Tonight’s tea is a seasonal Organic Super Ginger. By that we mean it’s suitable for the season, not that it’s Christmas specific. Besides the obvious, it features several kinds of pepper, peppercorn and rooibos tea.
It’s the perfect wintertime tisane. Caffeine free for late night tea drinkers, plenty of zip to keep out the cold, and a hefty dose of ginger to combat dread lurgies.
We love rooibos and this is the first we’ve had from the calendar, which is shocking considering how close we’re creeping to Christmas.
It odes make your tongue zing a bit after sipping, but we don’t mind. Nothing wrong with a good, long in the mouth tea.
We also have a sample from the German Advent Calendar. It arrived Sunday but what with manufacturing block after block of reluctantly Flying Geese, we didn’t realize it had arrived until late on Sunday evening.
We should by rights open today’s sample now, too, but we don’t want to rush it. Also, it’s a lovely black tea and we’re going to need something to wake us up tomorrow. So more on that then.
We will say that it’s a charming idea for a calender, coupling tea with puzzles. Apparently a director at the museum of history needs us to research something or fix a time machine – it’s a bit of a cross-Atlantic effort since the calendar is in German and our German connection has to play translator. (Shame the story they picked wasn’t about how all flesh is as grass and turns into the moon on wintery evenings, because then we’d be fine!)
Anyway, we chipped away at today’s German door while still quilting the Flying Geese. The cat decided to help, because she’s good that way. Read: The cat decided my spool of thread was staging an elaborate plot with the downstairs carpet and had to be stopped at all costs.
To honour her hard work, here’s a poem. We’ve given it to you before, but it turns out that while we cannot stand Marge Piercey in prose, we love her poetry. This might be the definitive poem about cats. T.S. Eliot, look out.
The cat’s song
Marge Piercey
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.
Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.
You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?
Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.
Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
Chorister at Home 