The calendar yielded an old favourite today -one that, to judge from the website when we went to crib information for you, was brought back specially for the calendar. It’s called Glitter and Gold, and it’s a black tea laced with cinnamon and all sorts. That’s no description, coming from a self-professed tea-lover, but we did the research. It yielded no good result. Suffice it to say we’ve been drinking this tea for years without thinking about the contents much. It’s a Chinese tea, which, Julian Mallory of Excellent Women assures us is ‘always such a treat.’ To us it tastes of Christmas -the cloves, we presume.
Proving we can sometimes be reasonable, here’s an old favourite poem to go hand-in-hand with a favourite tea. It comes from Gaudy Night, and we have a sort of inkling we may have used it on here before. But we love it. ‘Conceited little thing’ -Peter meant in the Donne sense, we think -or not, it’s the poem we turn to when we want to still the world for a spell. (The joys of the boating scene, you understand, we savour for rereads only.) Between the giddy whirl that was yesterday, and the busy, half-mad bustle that is Advent as ordained by the claims of the world, we offer you this bit of literary respite.
That Still Centre
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying, so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.
Chorister at Home 