The Kelly Kettle

Tea and the Englishman - THE FACTS

• A kettle with which to boil the water.
• Water.
• Tea leaves. Ideally these should be loose, however the lower classes are permitted to use tea bags.
• A tea pot in which to brew the tea. Again, allowances are made for the lower classes. They are permitted to perform the brewing directly in a teacup.
• A teacup. This should have a floral design. No exceptions.

An Important Statement from Peter Davison<sup>*

*</sup>This is a lie and we're making it all up.
Hello there! I'm Peter Davison, and there's only one D in my surname. But that's not all. I was also one of the best, and perhaps the most underrated of Doctor Whos. Now don't get me wrong: Tom was okay, with his long scarf and his Jelly Babies. But I like to think I had somewhat more refined tastes. I had a great fondness for cricket, tea and all things English.

I've been accused of racism in the past. And I admit, I did have a tendency to select my assistants from England rather than any other part of your world. And I'm not too keen on Daleks and Cybermen. But I'm not a racist. I'd even shake the hand of a Cyberman, if I really had to. And I don't know what the equivalent of a handshake would be for a Dalek, but I'd be willing to try, provided it was tasteful.

I think the "racist" label really came about as a result of my work at the World Health Organisation. When I left Doctor Who, I was immediately drafted into the WHO as a result of a misunderstanding over acronyms. I've been there ever since. They put me in the Regional English Subdivision where they thought my talents and my penchant for the English could be put to use. I can't say I enjoy it there - there is very little to do, most of the time. However, I have been instrumental in developing the guidelines about tea consumption for the English.

People are always getting on at me about my advice to avoid Chinese teas. They tell me I'm being racist. Well, I'm not. The Chinese are okay in my book. I just have a problem with their tea. It's horrible, and I can prove it. K9 and I never worked together, but we were friends behind the scenes, where he gave me a lot of encouragement and advice. We keep in touch. He was round the other day, and I got him to analyse the composition of some Chinese green tea leaves, using that special nose thing that he does. He told me it was nothing more than paper, coloured in with a green felt tip pen. At least that explained the taste.

Another controversy that has been sparked by my advice about Chinese tea is what I call the Earl Grey Issue. I'm a great fan of Earl Grey, but people tell me that I can't be, because Earl Grey is Chinese. That's rubbish. Earl Grey is not a Chinese tea. There is a rumour about a Chinese Mandarin giving Charles Grey the recipe, but it's just a rumour. I got a man at the BBC to let me have a go of the TARDIS again, so I could nip back and check the matter out once and for all. Here are my findings, and hopefully the Earl Grey Issue can now be put to bed:

Earl Grey is a delightful tea, which can be appreciated by all. And it is a truly multicultural tea, containing ingredients from all over Earth. It would be totally inappropriate to drag the sheer beauty of this tea down by engaging in a pointless, jingoistic squabble about its origins. However, the following countries, in the following order, deserve the credit:

1. England. For organising the whole show. Were it not for the English, nobody would know what to do.
2. India. For the wonderful Darjeeling tea - a key component in Earl Grey.
3. Sri Lanka. For the wonderful Ceylon tea - an important part of Earl Grey.
4. Italy. For growing the Citrus bergamia (Bergamot) tree - the fruit of which provides the wonderful aroma of Earl Grey. Note to the uninitiated: Earl Grey is not a "citrus tea". Citrus teas are evil, and were almost certainly invented by The Master. Earl Grey, however, is beautiful and, unlike citrus teas, works very well with milk.
5. China. For the not-so-wonderful Lapsang Souchong tea, which some companies insist on using to make Earl Grey. Thankfully, in very small amounts.

So let that be the end of the matter.

That's all I wanted to say, but before I go, Outdoor Idiots.com agreed to let me plug my latest DVD in return for dropping in. You can now get season one of "A Very Peculiar Practice" on DVD. It's dead good, and it costs about a tenner.

Thanks, and good bye!

The Kelly Kettle

• In the middle of a dry spell, you can ignore all the guff about not picking firewood from the ground. But it was wet when we were there, and there were densely packed old trees with plenty of dead branches near the bottom, so we had no choice but to use them, your honour. In this situation, the ideal partner to carry around with the Kelly Kettle is a small folding saw. You can then cleanly remove a small dead branch from a tree without leaving splits and tears on the tree. Most other methods of removing a branch (including an axe) have a habit of leaving these splits and tears, which can lead to the tree becoming infected with fungi or insects. In the location we were in, there were in fact a lot of lower branches that had clearly just been torn off, and this might have helped to explain why the trees were in a bad way. With a saw, you can make a relatively clean cut, as in Fig. 4:
  
  Fig. 4: The result of cleanly removing a branch with a saw
  Note that a tree surgeon would probably recommend cutting even closer to the trunk than we did - right up to, but not including, the bark on the trunk. There is then a chance that the bark on the trunk can heal over the cut. Anyway, we are not tree surgeons, we are Outdoor Idiots.com, so that's our excuse.
  
  
• We now have a branch, as in Fig. 5 below. It's about 2 feet long, and there will be plenty enough wood there to boil the water for two mugs of tea.
  
  Fig. 5: A newly-liberated branch
  
• The branch can then be broken down and the sticks sorted into order of size. Fig. 6 shows how little wood is needed to make two mugs of tea:
  
  Fig. 6: Twigs prepared for the Kelly Kettle
  Note two desperately important facts shown in that photograph:
  
  
  1. Size is important. We have deliberately made each twig quite long, about 6 to 8 inches, so that when dropped down the chimney of the Kelly Kettle, they won't fall into a horizontal position - they will be kept near-vertical. We find this is a good way of ensuring that all the fuel has space to breathe and can therefore catch fire, and burn, quickly.
  2. We are using a mug with a floral design, in accordance with WHO (RES) guidelines. We phoned up Peter Davison^* (^*we didn't really) to check that he was happy. He said, "The design is a bit modern for my liking, but it will do, yes. You will remember to mention that A Very Peculiar Practice is out on DVD, won't you?"
  
  
• Then we prepared the base of the Kelly Kettle. You can use crumpled up newspaper, some dry wood shavings, a firelighter, twigs or whatever you fancy. Here at Outdoor Idiots.com, we are very keen on using cotton wool balls as tinder, because the balls can be unravelled and made into a nice fuse. We'll probably make that into a Top Tip feature at some point just to pad out this web site - hopefully you will have forgotten we mentioned it here by then. Anyway, we arranged the cotton wool in the base like this:
  
  Fig. 7: The Kelly Kettle base, all primed and raring to go
  Note: We reckon the two holes in the base, as shown in that photo, are not just the result of a rampant designer's mind, who wanted to put the equivalent of a car's twin exhaust into his new creation. Rather, it's a great idea which facilitates sticking a fuse out of one hole as in the photo, while the other hole can still allow lots of oxygen in. We kept the cotton wool away from the vacant hole, in order to allow oxygen to enter freely.
  
  
• Rather than pile up kindling and/or firewood on top of the cotton wool first, we next placed the main part of the Kettle onto the base. We then added a bunch of the thinner sticks by dropping them down the chimney - not so many as to suffocate the flame when it is first lit, though. The fuse is then lit, and as soon as the first branches have caught well, the rest of the fuel is then added, little and often. In practice, this usually means constantly throwing the odd twig or two down the chimney right up until the water begins to boil. Anyway, if the firelighting ceremony goes according to plan, you should end up with yellow stuff coming out the chimney (Fig. 8). We didn't want to touch it to find out, but we think this yellow stuff is what makes the water hot.
  
  Fig. 8: The Kelly Kettle in concert
  

• Beauty. The Kelly Kettle is a thing of beauty. Not only does it look good, but using one makes you feel good. As you sit waiting for your cup of tea, feeding the kettle with fuel, listening to the crackling wood and smelling the smoke, you'll think you are a proper woodsman like out of the old days. Even though the old days all happened before you were alive and you don't know what they were like, and Kelly Kettles didn't exist then.
• Speed. The Kelly Kettle can boil your water fast, but sometimes the furnace-like design is a bit too good for its own good. If any of the fuel is a bit damp, for example, then there might not be time for it to dry out properly. We have found in winter that this can mean, even if the fire starts well, it can quickly burn out, leaving the less-than-ideal fuel behind, unburned. But we are incompetent and shouldn't really be allowed near fire - you will probably do it better.
• Popularity. The Kelly Kettle is not as popular as it should be.
• Sizes. They come in two sizes. Ours is a "one pint" jobby, but it can hold a bit more than that - enough for two mugs. The other size is a "two-and-a-half pint" jobby.
• Thermostat. The Kelly Kettle doesn't have a thermostat, and it doesn't shut off automatically - that would be crazy. However, if you fill it to the brim with water, then when it boils over, the water enters the base and can sometimes put the fire out - creating the illusion of a thermostat. If you perfect that party trick, you will most assuredly become more attractive to the opposite sex. Which wouldn't help Stephen Fry, but that's the risk he'd have to take, if he decides he's going to do party tricks with a Kelly Kettle.
• Horrific Accidents. Some truly horrific accidents can be staged with the Kelly Kettle. Two popular ones are:
  1. Put the cork (which is just designed to be used when carrying the empty kettle around, to stop dirt getting into the water chamber) into the spout while the Kelly Kettle is operational. Then when the water boils, the cork will pop out and any nearby faces will be melted off by the following jet of boiling water.
  2. Carelessly lift the kettle up by the handle while there is fuel still burning in the chimney. The handle will come up over the chimney, your hand will be on the handle, and your hand will catch fire, dripping molten finger-fat down the chimney. Which nobody wants. If you want to lift the kettle off the base while fuel is still burning, this requires a careful combination of holding both the handle and the chain you see in Figs. 2 and 8. To be really safe, you can just wait till the fire has died down.
• Cooking. Some hard-to-get-hold-of cooking accessories exist for the 2.5 pint version of the Kelly Kettle. They allow you to use the base as a firepan and cook over it.
• Baggage. The Kelly Kettle comes in a thick, oversized fabric bag with a drawstring. This is useful in preventing a used Kelly Kettle from spewing its charcoaly innards all over your other equipment while in transit. It also has plenty of space left over for carrying spare fuel. The total weight of our much-used, dirty charcoaly Kelly Kettle in its bag is 640g, or 22 ounces if you must use silly units.
• Fuel. We recommend Chinese green tea leaves as the fuel of choice. After all, they've got to be used up somehow.

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