Calculating the Cups

Alexander McCall Smith
Author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
series

Yesterday I ended my post with a question:

How many cups of bush tea will it take before all these dilemmas are sorted out?

The person with the dilemmas is Mma Ramotswe, owner of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency in The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander McCall Smith.

When I posed the question about the tea, it wasn't until later in the evening that I turned the page and discovered the very next chapter was called "How Many Cups of Tea...." in which Mma Ramotwe and her assistant Mma Grace Makutsi discuss that very question on their way in the little white van to the edge of the Kalahari to find the matron of the children's orphanage.

They start to count the number of cups of red bush tea that Mma Ramotswe drinks each day. Turns out it is about ten. And that is before the evening tea, so about fourteen cups each day. Mma Makutski quickly calculated and rounded that out to one hundred cups of tea per week.

"One hundred cups," repeated Mma Ramotswe. "That will be doing me a lot of good. One hundred cups of red bush tea, Mma. The bush tea is full of good things. It will be making me very strong." She paused. "I am not ashamed of all that tea, Mma."

"Of course not," said Mma Makutsi. "There is nothing to be ashamed of in drinking one hundred cups of tea a week, Mma. Which is..." She paused again. "More than five thousand cups of tea a year. That is very impressive."

I am happy to report that the tea works; all the problems were sorted out.

Now, I will be drinking tea while waiting for the next installment in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.