I LIKE a nice cup of tea with my dinner and a nice cup of tea with my tea, and when it’s getting late, almost anything can wait for a nice cup of tea.

Or so said Gracie Fields, and she should know.

I now sing this song every January when I get stuck into some serious tea appreciation – because for three years running I have been given lots of tea as a Christmas present.

It comes in a box containing nine smaller boxes, each a different variety, from green tea that is, to be honest, barely drinkable, to Lapsang Souchong, which tastes like the end of a pencil.

Some are acquired tastes, to be honest, but tea is never boring.

I’m currently working my way through the Imperial Spice, which sounds like it could be a brand of aftershave, but is more or less the same as chai.

My love of tea goes back to my childhood, when the kettle was always boiling and the Carters’ brand of choice was Typhoo (or ‘Typhoid Tea’, as a lady down the road always mistakenly referred to it).

To be honest, Typhoo tasted much the same as other brands, but I eventually discovered Earl Grey, which is now my favourite, and love to try weird and wonderful variations and blends.

In fact, I slowly discovered, as I got older, that tea, just like beer, comes in enough flavours and with increasingly more becoming available in recent times, for me never to bother with a cup of coffee.

Why drink coffee when you can have a choice of tea?

But this is where I can see a generation gap opening up.

My son was given a coffee machine for Christmas. In fact, my wife and I bought it for him.

So he has enjoyed experimenting with making all kinds of different coffee concoctions – most of which are a mystery to me because I don’t drink the stuff.

But drinking upstart coffee instead of good, old-fashioned tea seems the modern thing for youngsters to do, and in time we will become a coffee-drinking nation more than a tea-drinking one.

You might think coffee and tea are already neck-and-neck in Britain, but I’m glad to say my brief research using Google suggests that while we drink about 70 million cups of coffee a day in the UK, the figure for tea is an amazing 165 million.

I’m not generally a nationalist or patriotic type of person, but for some reason even I get a touch of the Land of Hope and Glories when I drink tea, because it seems an essentially British thing to do.

As I’ve got older, I’ve also surprised myself with my willingness to buy cups of tea when I’m out.

I usually have an aversion to buying things I can make perfectly well myself, but – maybe because of our age – when my wife and I are out these days, we often stop for a cuppa.

Probably the cheapest cup of tea in Swindon is served in the Roundabout Café, part of the Pilgrim Centre, near the Town Hall.

But not for much longer.

I am told it is struggling to make ends meet, so will be closing in March, which is a shame because it’s always friendly and spotlessly clean, and seems like a popular meeting place, especially for older folk.

Pop in. If everybody reading this went there for a nice cup of tea this week, it might be just be the boost they need for there to be a rethink about closing.

If you must, have coffee instead. But only this once.