A nice hot cup of tea

BBC News: Black tea 'soothes away stress'.

Scientists have evidence behind what many tea drinkers already know - a regular  cuppa can help you recover more quickly from everyday life stresses.  The study of black tea - instead of green or herbal varieties - found it helps cut levels of the stress hormone cortisol circulating in the blood.  They found people who drank tea were able to de-stress more quickly than those who drank a tea substitute.  The University College London study is in the journal Psychopharmacology. In the study, 75 young male  regular tea drinkers were split into two groups and monitored for six weeks.  They all gave up their normal tea, coffee, and caffeinated beverages, and then one group was  given a fruit-flavoured caffeinated tea mixture made up of the constituents of an average cup of black tea.  The other group was given a caffeinated placebo identical in taste, but devoid of the active tea ingredients.

When the July 7th bombs went off in London, there was a LiveJournal  icon going around that said "Britain's terror alert level has been raised to:  A nice hot cup of tea."