It wouldn’t be Tea Week without some puerile attempt at inventing a dangerously insane thing of some sort. We decided on reimagining the tepee today as, you know, we watched The Revenant and it got us thinking about tents, tea, and how you could combine the two into a giant superstructure one can accommodate and consume simultaneously.

We invented the teapi! To approach this construction, one must first acquire a large quantity of tea bags. Around 10,000 will do the trick. You’ll also need Blu-Tack, staples, a stapler, superglue, and a degree in Architecture or Construction Project Management. Preferably both. With this ascertained (you can learn anything online these days – use YouTube for the difficult bits such as mathematical formulas and the right type of bleach in your foundation to scare off rats) you can commence building your teapi!

The Teapi

The tepee is essentially a tent with a pointy roof – it’s the Marge Simpson of the tent world. The idea is humans gather in the thing, light a fire, and the smoke gushes from the hole in the roof whilst maintaining some warmth. It’s human ingenuity at its finest and we have a long history with the humble, noble, and glorious invention.

The teapi takes all this history and barfs all over it, like a football hooligan evacuating his kebab over his long suffering wife’s bonce. Whilst she may not be impressed, his mate bloody well are! This is what the teapi represents – a stupid idea being accomplished with great incompetence and repellence.

You basically glue and staple all of the tea bags into a teapi shape using your new found online degrees. Wear a face mask during this construction work as the chemical fumes are likely to induce dizzy spells, the symptoms of which are: dizziness, lack of balance, loss of balance, and exclamations such as, “Gee! I appear to have lost my balance!” etc.

It’ll take a few days to get the thing up and you should do so indoors as, you know, it’s tea bags we’re on about here. Once your construction is complete, however, transport it outside, jump on it, and bask in the glory of your pointless construction!

Is it Inhabitable?

Not really, no. As soon as it rains your tea bags will spoil and begin to fester – flies will accumulate on your teapi and the whole thing will turn into a maggot infested nightmare. To ward off the flies, you can use a fly killing aerosol to eradicate the disgusting creeps from the face of the Earth, but this creates an unholy stench in your tent which makes living in it impossible, unless you enjoy toxicity based seizures induced by chemical reactions.

One real solution is to build a proper tepee over the teapi (an Inception tepee as we’ve dubbed it – a dream within a dream, but with tepees), thusly protecting it from the effects of rain. However, the superglue chemicals have a habit of lingering in the atmosphere due to this and this can lead to chronic hallucinations, brain damage, diarrhea, and manic frothing at the mouth. Due to these ailments, we recommend you hedge your bets with the maggot infestation endeavour.