The Gothic hotel attached to St Pancras Station - a veritable Dracula's castle on London's Euston Road - has not taken a paying guest for decades. During its long retirement it has suffered almost every urban blight, including a video shoot by the Spice Girls. Possibly the lowest point in its fortunes occurred in the Seventies when the place was used to house old BR crockery, not that there was anything wrong with the actual crockery. On the contrary, late BR crockery was pleasingly chunky, highly glazed and coloured an intriguing shade of green. I liked it. And the repertoire featured not only cups and saucers but also - can you imagine the luxury? - teaspoons and little milk jugs.
Yes, if you wanted a cuppa on a train in the old days it came with a mini tea set assembled, if I remember correctly, on a plywood tray. Now the whole kit is lobbed into a paper bag inside which you have everything you need for scalding yourself and getting depressed: a plastic cup filled almost to the brim; a teabag floating inside it like something dead, and a highly breakable plastic stick for fishing this out; there'll also be a couple of sugar sachets that might or might not accord to a teaspoonful, and a plastic pot of UHT milk.
The best thing, with these little pots of milk, is to ask for two of them. Open the first as recklessly as you like, then pour it down the front of your jacket. This gets the spillage out of the way and leaves you more relaxed about trying to decant the second one into your cup. Well, I find these foil-topped pots damnably fiddly at any rate, and also sinister: they're everywhere, yet most people don't know what they're called (they're known as 'jiggers' in the trade). They are one of the outstandingly depressing things about convenience culture. I have in the past walked out of cafes when I've been shown to a table on which half a dozen are mustered in a little sort of ramekin that tries to detract from their plasticity. They actually make me feel guilty about taking my tea and coffee white, and whenever I have to use one I'm never in quite as good a mood immediately afterwards as I was immediately before. It's something to do with the way the contents dribble into the cup so forlornly, the way that no regulation of flow is required. There's enough in them to make black tea white and all you have to do is upend the thing: an act as perfunctory as flushing a lavatory.
