We spent all day quilting Flying Geese, so we’re only having our tea now. Well, we’re only having the Advent tea now. We had lots of orange pekoe to preserve our sanity while battling a right-handed rotary cutter.
Pausing to ask: Why do people solemnly believe the world is right-handed? Asking for a very aggrieved left-handed quilter and blogger. Anyway, we took the stuff home, where there was Advent tea but as it turns out, inferior scissors, and that was every bit as satisfactory as it sounds. Flying Geese x4 might go fast but it’s fiddly.
So, now we’re having Let It Snow, which is apparently green tea and apparently contains chocolate and caramel. We say apparently because this is not how we remember the ingredients list for this tea. The smell is all wrong, too.
Funny fact about Let It Snow; Last year we also misremembered it, and misremembered it again the year before that. For a tea that’s been part of this calendar since jump we never remember what it tastes like.
In our defence, we’re starting to think they’re reinventing the wheel every year with this one. Last year we said it tasted of apple and cinnamon. This year there’s definitely caramel in there, and it smells like spiced eggnog, which is how last year’s calendar (not us!) describes yet another tea. Are you keeping up? We’re not!
There’s definitely no apple, though. A The ingredients were nice and bitty, so we saw them going in. Raisins, caramel pieces, some green tea…One of our ongoing irritations is that whenever David’s Tea flavours its tea this much, all the pieces of flavour push out the tea leaves, especially in sample boxes. So, in spite of using the entire sample on this cup, we can’t taste any green tea.
We stand by the cinnamon, though. That stuck from 2019.
Now we’re hopelessly intrigued. If you drink this tea more regularly than we do, what does it taste like to you? And is David mucking about with the formula between calendars or have we finally gone certifiably bonkers?
Actually, don’t answer that. The Flying Geese block make a strong argument for madness…
We should now give you a nice poem about geese to be thematic. But we can’t face more geese. Instead, have this lovely Thomas Hardy, to remind us all there are still shreds of optimism and loveliness and things that are not the Flying Geese Block x4 in the world.
The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
You never thought we’d let you get all the way through Advent without this gem, did you? Now we’re off to install the shepherds at the crib.
Chorister at Home 