Tonight, after a day spent attempting to get organised for Christmas (when and how did it get to be December 13?) we’re drinking Caramel Roibos tea. It’s smooth, rich and roughly the way we imagine liquid gold to taste. Win fact this is our second pot; we made the first with breakfast. It’s not really a breakfast tea though, and we don’t just mean that it only half diminished the feeling our brain was over-stuffed with cotton wool, or even that we felt extravagant drinking it (though we did). It’s a tea meant to be savoured though, drunk slowly and unaccompanied by anything that might interfere with the flavour of the tea.

It’s St. Lucy’s Day today, and by rights I should offer you John Donne’s thoughts on that occasion. In Scotland though, that particular poem is really best read on the shortest day of the year, and that’s still a little way away, so we’re guarding it jealously. Instead, have another of his and a favourite of ours, ‘Batter My Heart. And because it happens that it’s been strikingly adapted by John Adams into an aria, we’re going to give you that too; it captures the raw urgency of the speaker and deserves to be better known.

Here then, as sung by Gerald Finley, is ‘Batter My Heart’ from Doctor Atomic and Donne’s Holy Sonnet.

Holy Sonnets; Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God

John Donne

In the course of sampling a tea labeled ‘Hot Chocolate’ we’ve put our finger on why we take exception to chocolate in tea; it is disconcerting to drink something that smells of one thing and tastes of another. Hot Chocolate tea in particular is neither fish nor fowl. It has black tea notes, so is long in the mouth like any weighty black tea, but it smells of chocolate. It doesn’t actually taste of chocolate though, more of cinnamon and vanilla, maybe of sugar too. Most disconcertingly that undefinable thing, ‘milk essence’ is back, which leaves the whole thing tasting vaguely creamy. Now it may be that adding milk to ‘Hot Chocolate’ tea would help it, some teas work that way. Equally, milk might crush the spices and the vanilla, which opinion we tend towards. Either way, if we have this for breakfast tomorrow (and we could,as  it’s very definitely a black tea whatever else it is), we’re going to feel excessively decadent -Signora Neroni comes to mind, or possibly a misguided E. M. Forster heroine.

By rights we should give you another Scots poem this evening, just to prove that this piece of green and pleasant land has in fact produced poets who understand both metre and rhyme. We were going to too, and then we went rootling around on the internet for a scrap of something that had come up in a sermon months ago and were so delighted that our haphazard googling yielded results that you’re getting that instead. It’s neither May, nor Ascensiontide, nor even a Thursday, but that doesn’t diminish the loveliness of the poem. Besides, it’s Gaudete Sunday today, the Advent Sunday when we can relax liturgical disciplines a bit. If the priests can wear rose, we think we can disregard the calendar and look backwards to Ascension in the name of good writing. We’ll chalk up on a roster somewhere though that we owe you one piece of good Scottish poetry.

Ascension Thursday

Saunders Lewis (translated from the Welsh)

What is happening this May morning on the hillside?

See there, the gold of the broom and the laburnum

And the bright surplice of the thorn’s shoulder

And the intent emerald of the grass and the still calves;

See the candelabra of the chestnut tree alight

The bushes kneel and the mute beech, like a nun,

The cuckoo’s two notes above the bright hush of the stream

And the form of the mist that curls from the censer of the

meadows.

Come out, you men, from the council houses

Before the rabbits run, come with the weasel to see

The elevation of the unblemished host from the earth,

The Father kiss the Son in the white dew.

Have you ever heard it say that the better the tea-leaf the better the tea? Forever Nuts is a herbal tea that takes this idea to it’s logical conclusion; the constituent parts of it are so big as to actually be awkward to extract from the sample tin onto a teaspoon. That’s its greatest fault though -if you don’t mind drinking tea that is pink.

It doesn’t taste of pink, you understand, there’s beetroot in it and that dyes it pink. Mind you, it doesn’t taste of beetroot either. In fact it tastes mostly of apple, cinnamon, almonds and what we’re tolerably sure is another nut that the ingredients neglected to specify. It being another of our previous attempts to replace the Crumble Tea, when it cropped up in the calendar today it was a bit like stumbling over an old friend.

It’s especially welcome after a day spent drinking Twinings  breakfast tea. (We did warn you we could be snobbish about tea.) It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Twinings; if we have to have a bag tea their our default when we can’t get Red Rose, and we can’t at the moment, because we’re in Scotland. It’s just that if you live on nothing but leaf tea -and good leaf tea at that -for long enough, it’s a wrench going back. Well we think so. The fact that we never learned to take Twinings Breakfast Tea without milk probably doesn’t help either.

If at this point you’re wondering how teabags ever came to feature today, given that we’re clearly fussy on the point of tea, we spent a large portion of today from sunset onwards in tearooms visiting with people. If that sounds like on of those quirks of time worthy of Austen -when a morning lasted until you sat down to your afternoon meal -it’s only because this is Scotland and twilight falls at 3. If anything we were observing tea precipitately. Tea of course, was most quotidian, but as proof it needn’t be that way, here is a poem by John Benjamin. We preface this by saying that whenever we read ‘In a Bath Teashop’ we think of Bath wet-cobbled and rainy. It’s not that it rained the whole time we visited -it didn’t – it’s that nothing elevates a bath tearoom so much as ducking into one to escape a sudden gout of rain when without an umbrella.

In a Bath Teashop

John Betjeman

Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another—
Let us hold hands and look.”
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

This evening choir ran short, since no one had a list of the hymns and the anthem was both straightforward and familiar. To that end we returned home, made a cup of today’s Advent tea and listened to a podcast cheerfully dissect a favourite TV show -just to make sure we weren’t the only people on earth for whom that constituted a hobby. The tea was a white tea, ginger and pear, and although we associate pears with sunnier weather, the ginger rendered it suitably wintery. We’ve never encountered a white tea we disliked, and this was no exception. Being lighter to start with, they seem to adapt more readily to being flavoured, than say, green tea.

We also finally got around to sampling a bit of the St Nicolas Day tea, which purported to taste of apple cider. In fact it does, but possibly the sweetest apple cider we’ve ever had. That could have done with having a green tea underneath to cut the sweetness. We say that not out of any kind of expertise, but because the Advent Calendar issuer once kept us in what we called Crumble Tea and they called Mom’s Apple Pie, and it was the cousin to this cider-inspired infusion. Green tea, cinnamon and something apple-tasting, and it was apple crumble in a cup. Ideal for a winter night. We keep sampling its tea inheritors, and though some have come close, nothing is nearly as good -but then, none of them was also a green tea.

After that dictate on how people who know how to make tea should be making tea, have a poem in which everything is in it’s proper place.

Tea With My Aunts 

John Arlott

Tea with my aunts at half-past four,

Tea in a world without a war;

The widow-queen is still alive

In Grampa’s house at Albert Drive,

And firm the monkey-puzzle tree

He planted at the Jubilee.

A frilly, fragile cup of tea

Unsafely balanced on my knee,

Aunt Anna mellows as I take

Another slice of home-made cake,

She rustles in her stiff grey gown

And takes her endless knitting down.

A chastely ringed and blue veined hand,

A weak white neck in velvet band,

With modest touch aunt Susan plays

The tranquil ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’

Of Bach, the tune she used to play

On Sunday evenings years away,

To whiskered men of gentle sort

Who paid her strained and stately court.

The Landseer cattle in the hall,

The massey antlers on the wall,

The monumental two-year clock,

A faith in class as firm as rock,

And all the house are just the same

As on the day the family came,

Firm barred against the new and strange

And devil-prompted thoughts of change.

The gilt-edged shares will never drop,

But yearly yield a steady crop

To feed a world of certain grace,

Where servants knew their proper place.

The bombs that broke the windows here

Have not destroyed the atmosphere.

After all our frustration with coffee-flavoured tea, we were apprehensive to discover today’s tea was meant to taste of coffee cake. It turns out that this was needless; it’s only a well-spiced black tea with lots of cinnamon, which is an institution we can endorse. Especially because great swathes of today were spent on an imperfectly heated 23 Bus Service to Stirling.

Happily too, this means we can reinstate the ritual of having leaf tea at breakfast. In the absence of a good black tea, we’ve defaulted to Twinings teabags, because it doesn’t matter how big the leaves or high the grade, green tea is insufficient to wake us up in the morning. And yes, we freely acknowledge that we’re a bit snobbish about our tea. We like to think of it as ritual though, because after all, what could be more ritualistic than tea? Here’s a poem from Ten Poems about Tea that recognises this all too well.

Alternative Anthem

John Agard

Put the kettle on
Put the kettle on
Is the British answer
to Armageddon

Never mind taxes rise
Never mind trains are late
One thing you can be sure of
and that’s the kettle, mate.

It’s not whether you lose
It’s not whether you win
It’s whether or not
you’ve plugged the kettle in.

May the kettle ever hiss
May the kettle ever steam
It is the engine
that drives our nation’s dream.

Long live the kettle
that rules over us
May it be limescale free
and may it never rust.

Sing it on the beaches
Sing it from the housetops
The sun may set on empire
but the kettle never stops.