Incongruously, for a wintery night powdered in snow, the tea is called Raspberry Cream Pie.  It’s a rooibos, and its full of rose petals, honest-to-goodness frozen blackberries, and crystallised pink sugar. If you’re very disturbed, don’t worry. You’re in good company. The pink crystallised sugar gave us a turn too.

It’s not a bad tea though. Exceedingly sweet, but after the revelation about the crystallised sugar, that’s hardly a surprise. It also tastes powerfully of raspberry, which shouldn’t be surprising except for the utter lack of raspberry in evidence. All told, it’s a strange tea. Not, as we say, bad, but we’re not sure rooibos is supposed to be sweet. What we love about rooibos is its spice and zing, and it’s hard to detect any of that under all the crystallised pink sugar. Of course, it might help if we had a sweet tooth for things that weren’t peppermint squares and lemon-flavoured.

It’s billed as a dessert tea, and it’s undeniably that. Decadent on a level that’s worthy of a pre-Raphaelite painting. We have to say, our favourite dessert tea was called Secret Weapon. It was a white tea, full of almonds, liquorice root, orange peel and cornflowers. It was also our get-out-clause when we wanted a sweet after a meal during Lent seasons past. They don’t make it any more that we know of. But we say this because we want to drive home that a sweet tea doesn’t have to taste like confectionary or candy floss. Now, to be fair, Raspberry Cream Pie tastes more like a Cranachan that someone left the oats out of, but that’s hardly what your average tea-drinker goes into a cup of rooibos expecting. It certainly wasn’t what we were expecting.

But perhaps what’s most incongruous is that we’re getting this tea in an Advent Calendar.  A few sweet teas in winter don’t warrant a raised eyebrow, not really. But raspberries in December? Where are they getting them from?

After all that, here’s a poem a bit more in season. It talks of mists and steam, and the kind of weather that we associate with a Scottish winter, and the kind of china that by rights belongs in harbour cafes. Blue and white pottery, you know the kind. We first came across it -the poem, not the pottery – in Ten Poems about Tea and at first reading we glanced off of it. It wasn’t obviously witty, it didn’t make us laugh, it didn’t rhyme -and yet it’s better stamped on our brains than some of the more obvious pieces in that collection. Without further ado then, here is Eavan Boland’s In Season.

In Season

Eavan Boland

The man and woman on the blue and white
mug we have owned for so long
we can hardly remember
where we got it
or how

are not young. They are out walking in
a cobalt dusk under the odd azure of
apple blossom,
going towards each other with hands outstretched.

Suddenly this evening, for the first time,
I wondered how will they find each other?

For so long they have been circling the small circumference
of an ironstone cup that they have forgotten,
if they ever really knew it, earth itself.

This top to bottom endlessly turning world
in which they only meet
each other meeting
each other
has no seasons, no intermission; and if

they do not know when light is rearranged
according to the usual celestial ordinance –
tides, stars, a less and later dusk –
and if they never noticed

the cotton edge of the curtains brightening earlier
on a spring morning after the clocks have changed
and changed again, it can only be

they have their own reasons, since
they have their own weather (a sudden fog,
tinted rain) which they have settled into

so that the kettle steam, the splash of new tea are
a sought-after climate endlessly folded
into a rinsed horizon.

Tea tonight is called Lemon Pound Cake. Unlike some teas we’ve had, this one tastes the way the name suggests it will. It’s an especially lemony oolong that  is long in the mouth, the lemon we presume. We’ve only made up a cup -it’s late and we need sleep -but we’ll be going back to it. We have yet to meet an oolong we cannot drink, and citrus has long proven itself a good pairing with the tea. Something about it means that unlike jasmine, which grows bitter, or black tea, which stews, an oolong properly flavoured won’t oversteep. You have to be careful about it though. Our first year of university tastes of a now defunct tea called Vanilla Oolong. That could oversteep, and often if we were absent-minded and chatting with people, it did.

It’s one of our defying memories of first year though, something we mention since earlier in the evening we got talking books with people, and one of the questions to crop up was about what book defined our university experience. The thing is though, we’re Romanticists at heart. We dabbled in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Edgeworth and Wollstonecraft. None of those are really writers that define our degree. We looked at Austen too, and because of degree stipulations we even traded a bit in Old English and Restoration Literature. Again, much poetry. Though translating passages about Aelthelthryth’s neck tumour was, we grant, a pretty definitive moment.

Sometimes we railed against those degree stipulations. Never the Old English, we could read it happily forever, but Restoration literature is…weird. This from the woman who has read articles on whether there are zombies in Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or not. Mary Pix’s The Innocent Mistress stands out as grievously bad. So bad in fact, that it’s no longer on the course. The Old Arcadia is also on our list of Seriously Bizarre. But sometimes after being strongarmed into a course, we’d get handed a gift of a text. Old English was like that, but over in the land of Restoration Literature, so was the poetry of Katherine Phillips.

She doesn’t get talked about much -a monarchist under Cromwell, why would she? But the great thing isn’t so much that she wrote independently, it’s that she defended her politics. When people went after her husband for her loyalty to the crown, she published a poem insisting she was responsible for her own opinions. And that was in-between the great hymns to love and friendship among women. This is none of those. It is, however,  our personal favourite. We want Do Not Sequester Our Common Sense to be the next sampler we stitch. Perhaps in whipped chain and herringbone stitches? What do you think?

On the Double Murther of a King

Katherine Phillips

I think not on the state, nor am concerned
Which way soever that great helm is turned,
But as that son whose father’s danger nigh
Did force his native dumbness, and untie
His fettered organs: so here is a cause

That will excuse the breach of nature’s laws.
Silence were now a sin: nay passion now
Wise men themselves for merit would allow.
What noble eye could see, (and careless pass)
The dying lion kicked by every ass?

Hath Charles so broke God’s laws, he must not have
A quiet crown, nor yet a quiet grave?
Tombs have been sanctuaries; thieves lie here
Secure from all their penalty and fear.
Great Charles his double misery was this,

Unfaithful friends, ignoble enemies;
Had any heathen been this prince’s foe,
He would have wept to see him injured so.
His title was his crime, they’d reason good
To quarrel at the right they had withstood.

He broke God’s laws, and therefor he must die,
And what shall then become of thee and I?
Slander must follow treason; but yet stay,
Take not our reason with our king away.
Though you have seized upon all our defense,

Yet do not sequester our common sense.
But I admire not at this new supply:
No bounds will hold those who at scepters fly.
Christ will be King, but I ne’er understood,
His subjects built his kingdom up with blood

(Except their own) or that he would dispense
With his commands, though for his own defense.
Oh! to what height of horror are they come
Who dare pull down a crown, tear up a tomb!

You’re getting a well-known poem today. We couldn’t resist, even if it does skip the calendar by weeks. We were out today doing our Christmas shopping, things for parcels, things for socks, and that rarity, cards that weren’t treacle-y. We’d like them to be vaguely Christmas themed (rather than, say, wintery), but provided they aren’t soppy, we’re disinclined to be fussy. Imagine our delight then, to read in a piece of poetical trivia, that The Journey of the Magi was supposed to line Christmas cards.

Christmas cards! Think of it. Set down this/ Were we lead all that way for / Birth, or Death? Or earlier, A cold coming we had of it. Not forgetting, I should be glad of a second death. Christmas cards! There were times when we regretted /the summer palaces  on slopes. We can’t decide if Faber & Faber commissioned the next Coventry Carol and got, well, Eliot in a theological mood, or if 1927 was the year of the unsentimental Christmas card.

Incredulous we might be, but we wouldn’t dare accuse those cards of soppiness. In fact, we’d probably buy them. Do Faber & Faber still do a line in them? We’ll take half a dozen stamped with that line about the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory/lying down in the melting snow to start with. Maybe if they go over well we’ll look into some inscribed with that bit about the innkeepers dicing for silver.  In the meantime, three guesses as to the poem of the evening.

As for the tea…A note on our poetry and tea ritual: Normally we brew the tea up in our little tea for one. We’re not doing that tonight. We took one look at the tea and recoiled in horror. Why? Someone, somewhere was struck with  the brilliant inspiration that what tea was missing was…youu’ll love this…coffee. Look, just because little Jassey Radlet, deep in the obscurity of Don’t Tell Alfred, feels (almost)  liking coffee makes her grown up, doesn’t mean we do. We can’t abide it. Not just the taste, but the smell, and the texture too. And here it is infiltrating our tea. We’re not sure we can even reasonably call this heresy. Someone has defiled the eighth sacrament. It is wrong.

So we’ve brewed tea in a mug. A teacup, actually, currently stranded from its saucer. Are we being a wee bit hyperbolic? Not really, no. Maybe a little. The thing is, we’ve been ambushed in previous years by coffee-infused tea, and the consequences were not good. And since our innate horror of pouring tea down the drain is strong, a mug it is.

Being reasonable though, coffee-tea doesn’t work as a concept. Watching it in the mug has brought this home to us. The coffee grounds escape the infuser and sink to the bottom of the cup, and that’s before they swamp the taste of the tea. What we really seem to be drinking is coffee that’s on nodding terms with tea, and it’s awful. We think it’s supposed to taste nutty, or something. How does one describe coffee? We don’t have the vocabulary for that.

But look, enough of this. A hard time we had of it indeed. Let’s move on to better things. And as you read, remember -Christmas cards!

The Journey of the Magi

T.S. Eliot

We’ve had our first real snowfall of the year today. At six this morning it didn’t look of the staying kind, but sometime between then and now it turned into powder, and now it’s boot season as well as felt hat, scarf and gloved hands season. It makes today’s tea selection especially appropriate. Nothing says winter warmth more readily than a cup of rooibos tea.

This one is called Alpine Punch, and we’ve been buying it for years off our own bat, one of the inheritors of the much-mythologised Crumble Tea. They aren’t the same at all (nothing is the same as that tea was): this one is warmer and rounder in tone, with ginger and almonds as well as apple and cinnamon. It’s longer in the mouth too, and the rooibos means it has more spice in the taste than Crumble Tea ever did. We’ve used it before now to take the chill out of many a dreich Scots day, the kind when the wind comes rattling over the water from Norway and the haar is rolling in heavy off the sea. But it does in a pinch for a snowy day too.

Certainly we’d much rather be indoors nursing a cup of tea when the snow comes, than traipsing about in it. We like our weather the other side of a window, where it always looks lovely and we don’t hear Nelly Deane mentally telling us off for the acquisition of damp stockings. That, by the way, is what comes of studying English Literature. You remember all the most unlikely quotes and are duly ambushed by them at strange, improbable intervals.

Having said that, here’s a poem about snow that speaks to the hopefulness of the season. We initially supposed it was about spring lambing, but then we remembered that before now we’ve heard of winter lambs over in Ambridge, and people who know us know we get quite a lot of our agricultural understanding from that fictive idyll. The rest of it we owe to Hardy, and we recall he also has winter lambs in spots. Gabriel Oak mismothers one around this season, if we remember right. Anyway, this is neither Ambridge-isnpired nor more Hardy. It’s a poem by Phillip Larkin, and, like snow, rather lovely in its imagery.

First Sight

Phillip Larkin

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Here fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

\

A dear friend wrote to us today, and having heard of our Advent blogging effort, gifted us a rare gem of a poem. We had never come across it before, and loved it so much that we resolved immediately on reading it to send it out as this evening’s missive.

We’re drinking Forever Nuts this evening, as prescribed by the calendar. We know it well, the larder is full of it. People give it to us so that we won’t have to ration the last of our beloved ‘Crumble Tea.’ But the Crumble Tea is sacred to the Anglican Inquisition and only to be drunk when it is in session, so still we hoard it. In the meantime we make do with Forever Nuts.

It isn’t the same, the store is wrong about that; it’s too light, a herbal tisane with no underlying tea to balance the apple and cinnamon sweetness of it. If Crumble Tea (they called it Mom’s Apple Pie) was crumble in a cup, this is perhaps an apple turnover in a cup. Not wildly different, but not the same either. It’s still a good herbal tea though, a lovely way to round off a meal. And it tastes of autumn, confirming the serendipity of this gift by our friend back in St Andrews. It’s longer than we’d usually post, so pour a cup of tea, or something of your own choosing, and take a quarter hour to enjoy it.

Poem in October

Dylan Thomas

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.