Dec 11

Today’s tea was Cardamom Spice Chai. Since we still had no sugar, we were canny, and took it to work, which is swimming in the stuff, and steeped it while waiting for the remote browser to load. In a sequence events that featured anything that could go wrong going wrong, this is the one thing we definitely got right.

It was a really lovely tea. The cardamom balanced the sugar, and the cream (the office only has milk once every six weeks for reasons we’re afraid to ask about) gave it a lovely smoothness. A little bit of sanity while around us research monitor malfunctioned, email filters worked overtime and Chrome didn’t work at all.

One of our great nemeses is the intersection we cross when liberated from this office. It’s terrible. And it’s not alone. All the intersections between the office and approximately the Banbury Road (possibly also the Banbury Road) are terrible for pedestrians. They are designed to one day kill all of us.

I was doing my usual grouse about this to no one in particular while rushing across the road on the green light. Rushing primarily because I realized around noon that I’d gone to work sans dance shoes. I did ask the teacher if she had a spare pair I could cadge, and she has dozens, but unhelpfully, she’s in Scotland. So I came home, bolted dinner, got the shoes, and the combination of all the dotting about with dance and traffic reminded me there was a dance-adjacent poem I’d stockpiled for you.

It’s not actually about dance. It was recited to me by one of the teachers en route to the Dance Achievement Awards classes. There’s lots of variations, but this one goes like this:

Here lies William Day
Who died protecting his right of way
He was Right, dead right as he sped along
But he was just as dead as if he’d been wrong.

A silly reminder that it’s always worth stopping to take the time to make tea and borrow sanity where you can as we squeak in before midnight. More tomorrow.

Dec 10

Double figures already?!

Welcome to the lightening round of Chorister at Home, where a conspiracy of TTC train delays, dancing and walking home (see above re TTC delays) forced us to make our tea and drink it while searching for poetry.

The tea today is Turmeric Spiced Herbal. Moving swiftly on to other news…Well, okay. It’s not that quite rapid-fire a post. Here’s the thing: We were going to find you a poem about dancing, because also see above re dancing. We had an excellent teacher in tonight briefing us, and she had some fabulous selections including easy Lea Rigg and the trickier Smiling Lila. All Greek to you, I know.

[Stopping to note; If anyone reading does also dance Scottish, say so! We’d love to know!]

The thing about the Tuesday Grannies is that they are the loveliest women ever, and they’re very keen on their tea. But we did get lots of dancing in, because today’s effusive teacher is nothing if not effusive and efficient, but anyway. Turns out unless you like Emily Dickenson (she drives us batty), there’s just nothing good and readily available about dancing. Okay. Nothing good and new. We’ve given you all the best Pat Batt RSCDS poems over the last however many years. So no dancing poems. Look, we just can’t inflict Dickenson on you. Or us. We have limits.

So have this, instead. Bet you know it.

The Summer Day
May Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The tea? We told you, Turmeric. Plenty of heat to it, and we don’t mean the water temperature. On a bitterly cold day (not this one, then) or if you’ve got a head cold (we do not) it’s probably perfect. For any other occasion…Well, it tastes the way you imagine a cold cure would taste. It’s perfectly serviceable. It’s just not what we necessarily go to tea for. And that’s okay. You can’t win every calendar door. Especially not when you pull the tea out of the calendar at random.

Until tomorrow, when we will also have been dancing. But at least we’ll know better than to try and be topical about it.

Dec 9

Today’s tea is Mint Melody, a green tea with lots of mint added to it. It smells far more of mint than tea, which is probably inevitable with something as aromatic as mint. Luckily, we’re pro-mint, which not everyone is. And it does taste quite strongly of mint, even seconds after steeping. The green tea gives it a nice, rounded quality though. It’s not all mint, like some teas we’ve had in the past, and it’s not a weird cocktail of tea-like herbs someone threw in a sachet with extra sugar. It’s very seasonal. Sort of like. drinking an After Eight, but without the chocolate.

Talking of seasonal, the tree is up, and so’s today’s poem. If you don’t know Brian Bilston, you’re about to become addicted . He’s a genius at light verse.

Dec 7

Today’s tea was high mountain darjeeling. It had much more body to it than the last darjeeling – perfect for a pot of tea.

We drank it while reading a book for book club. There’s all of two of us in this book club, and lots of people make fun of it. But 100% of the book club shows up 100% of the time when we meet. We love it. And the books have never been bad.

Because of that we didn’t have loads of spare time to think about poems, so you’re getting one of our emergency ones. Not to worry, it’s a staple of this calendar for a reason.

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.

Dec. 24

We’re drinking a quick cup of Merry Breakfast blend before heading off for our Christmas Eve visit, so this is short and sweet today.

It’s a lovely tea – and exclusive to this Advent season. Inevitably. We’ll have to buy more before the year is over. There’s pomegranate in the tea, so it’s a bit sweet, but not overly so. Perfect for Christmas Eve.

We’re drinking it while the shortbread bakes as we pack up the Christmas cake and a grass cutting. We’re off to find out why.

But before we go, have the best Christmas poem going. It’s still our favourite.

The Oxen
Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Happy Christmas from the Chorister at home, the Marschallin Cat and the Dachshunds of Dawlish. Don’t forget to take time in all the business to drink tea (our advice) and nap lots (the animals recommend it).

Dec. 23

We’ve just watched the most ludicrous Christmas Special in a long line of Christmas Specials. This is a time-honoured British classic of holiday viewing, and we’ve seen a variety over the years. There’s the traumatic All Creatures, where we thought Tricky Woo was dying. Dachshunds still aren’t speaking to us about that one.

There was the Maigret Christmas Special, which was bizarrely well-constructed. There’s a whole line of Dr. Who Christmas Specials that exist so that we can wail down the phone to our academic sister that ‘That didn’t make sense! It was great until I thought about it for five minutes and now I’m so confused, Erin!’

And there’s the obligatory Heartbeat Christmas Special, brought to you by Soppy Is Us.

But then. Then. Then they gave us the Sister Boniface Christmas Special.

Unless you’ve seen Sister Boniface, you probably aren’t aware of several things. It began as the unlikely spin-off to Fr. Brown. Except, unlike it’s parent show, it’s a comedy. There are March Hares less mad than this show, and the Christmas Special is the maddest of the bunch. In a move you couldn’t make up – except, you know, someone, somewhere did – it crosses the bottle plot of Murder on the Orient Express with the jewel theft of The Blue Carbuncle, the obligatory curse of – well, actually, let’s face it, about half a dozen bog-standard mystery plots – and the birth of a baby in an unlikely spot on Christmas Eve. Complete with wise men (well, some nuns) bearing gifts and a star (okay, an enhanced rail signal) guiding the nuns to the baby.

If you got all that, kudos to you. We just watched it and are thoroughly perplexed. There was a whole subplot where the Rev. Mother cancelled Christmas a la Oliver Cromwell, and another involving two extremely dotty old ladies trying to create The Best Christmas Ever.

This is probably why we capitulated and made a mug of Camomile Dreamland. How else are we supposed to unwind from that madness?

Actually, we’re hard on Sister Boniface, and it’s truly bonkers. Honest-to-God. But there’s also a great New Yorker article from years back about how it’s one of the best Catholic TV shows, simply because it recognizes that the nuns in it are people, as well as nuns. the eponymous Boniface has a PhD in science. Sister Peter loves the movies. Sister Lawrence loves to cook. They bicker and fight, and it gets a heck of a lot more right about religion than Fr Brown does. We haven’t once had to scream That’s not how confessional seals work at this show. So, you know, go watch it. But not without embracing the sheer insanity first.

Anyway, back to the tea. Camomile Dreamland is a rooibos-based tea, so we had hopes it would taste better than normal camomile. And it does. A low bar benefits everyone, right? On the other hand, it doesn’t really taste like much of anything, either. It’s been steeping away while we typed about the madness of some fictional nuns, and you’d think that would be enough time to taste of something, but…no. There’s a hint of something sweet in there, and we suspect rose petals. But the rooibos pretty much drowns out the taste of everything else, even the lemon.

On the other hand, we can’t taste the camomile, so that’s something.

So, what to pair with this tea? Have one about Mistletoe. Why? Blame Sr Boniface. It was pivotal to her scientific deductions. Also, we’re pretty sure this is saner. Hang on, what was it we said about that low bar…?

Mistletoe
Walter de la Mare

Sitting under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
One last candle burning low,
All the sleepy dancers gone,
Just one candle burning on,
Shadows lurking everywhere:
Some one came, and kissed me there.

Tired I was; my head would go
Nodding under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
No footsteps came, no voice, but only,
Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,
Stooped in the still and shadowy air
Lips unseen—and kissed me there.

Would you look at that. There’s not one stand-in crib scene. Not to worry, there’s another Christmas Special or ten round the corner…

Dec. 16

Today’s tea was a breakfast blend, which you might think the Advent Calendar associated with England, but which in practice they associated with India.

Fair enough. Many of the black teas in this blend were Indian – Assam, Darjeeling, that kind of thing. It’s not the world’s most exciting tea to write about. Once you add milk it tastes like any other store-bought black tea, however big the leaves are. But it’s good for waking up to, and we still have some left over.

At this point in the calendar, it’s worth saying this is the most well-balanced David’s Tea has been about it’s 24 Days of Tea thing. For one thing, there’s a lot less stevia in these teas. We aren’t frantically trying to describe sugary herbal blends that all pour out pink. These are teas that are teas. The Around the World them helped keep it focused.

Next week will be the test, presumably, but so far, so good. We’d buy this calendar again. Even without the tins. It’s been fun.

So, this poem isn’t a reflection on the tea at all – except inasmuch as whatever the calendar says, we associate breakfast blends with England, and it’s hard to get more quintessentially English than Inspector Morse – TV and book models.

But the thing TV Morse doesn’t tell you is just how wide Dexter cast his net of allusions. One book opened each chapter with a cryptic crossword clue, which, by the way, is how we learned to solve cryptic crosswords. Every book had one pivotal reveal contingent on Morse solving a crossword clue that stumped him, and the trick was to crack it before he did, because it was always thematically relevent.

But the last Morse book took it’s title from an A.E. Houseman poem, so every chapter opened with a stanza from a Houseman poem. And this is the one everyone remembers, because it gets quoted as that ubiquitous theme plays over the series final episode. We haven’t seen the final series of Endeavour, but we sort of hope they loop back to ‘How Clear, How Lovely Bright’ for the symmetry. And because Morse was right; Houseman’s a brilliant poet.

How Clear, How Lovely Bright
A. E. Houseman

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Christmas Greetings

Today’s tea, prosaically, was garden-variety Yorkshire Breakfast, because sometimes we enjoy something straightforward. Also, we’d run out of Advent doors and didn’t get enough of a chance to stop for long enough to faff about with leaves and infusers. Mind, there’s a lot of good to be said for Yorkshire tea. It’s well suited to our hard water, and it steeps quickly, which is nice first thing in the morning.

Also on today’s agenda were various relatives, Dachshund misadventures, and Miss Marschallin’s Christmas Sock, the contents of which was declared a success. Well, it was if you weren’t the unfortunate Valarian Gingerbread Man, who is now in for a lifetime of ritual slaughter. Ah well, she’s delighted.

Here’s a poem as the day wraps up. It’s called Christmas Night, and we suppose tonight qualifies. It’s lovely, and captures something of the flatness that comes after the bustle and rush of the day is winding down. Relatives gone home, paper recycled, gifts put away, all that lot. SO put the kettle on and enjoy.

Christmas Night
Conrad Hilberry

Let midnight gather up the wind
and the cry of tires on bitter snow.
Let midnight call the cold dogs home,
sleet in their fur – last one can blow

the streetlights out. IF children sleep
after the day’s unfolding, the wheel
of gifts and fries, may their breathing
ease the strange hollowness we feel.

Let midnight draw whoever’s left

to the grate where a burnt-out log unrolls

low mutterings of smoke until

a small fire wakes in its crib of coals.

Didn’t we say it was lovely? Here’s hoping it unwinds your day, or holiday a little going forward. Best wishes and a happy Christmas from us, Miss Marschallin and the misadventures Dawlish Dachshunds!

On Christmas Eve

It’s been a whirlwind of a day. Ravine walks, extracting gremlins from electronic monstrosities, eleventh hour wrapping and shortbread baking…it goes on. The annual watch of The Blue Carbuncle featured somewhere. Christmas Eve is always crammed with stuff, and this year is no exception.

Sneaking in at the end of it is our final blog write up for this year’s calendar. It’s a black tea we know well, called Santa’s Secret. It blends peppermint and black tea, and for our money is the best of these ‘sweet’ teas. It’s sweet, and has a real extravagant, desert-quality feel to it, but it isn’t saccharine, either. The mint sits comfortably with the black tea and they keep each other in check, the perfect balance of strong and long in the mouth. This is how to reinvent tea well.

We also reiterate the other day’s recantation. We stand by the fact that this calendar’s balance is skewered bizarrely, but there do seem to be nearly equal parts herbal and non-herbal teas. It’s just that all the variety came at the beginning and the end, making for a few very unbalanced weeks of tea drinking. It’s good to know the calendar can still do variety.

Here to close out the year is a carol that purports to be by Walter Scott. We say that; there are lines of this that we know for a fact belong in Marmion. There are other lines that we’re fairly sure Shaw added in because he liked them. Oh, the joys of carols, eh? THere’s a reason no one ever seems to be able to agree on both lyrics and tune, and why we each of us think ours is right.

Merry Christmas
Adapted from Walter Scott

On Christmas Eve the bells were run,
On Christmas Eve the mass was sung;
The damsel don’t her kirtle sheen,
The hall was dress’d with holly green;
Forth to the wood the merry men go
To gather in the mistletoe;

Then drink to the holly berry,
With hey down, hey own derry!
The mistletoe we’ll pledge also
And at Christmas all be merry,
At Christmas all be merry!

The fire with well dried logs supplied,
Went roaring up the chimney wide;
Then come the merry masquers in,
And carols roared with blithesome din.

England is merry England,
When Old Christmas brings his ports again
Then drink to the holly berry, etc

We wanted to find you a vocal arrangement to go with it, but luck was not on our side. And while, theoretically we’re not averse to singing it into this particular monstrosity for you, it’s late and all residents not Miss Marschallin would be objected by the lack of consideration. But if you happen to know of a favourite version, point us towards us or send us a link.

Until then, Happy Christmas from us, Miss Marschallin and the Dawlish Dachshunds!

Doubt, Tea and Christmas Eve

In homage to an old Glasgow haunt of ours, we’re drinking today’s tea in what they would call ‘Russian style.’ That is, loose leaved and less the tea infuser. Also, whatever the technical term si for drinking a cup of tea while a cat waltzes around one’s space, not just lap, but back, shoulders, desk, keyboard…there’s a technical term for that, yeah?

Anyway, the tea itself is called Fireside Mocha, and we really hoped we’d misread Firside Matcha. No such luck. Question; if your fruit based infusion lacks tea leaves but does have coffee grounds, in what way is it not flavoured coffee?

This year’s attempt to convert us to the taste of coffee went about as well as anyone whose old hat at this tea-and-a-poem blog of ours would expect after three odd years of it. There’s grimacing, noises of distress and quoting of Nancy Mitford. Specifically that old saw, ‘Aren’t I grown up Fanny? I drink tea and almost like coffee.’ It’s one of Don’t Tell Alfred‘s truly funny moments, with the caveat that we still don’t like coffee. Not even almost. And we absolutely, unconditionally, definitely do not want the stuff in our tea. Got it, universe? If we want coffee – which event is doubtful – we’ll have coffee. If we want tea, we’ll make tea. And if we want a fruit concoction steeped in hot water, we’ll have a fruit flavoured tisane and thank you to leave coffee grounds well out of the mix.

Anyone still unclear on the Gospel of Tea as preached by us, raise your hand, post a note, or otherwise reach out to us. We solemnly promise not to victimise any lovers of coffee.

To go with a tea of dubious merit, here’s a Christmas poem with doubt at it’s thematic centre. We don’t know enough Betjeman, and obviously neither does the internet, since it’s convinced we’ve misspelled his name. What we have read though, we’ve always found interesting. He shares Hardy’s trick for elevating the mundane and weaving it in to a sacred space.

There’s probably something interesting to be said about the fact that two of the best Christmas poems going are rooted in the wavering faith of these two poets. Something about the frailty of humanity and our impermanence, or something. But it’s late, much too late for theology. So here’s the poem instead, and if you happen to have any more brainwaves about doubt, Advent, mundanity and the poetic, you know where to reach us. Or you could just get in touch about tea. We’re really good with both.

Either way, a happy Christms from Canada, from us, the Dawlish Dachshunds, and Miss Marschallin.

Christmas

John Betjeman

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
‘The church looks nice’ on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says ‘Merry Christmas to you all’.

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children’s hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say ‘Come!’
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.