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.