This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The Critic’s connoisseurs will know from my regular references to it how much I admire Bruce Robinson’s inaugural work Withnail & I. Set at the end of the sixties and the end of a friendship, pathos packs every page of the screenplay.

In the extraordinary final scene, an emotionally as well as alcoholically charged Withnail, having bade farewell to his friend, stands in Regent’s Park Zoo, rain lashing down, necking fine claret from the bottle whilst declaiming Hamlet’s celebrated soliloquy, his only audience the wolves. It is the most redolent, the most moving moment of a movie full of melancholy, with the rain a metaphor for tears.

Wet weather does make us feel that we need something to dismiss despondency and lift the spirit

So what to drink in the rain, when life outside seems cold and perhaps a little bleak? What warms? What pleases? What diverts?

I am not sure that a downpour, no matter how torrential, necessarily demands the decanting of a Margaux 1953 (“best of the century” according to Withnail), and certainly not drunk direct from the bottle. But wet weather does make us feel that we need something to dismiss despondency and lift the spirit. Perhaps it might be a reversion to childhood? A mug of steaming Bovril and memories of mum by the stove, holding her hand in a warm kitchen?

Or maybe a pint of bitter accompanying pie and mash near the pub brazier as the rain beats on the windowpanes and the guns and dogs, muddied boots and paws, all steaming, pile in through the tap room door?

Could it be coffee or cocoa, or “an Irish” whilst watching an old film with friends? Rain does seem to tug on the nostalgia strings in a way blue skies and scudding swallows do not. Perhaps it is because rainfall forces us indoors and to huddle together for warmth and revivification. Rain is communitarian; the sun speaks to the individualist.

For me rain always evokes drab bank holiday weekends in Wales in the 1970s, often with my grandmother, great aunt and uncle. Stuck inside and with nothing to do, we would listen to Alan Dell on Radio 2 and play Sevens, supported by a pot of hot English breakfast tea and rock cakes. Outside the drizzle fell as if in slow motion and the cows in the fields seemed still and forlorn.

I still like to make tea when it rains, the hotter and stronger the better. Some people (my old friend Michael Fabricant is an example) like their tea weak and milky where the leaves are shown to the pot but venture little further into it. I prefer mine nicely orange with a splash of milk and no sugar. And if the milk is full cream all the better.

Tea like this not only warms the insides, but seems to warm everything outside too. Of course there are hundreds of different types of tea — smoky Assam and sweet Darjeeling from India, Sri Lanka’s citrussy Dimbula, savoury Pu-erh from Japan and China to name but four.

China is famed for its teas, and from around the world more and more exotic concoctions are being developed all the time, thus there is no shortage of supply or surprise. So try some. But try tea in the warm and dry, not in a deserted park in the driving rain, unless your name is Withnail. He was not a tea drinker!