I am a tea drinker. Much as I like coffee, it has the rather bizarre effect of making me sleepy. My body is caffeine-backwards. Or enieffac, if you will.

99 percent of the time, if Stat says "honey, make a brew" and I reply "get stuffed, it's your turn" and he grudgingly slopes off into the kitchen, he'll come back with a cup of well-steeped PG Tips, with a dash of milk and no sugar. (For the record, Stat drinks gigantic mugs of coffee with a roughly 2:1 sugar-to-coffee ratio. My best beloved is not caffeine-backwards. He doesn't function without coffee.)

If we're talking standard British brews, i.e. the kind you put milk into, English Breakfast is my favourite. Earl Grey is my icky-not-favourite. Personally, I think Jean-Luc Picard's tastebuds are a little squiffy if he likes Earl Grey so much.

However, my very favourite tea is green tea with a hint of lemon. I love it for its lightness, its health benefits and its versatility. When I'm ill, I'll drink with a little more lemon, a teaspoon of honey and a sprinkle of ground ginger. If you're a singer, I can highly recommend it for your throat's off-days.

One tea I can't make up my mind on is red bush tea. It's definitely an acquired taste, and I keep having to go back to it. Mma Ramotswe likes her bush tea, and I'm trying to like it so that I can be a good lady detective too. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, I dunno.

My tether is long, perhaps longer than it should be, but at the end of it lies a pit of fire and brimstone so monstrous that it would make Satan jealous. I do my best to always see the good in people, to get along with them and keep our respective sailings as smooth as I can, but there are three kinds of people that instantly find themselves on the direct do-not-pass-go-do-not-collect-£200 route to the barbecue. They make me angry, and to wear even thinner an already over-used quote, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Firstly, I have no patience for hypocrites. Hypocrisy, duplicity, bigotry, two-facedness, however you name it - people with a "do as I say, not as I do" attitude. It displays a total absence of honour, a wilful disregard for the thoughts and feelings of others, a way of excusing oneself for not abiding by the rules one believes all others should adhere to. Hypocrites think themselves above and beyond everyone else, above the authority of social and moral etiquette. For a person to be so arrogant and self-centered is beyond my understanding of the human psyche, so I just abhor it. Either be straight with me, or GTFO.

Secondly, I have no patience for bitches. To clarify, I'm not using this term in a misogynist context - the way I see it, a bitch is anyone, male or female, that habitually creates a negative atmosphere because they feel they have nothing better to do. You know, people that create drama for the sake of it, people who have nothing nice to say, people who start fights amongst themselves or others just to commentate on the fallout. What good does this sort of behaviour do anyone? This life is too short, and joy is too rare and fleeting, for it to be about anything else but the pursuit of peace and happiness. Now, I understand that some people have to be dicks in this life, in order for us to appreciate good people - light must cast shadows, after all. But that doesn't mean I have to like them, or to put up with them.

Thirdly, I have ABSOLUTELY no patience for fundamentalists. They give religion a bad name, and religion is something that is supposed to be beautiful and personal and elevate humanity. But thanks to people taking words literally that were always meant to be open to interpretation, all sorts of atrocities are committed in the name of religion. Instead of elevating us, fundamentalism drags us into the mire and reduces us to our basest, most violent selves. Would any deity want a war started in their name? More than that - would anyone who had ever said or written anything want their words to be the basis for anger and slaughter and human suffering?