Dec. 12

Tonight’s tea was a Japanese Sencha. We love Sencha, but it’s an incredibly fussy tea. Leave it a split-second too long and it turns from green tea to extremely bitter drink. We left it a split-second too long.

In our defence, we’re just back from the annual Christmas Party for the Tuesday Scottish Country Dancers. You want to dance with these Tuesday folk. They ask things like, ‘Have you ever seen a man in a kilt, wearing oven mitts, try to put on ladies’ panties?’

See? Now you know everything about 1950s Hogmanay in Scotland.

They’re also notorious for body-checking one another when dancing mirror reels. In our slow dance step. I love the Tuesday group. We have so much fun going wrong together.

There are, actually, Scottish Country Dance poems…But we’re pretty sure we’ve used up the best ones. So here’s a poem to go with your Japanese Sencha. It’s short, so you can avoid that fatal over-steeping error.

Goes Out, Comes Back
Kobayashi Issa

Goes out,
Comes back —
The love life of a cat

We love these little poetic gems by Issa. There’s tremendous humanity in them. And it proves people worshiped cats before us. Miss Marschallin could have told you that, but would you have believed her?

Dec. 11

Today’s tea was Darjeeling Afternoon, which, full admission, we drank in the morning.

An excellent choice, because this black tea is wonderful for productivity. We’ve done al lthe Christmas cards, posted several parcels, sorted everyone’s gifts, and did battle with the fleas. They thoughtfully showed up in September, and even though it’s December and it’s the world’s mildest infestation, they refuse to die. The cat is unamused. We’re unimpressed. The dogs don’t even notice.

We ran out of Darjeeling Afternoon by four o’clock, so we switched to a Harrods’ Christmas bend courtesy of a friend. Also a lovely tea. We drank it while writing the Christmas cards.

Along the way, we battled the customs form for Canada post. Did you know it’s now impossible to fill one in in person? Neither did we. It’s great. The form won’t do large-print and it willfully infilled misinformation that we weren’t allowed to change. Canada Post, in the unlikely event you’re reading, take note: This violates the Ontario Disabilities Act. You’re supposed to have options for your partially-sighted users that accommodate us. And, you know, maybe accommodate the little granny types who don’t want to fill the form in online while you’re at it. It’s not hard. There are lots of people who have valid reasons for not filling this stupid customs thing in online. And it’s not like it saved us any time, because the woman at the post office had to correct the willfully mistyped stuff that I couldn’t correct (there is no Toronto in Germany, autofill!), but she still had to input all the info!

So, who does this help? Not us. Not the postal workers. But it does actively discriminate against great sections of Canadians trying to send their Christmas parcels! Huzzah! Sort it, guys.

Sorry. We didn’t mean to read you the accessibility riot act. Please have some light verse in compensation. No one writes it like Wendy Cope.

The Orange
Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Dec. 10

Double digits already?! This happens every Advent, and every Advent we’re confused. Honest to God, the only month that outpaces December is February.

Right, we promised you a rant on Conditor Alme Siderum. Otherwise known as a perfectly inoffensive hymn.

So, what’s it done to offend us? Nothing.

There’s a thing in the order of service called a Sequence Hymn that basically exists to knit the first lesson to the psalm. Lots of churches have them. My old church had one every Sunday and it was always different.

Enter St Thomas’s, Huron St. Where, every Advent, come hell or high water, we have to sing Creator of the Starry Height as a sequencing hymn. Every. Single. Sunday. And then it sods off for Christmas and a great whack of Epipheny. Until Lent comes round and the sequence hymn comes back, and even though Lent is a completely different liturgical bloody season we have to sing this thing again. For six weeks.

As hymns go, there are more offensive ones. It even has a decent tune, except that’s not what we sing. For reasons best known to this church, we sing the plainsong tune, and it goes on for bloody ever. It’s also super unwieldy for anyone who A)can’t read nuems or B) struggles to sing without hefty backup from a choir.

And even if none of that were true, four consecutive Sundays of this thing is A Lot. Five years on, we officially hate this hymn. We are sick to death of singing it, and we don’t understand why the weird penitential season obsession with it our church has.

We actually fell down an ecclesiastical rabbit hole chasing this up once. We thought maybe this was an Anglican Church of Canada quirk and read all the fine print of all the manuals for music directors of said church. It’s not a thing. There are zero rules insisting you drive your congregants insane by using this hymn – and only this hymn! – every time the purple vestments come out.

There is no rhyme or reason, and we’re doubly not coping this Advent, because we may or may not have rebelled during the era of the Covid Live-Stream and picked our own sequence hymns, with zero plainchant sung at a key only a coloratura could pull off. No, seriously. We ended up on High F more than we didn’t and it was fabulous. Jerusalem the Golden never sounded so good. Ditto Lo In The Wilderness A Voice.

But now we’re back to in-person worship and nothing but Creator of the Starry Height, and two Sundays in we just want to murder it. Slowly. With a spoon.

Probably just as well we’re drinking a refreshing peppermint tea tonight, eh? This isn’t for you if you don’t like mint; The clue’s in the name. It tastes very strongly of what it says on the tin. We love mint, so it’s always a winner.

Again, some of the strength comes from tipping the whole packet into the pot. It’s just too hard trying to portion stuff out of those recyclable plastic bags they’ve switched to. You end up with tea leaves on the counter, and that’s a sad waste of tea.

After all that, here’s a poem about stars that doesn’t get old. Maybe because no one’s set it to plainsong…Maybe because that guy Keats was good at his job.

Bright Star
John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Dec 8

Today’s tea was a gorgeous Saigon Chai. We did our best to make it properly, iwth lots of milk and rock sugar from a friend. We don’t typically sweeten tea, but we make an exception for chai, because traditionally that’s how you make it.

Really traditionally, you’re supposed to our the tea into gently simmering milk and whisk it to keep it aerated. And then you do this thing where you pour it back and forth between pans from a lofty height, which is…not great technique for your household blinky person.

That’s ‘partially sighted’ to the layperson.

Though actually, we’ve done the whisking thing while visiting the academic sister, and while it’s involved, it makes for a lovely tea.

This one turns out quite nicely even without all that fuss. There’s a good mixture of spices in there, and the sweetness helps emphasize the. We got two pots out of the packet, and are sorry we don’t have more.

Normally, we try not to recycle poems too much. We figure some people come back annually and would get bored if every year was the same stuff. But we’ve just given you a lengthy lecture on chai, so this poem is too perfect not to reuse. It was Kenny Knight or Carol Ann Duffy, and she’s great, but we know which option we’d pick.

Lessons In Tea Making
Kenny Knight

When I first learnt to
Pour tea in Honicknowle

In those dark old days
Before central heating

Closed down open fireplaces
And lights went out in coal mines

And chimpanzees hadn’t yet
Made their debuts on television

And two sugars
Was the national average

And the teapot was the centre
Of the known universe

And the solar system
Wasn’t much on anyone’s mind

And the sun was this yellow
Thing that just warmed the air

And anthropology’s study
Of domestic history hadn’t

Quite reached the evolutionary
Breakthrough of the tea-bag

And the kettle was on
In the kitchen of number

Thirty two Chatsworth Gardens
Where my father after slurping

Another saucer dry would ask
In a smoke-frog voice for

Another cup of microcosm
While outside the universe blazed

Like a hundred towns
On a sky of smooth black lino

And my father with tobacco
Stained fingers would dunk biscuits

And in the process spill tiny drops
Of Ceylon and India

It had to be couplets, eh, Knight? It’s a good thing we like this poem. You have no idea how many of your bloody couplets we just fought the blog to realign.

Day 7

We’re drinking today’s tea late, and honestly, it’s not because the day was busy. It was busy, but the plain fact is that you don’t drink camomile tea in the middle of the day unless you are actively trying to nap.

Normally, we make an excellent cat. We like sun, and we like lounging and a general sensibility of coziness. We’re less keen on sleeping all day, though. Miss Resi makes an absolute specialty of it. It’s a whole production. First, she circles thricely. Then, trhicely she pads her blankets. Next…Oh, hang on, that’s a poem, isn’t it? A really terrible paraphrase about the cat that drowns in a goldfish pond. What was wrong with Victorians?

Where was I? Ah, all that glisters is not always gold, and camomile tea is never a good idea before two and a half hours of Scottish Country Dance. Actually, by the time we got to the dancing bit, we were doing a pretty good job of losing the plot without our least favourite sleepy-time tea.

No, really. Lavender’s nicer. What is it about camomile that tastes inherently of dry hay? Please feel free to leave your favourite way to improve it in the comments. We wished we loved it.

But we’re drinking it now, right before bed, where the cat will join us. She has a very busy day. She gets up, and she sleeps. Then she sleeps and gets up. Then she rest before napping and – oh? You say we’re paraphrasing another cat poem? Well have one we haven’t poked fun at in the blog.

The Cat’s Dream
Pablo Neruda

How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings-
a series of burnt circles-
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.

I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.

I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
like a tiger’s great-grandfather,
and would leap in the darkness over
rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.

Sleep, sleep cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
and the great ruff of your tail.