaimed not simply his individual success, but his positioning culturally within that tradition of British adventure, daring and enterprise which explored, charted, educated and exploited so much of the globe during the second half of the second millennium.
