We’re behind on the two-calendar system today. We’ve been running around non-stop since the morning. It was Advent IV, so we had church at 11, and that took a decent chunk of time. We can’t seem to remember how long the commute takes now we’re attending in person again, and keep showing up half an hour before the service starts. Mind you, it does mean we get our pick of pews in the days of partial capacity.

We got home in time to gobble lunch before disappearing to The Messiah. It was the last performance and we were lucky to go. It was the most condensed Messiah we’ve ever seen, but there’s still a bit of a thrill that comes with live music. We’ve missed it.

Despite the shortened run time we weren’t home again until five, and then everyone was so exhausted we had plain Yorkshire tea. So, now we’re having Caramel Shortbread from David’s Tea, and while we have what promises to be a lovely rooibos also waiting, having two tea samples consecutively at nigh on eleven at night is a bit much, even for us.

Caramel Shortbread is an old favourite. We never stock up on it, because we don’t drink enough herbal tea to justify the purchase, but we’re always delighted to see it in a David’s Tea calendar. Millionaire’s Shortbread, the thing this purports to imitate is one of our favourite sweets, and we’ve got to tell you, the tea does a pretty good impression.

The website encourages you to pair it with biscuits but it’s sweet enough on it’s own, we think. A combination of apple, brown sugar, and stevia. The last is almost certainly unnecessary, but as we say, we’ve liked this tea for years, we’re not going to start telling anyone to muck with the formula.

The brown sugar gives it a lovely caramel sweetness, and the fruits give it enough sharpness to balance it out.

All told, it’s a lovely, sweet way to end the day. We’ll get to that rooibos tomorrow, and the other teas too. We always need generous quantities of tea on workdays.

But first, a poem about music.

Ghost Music
Robert Graves

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,
Bent-backed and blind the organist.
From rafters looming shadowy,
From the pipes’ tuneful company,
Drifted together drowsily,
Innumerable, formless, dim,
The ghosts of long-dead melodies,
Of anthems, stately, thunderous,
Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:
In melancholy drowsy-sweet
They huddled there in harmony.
Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

We love this image. Whether you’ve sung from a choir-loft or not, it beautifully captures the feeling of stepping into a well-sung choir stall. It’s especially true of the Advent Prose, which makes it perfect for today, because Advent IV is always when our church features that anthem.

They’re wrong, by the way. You should sing the Advent Prose at the beginning of Advent. We were trained that way as a chorister and whatever you first learn is always right. But seriously, the Advent Prose pairs exquisitely with the Great Litany as a penitential rite. The only reason you wouldn’t put them together is if you wanted to get to the sermon the right side of lunch, and you can still do that if you cut out the sermon 😉

And if you have no idea what we’re wittering on about, have a listen. As Advent music goes, this is hard to outclass.

Well, we’ll see how this goes. Currently the other human in the house is watching Morse and the streaming of it is mucking the internet about. It took 15 minutes and ten percent of the battery from The Little Laptop That Could to get here. Not how we want to spend Saturday evening.

But anyway, we’re here. And we have two lovely teas for today. The first one the sender says she wasn’t sure about. It’s called Bee Hoppy and it reminds us of last year’s Manuka honey black tea.

It’s not as strong – we couldn’t drink that one without milk and this is lovely all on it’s own. Still quite a strong honey flavour, but it’s a black tea/rooibos blend and the spice of the rooibos balances out the honey lots.

Now we’re drinking Zest Wishes. This one is from David’s tea, and it’s got so much spice that at first we thought it was a rooibos, too. Turns out it’s an oolong with lots of cardemom and cinnamon. It’s kosher, a declaration which always makes us wonder just what David does to tea to make it not kosher. But it’s gorgeous. Our only complaint is that we’ve run out of the sample. We should have rationed it.

Here’s an excellent poem to go along with two excellent teas. After talking about Larkin the other day, we thought we owed you the real thing before the season was out.

Mr. Bleaney
Phillip Larkin

‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits — what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

Two lovely teas today. From Germany a lovely Earl Grey that I had over breakfast. It was creamy, the way we like Earl Grey but with a few floral hints. It’s technical name, after consultation with the packet, is Aged Earl Grey and we’d have it again. We had it with and without milk, and you can’t go wrong either way.

Davids Tea was an organic breakfast blend. There’s not a lot to say about this one because it does what it says on the tin. It’s a nice, sturdy breakfast tea that will get you through the day. We used it to recuperate between mass Flying Geese production. About which…

We thought you might like to see what we’ve been nattering about this last week. Now we just have to assemble the thing…

The orange squares are placeholders. We wanted to know how big they needed to be before we started cutting up the fabric we chose. That’s next on the list, in-between article writing and wrapping and all the usual Christmas addenda.

Here’s some more Wendy Cope for you as you drink your sensible breakfast tea. Though you don’t want to be drinking while reading. Otherwise you risk choking over this wonderful response to an anonymous grumble to The Times that no one commemorates engineers.

Engineers’ Corner
Why isn’t there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint… How many schoolchildren dream of becoming great engineers?
— advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council

We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints —
That’s why so many poets end up rich,
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?

Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day.

Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering —
You’re sure to need another job as well;
You’ll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out. It must be hell.

While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You’ll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust,
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust.

No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There’s far too much encouragement of poets —
That’s why this country’s going down the drain.

Tell you what; this writer will personally commission the Engineer’s Corner just as soon as they kit us out with teleportation and time travel. And none of the Fringe side-effects, if you please. We like our molecular cohesion in tact.

Confession; we have zero energy to blog about anything. In proof that Christmas is systematically unspooling our brain, this morning we opened up the calendar to Joyeux Lutin and thought not, ‘That’s the French,’ but ‘What is a Lutin?’

A Lutin is an Elf. The tea is called Elf Help. Apparently we stopped reading the large print. That’s impressive since we’re best at reading large print.

But the day was off to a lovely start with a Kusmi tea we didn’t know called Tzarvena. We adore Kusmi. A friend brought a sample back from a summer trip to Paris back in high school and ever since we have been addicted to their Prince Vladmir. Later, we stumbled across Kusmi in Berlin, when we couldn’t seem to move for coffee. We were delighted and the woman at the till was convinced we were British. It was easier not to correct her.

Tzarvena tastes wonderfully citrusy. More orange than Prince Vladmir, but still with spices. It’s a bit sweet, wonderfully layered and it got better the longer it steeped. But don’t you dare put milk in it. You’d loose the equisit texture of it.

Elf Help (or should we say Joyeux Lutin?)also features orange peel. There’s some coconut mixed in for sweetness and tart cranberry to balance it out. After the day we’ve had it’s the perfect way to unwind.

Almost. Here’s some more light verse to make you laugh. Like Cope, this one’s a parody. But the poet being sent up is Phillip Larkin and the poem aped is This Be the Verse.

We love This Be the Verse. But the story goes that Adrian Mitchell learned someone had misheard the opening lines of Larkin’s poem as they tuck you up, your mum and dad, and was inspired to write a response.

This Be the Worst
Adrian Mitchell
They tuck you up, your mum and dad,
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man,
It shines out like a sweetshop shelf
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.

We first found Larkin’s poem reading Lemony Snicket, and we still have a soft spot for it. But its placement in the books is singularly bizarre – and that’s a different blog. We found Mitchell’s answer years later, at poetry and cake. We like them both, but we like them differently.

We finished our paid work early today, so from noon onwards did nothing but quilt. Flying Goose after Flying Goose after Flying Goose. Tomorrow we’re dragooning a cousin and her machine into finishing them off so that we can finally start piecing.

From noon until six, that was all we did. We took a break, and we stopped for pots of Golden Nepal Typ Maloom (this is today’s German tea), but otherwise it was all quilting all day.

Having done that, we have no idea how the professionals survive. Our shoulders were not happy, and we had tried to be good about not hunching. Also, our right arm was underwhelmed by the experience and all it did was hold the fabric steady!

It was a relief to get to our evening dance class. It was the Christmas ceilidh, so we swapped out some of the more traditional music with appropriately Scottishized carols. You know, We Three Kings with Scotch snaps and Let It Snow in a strathspey setting. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve danced the Scotch take on We Three Kings. It’s the jauntiest version of the song ever to go out into the world.

Now we’re sipping Organic Nine Berries from David’s Tea while trying to source suitable poems about ceilidhs. There’s not a lot out there. This seems like an omission. Apparently our society has one poet and we’ve given you quite a lot of her in bygone years.

(Actually, that’s not true. One of the social group members wrote a poem for the occasion but we don’t have it here.)

Anyway, about the tea. Golden Nepal was a lovely black tea. It’s another nice, uncomplicated one, and we quite like that because it makes a break from, say, residue-heavy Candy Cane Crush. Also, we love a good black tea. This was the perfect thing to get us through the quilting marathon.

Organic Nine Berry lives up to its name. The fruits don’t quite balance. It’s heavier on hibiscus and blueberry than strawberry, for instance. But part of that is the steeping time.

We quite like it, because the hibiscus keeps it the right side of the sharp-sweet divide. And even now more strawberry is coming through, so we’re doubling down on the importance of steeping times. You have to mix it thoroughly, too. When we poured out the berry flavour wanted to sink to the bottom. So, keep a spoon handy.

And now, here’s that ceilidh poem for you. It’s talking about an oldy-worldy, properly traditional ceilidh. The kind where dances, stories and music jumble together. They still do them, and we have fond memories of one out on the Isle of Mull, but these days the word is more synonymous with dancin. Enjoy!

The Time Traviveller’s Convention
Sheena Blackhall

Bring a pairtner tae the Ceilidh
Dress informal, the invite stated
At the time traivellers’ convention.

Mary Queen o Scots arrived hersel
Signed up fur speed-datin.
Said she wis a romantic,
Cud lose her heid ower the richt chiel.

The sheik in the tartan troosers
Turned oot tae be Rabbie Burns
Wi a bevy o beauties he’d gaithered
On his traivels.

John Knox tuik charge o the raffle
The kirk being eesed tae collectin
Naebody socht him fur a lady’s choice.

Lord Byron niver missed a single dance
In the Gay Gordons. He wis last tae leave.

The Loch Ness Monster, playin watter music
Last seen wis reelin roon bi Ailsa Crag
Wi thirteen kelpies and a Shetlan silkie.

Feedback suggests they’ll aa be back neist year.

Fun fact: when we started the search for ‘poems about ceilidhs,’ Google tried to complete the query with ‘poems about ceiling fans.’ We have several follow up questions. One, is there ceiling fan poetry out there? Two, would that have been the easier search? And finally, what convinced poets this was a gap in the universal body of poetry that needed filling?

We may have to look for you for tomorrow. But no promises.

Lots of teas today. I had my first of the German teas over breakfast. That was a lovely spiced Chai called Karl-Heinz. We’re told this is an old German joke that harkens back to the many double-barrelled names that cropped up in certain generations. As a tea it was a beautiful example of flavoured black tea. No sweetners, a bit of vanilla, cloves, and several other spices. It was warm, creamy and the perfect breakfast tea.

Around noon we stopped work and swapped Advent calendar’s for David’s Tea. That was a black tea, too, and this is where I should segue into the Wendy Cope poem about bloody men and buses. But this year it’s not true since I’m not rationing black tea. Though I still remember the year I ran out and refused to restock until January. I got exceptionally creative about what constituted a breakfast tea.

Candy Cane Crush is one we sometimes keep in stock here at Dawlish Dachshund central. So, we knew it right away, right down to the sticky residue it leaves on everyting. It’s actually a lovely tea. The candy cane is a nice compliment to the black tea. But it also has a bizarre effect on the tea’s appearance. It pours out sort of murky or cloudy. The first time we saw it we assumed we poured to early, but it’s something to do with what happens when melting candy cane meets boiling water.

This also accounts for the residue. Anyone who’s ever held a candy cane past a certain point knows what we’re talking about. You need several gallons of soap and a good scourer to get this stuff off your teapot. It’s irritating, but not enough to put us off the tea. We love the peppermint flavour it has.

Finally, we made a pot of Low Rider Green tea before starting on more Flying Geese. They’re taking over our lives. We broke up our evening program to stock up on more fat quarters just in case. This thing will get done, by hook or by crook.

Anyway, the green tea was a beautiful, uncomplicated sort of tea. Our grandmother would have liked it. Nothing fancy, no flourishes. Interesting enough to make a change, not so interesting as to be overwhelming. The perfect tea to drink before pinning another half dozen Flying Geese.

And now, a poem. Yesterday we gave you a cat poem, so the edict of what you do to the right-hand cat you must do to the left-hand dachshunds says we owe you another poem about dogs tonight. This one is delightful, and we’ve been looking for an excuse to air it.

Drama
Billy Collins

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance-
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

Question: Just how excessively egregious is the bad form of posting poetry in honour of dachshunds while a cat sits entwined in your arms? She’s got her throat exposed and everything. Either she can’t read or can’t be bothered reading…

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.

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.

Tonight we’ve established we don’t take coffee with sugar.

Those of you thinking you wandered into the wrong Advent blog, this is your reassurance you landed on Chorister at Home, thoughts on tea, good books and music. It happens, however, that the Advent Tea for December 10 is Fireside Mocha.

Fireside Mocha contains, these in no particular order, coffee, chocolate, apple (artificial? Real? Who knows!), and – no word of a lie – green tea sprinkles.

Not to sing an old tune here, but if we liked coffee, we’d drink coffee.

We hate coffee. Vehemently.

Fireside Mocha has the bizarre distinction of featuring coffee but being billed as a herbal tea. Question to the discerning masses; is it tea? Do green tea sprinkles justify it’s inclusion in this calendar?

Further question; What the – forgive the language – bloody hell are green tea sprinkles when they’re at home?

Anyway, the maybe-tea-possibly-coffee that is Fireside Mocha combines all our least favourite things in a Davids Tea selection. There’s the coffee, which we’ve discussed. Over the course of several years, no less. Then there’s a ridiculous amount of sweetener. The apple (artificial? Real? Jury’s out) exacerbates this.

So, what you get is a cup of overly sweet herbal tea with undertones of bitter coffee. Somewhere in this thing, supposedly, is chocolate and we can’t taste that, but frankly, at this juncture, we can’t decide if that helps or hinders it.

As for the green tea sprinkles, we’re pretty sure they’re decoration only. There isn’t even a hint of green tea in this cup. Ration-era teabags on their third steeping come closer to tea, and we’d like it on record that we don’t say that lightly. We had a grandmother whose family sent tea to a British family back when tea was rationed, and we heard all about the steeping and re-steeping process.

Sounding the funeral knell of this sample is Miss Marscahllin. She came, she sniffed, she walked indignantly away to wash her paws. We’re going to do the same.

But first, have a poem. Not about tea, or coffee or how you’re supposed to make it because we’ve given up on David ever having the epiphany we want him to have about how coffee has no business in tea.

No, this is nice, and inoffensive. Enjoy.

Two Sewing
Hazel Hall
The Wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.

Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.

You’d better like this one better than we liked the tea. Because it didn’t half fight us over the formatting.