Today’s tea is Calming Camomile. Investigation reveals David spells this the Canadian way, and you know, fair play. But it’s late and we’ve read too much Mary Wesley. It looks wrong if we deviate from British English. Apologies.
Candidly, we aren’t camomile lovers. Unless you stick the stuff in a fictive Camomile Lawn way off in Cornwall and leave us to read about it. That’s quite nice. As a tea, it’s not a flavour that does a lot for us. When we want something soothing, we drink lavender.
So, when we say this one is a decent camomile tea, we aren’t damning with the faint praise we could be. Someone went to extravagant lengths to dress it up with apple and a few other ingredients. Nothing you can do about the awful camomile smell, but at least it tastes more of apples than hay.
On the other hand, we still have other things we prefer when we want something soothing. Like sticking on a video of Orchards of County Armagh and watching the dancers. We’re odd like that.
Just to prove it, here’s an unlikely poem to go with today’s sleepy time tea offering.
Flowers
Wendy Cope
Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.
The shop was closed. Or you had doubts-
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.
It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.
Why ‘Flowers’? Because we had to write all kinds of gloop for a work assignment today and this was the perfect anecdote. Also, there’s tremendous debate about whether the speaker is being sincere or cynical. Feel free to write in and take sides. We know where we come down.
Chorister at Home 