Twelve of the Clock

We were on terrible choral form tonight, singing the descants from the congregation. On the other hand, the chap beside us was clearly singing the tenor line from the congregation, so clearly the choristers of St Thomas’s accept that this is a thing erstwhile choristers do. We’re running with it.

The thing you have to understand is that there are some hymns, like Hark the Herald we can only sing harmony on. We’d have to think far harder about how the melody of verse three goes than if we belted the descant. Ditto the Sing choirs of angels bit in O Come, All Yea Faithful. That’s a bit different though, because years as a specifically British chorister conditioned us to sing Cantet nunc io, cantent agnelorum. We don’t know what it is about Canadian Anglicans that they eschew a good Latin carol when it’s handed to them like that. But ah, well. No one’s hit us on the nose for our congregational descants yet, so we’ll cut them some slack. Tis the season, and that.

We tell you all this because we’ve just squeaked back from midnight mass. It’s supposed to be the Snowstorm of the Century, and for our money the year we had the ice quakes was worse. Okay, so It’s -10 feeling colder out, but the snow has stopped and that first year we moved back it stuck stubbornly at -30 all December. In fact, we walked home from Mass in -30 that year. It wasn’t ideal.

But all that aside, we’re thawing to a late-night cup of Sugerplum Fairy. You’re thinking this is a herbal plum tea, aren’t you? So were we. But it’s pears. Yes, yes, we know. Sugarplum but flavoured with pear. Look, we just report the facts. We don’t try to explain the logic of the eponymous David. Quite honestly, he feels weirdly God-like when we write this blog, in an Old Testament sort of way. A bit whimsical, a bit judgmental, and prone to totally inexplicable decisions. Like naming a tea centred around pears after the Sugarplum Fairy. You think they’d at least pick the dance of the dancing pears from The Nutcracker for this, yes?

There’s a hint of Christmas spices here, but it’s predominantly a sweet tea. We think it could be a really lovely green tea – the tannin would balance out the sweetness nicely.

Speaking of, that’s 24 days of no green tea. We did discover over breakfast, when we drank Santa’s Secret properly, that it was a green-black hybrid, but we’re not sure that counts. Talk about bizarre decisions.

But you know what they didn’t do this year? They didn’t do that awful coffee-tea hybrid thing we always end up ranting about. You didn’t notice, did you? We never once had to lecture David and Co on how coffee isn’t tea and never the twain shall meet. Is it possible someone reads this blog?

In case they do, we’d better end with something sensible. We know tonight’s tea has a Nutcracker theme, but Thomas Hardy is our tradition. Besides, no one writes a better Christmas Eve poem. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. So, enjoy The Oxen.

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.

Doesn’t he do the loveliest and most unexpected things with wordplay? It’s in the books too, but gets obscured by the sheer agony of, say, Tess. You can pay more attention to linguistic playfulness in Hardy’s poetry because he’s not always battering your heart into fine pieces. Look at the rhymes, too. He’s got a rare gift for true rhyme, and some of them are not obvious.

But enough of that. No oxen kneeling here, but Dachshunds sleeping. That’s this chorister’s cue. Happy Christmas from the Dawlish Dachshunds, the Marscahllin- Cat and the resident Chorister at Home.

Go forth and make a joyful noise, with or without descants. And drink a cup of Christmas tea for us.

Blast Beruffled Plume

Today’s David’s Tea is a wonderful selection. It’s called Salted Caramel Oolong. We always say we have yet to meet an oolong we don’t like, and this is a textbook example of why that’s true.

Oolongs are wonderfully flexible teas. You can mix them with fruit or sweets or leave them alone and you always get a rich combination of tastes. Salted Caramel Oolong is a bit sweet, and it’s long in the mouth. It’s an extravagant desert tea or afternoon tea. There’s enough caffeine to get you through the afternoon but not too much to keep you wide awake.

We drank ours while writing about bird symbolism today. 2000 words of it. It’s been one of our better topics.

That makes our poetry selection tonight apt. Here’s one of our favourite poems in the English language to go with our favourite oolong. It happens to be about a bird. But it’s about so much more than that, too.

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.

Not that anyone asked, but we could do you a whole Advent of nothing but Thomas Hardy. The man gets damned out of hand for his bleak novels, but for our money, he writes some of the most beautiful poetry there is. And as this one demonstrates, it can be surprisingly hopeful.

Twelve of the Clock

As ever we’re sneaking this last post in closer to Christmas Day than Christmas Eve.

But we were working this morning, baking n the afternoon, and the late-night service was at ten this year, not eleven. We can sing, but only, and this made us smile, ‘gently, maybe humming, the way you might sing along with the radio.’

We have news for our little Anglo-Catholic church…when we sing along with the radio, we go as operatic as we can get away with. We sing choruses we know with gusto, and we leap gleefully for high notes. Not sure that’s really what they want at the moment. So, we were very good. We sang very, very quietly indeed. Our best mezza-voce.

Okay, we were mostly good. We still sang the descants from the congregation. Look, you have to understand that at this point it’s harder to sing melody on Hark the Herald and Adeste Fidelis. Our muscle memory on certain verses isn’t for the melody line. And anyway, we sang them really, really quietly. Okay? Just because it’s been years since a conductor insisted we hit Top A pianissimo doesn’t mean we’ve lost the skill.

We’re also late because having people at home all day means they want to be included in the tea-making. WHich is lovely and all, but they aren’t really ambitious tea people. They are to tea the way we are about cheese. We stick to nice orange things like cheddars and double Glousceter, and they stick to Yorkshire Brew. Perfectly good as breakfast tea goes. Not much to blog about. A very tea-like tea.

So, we are only now drinking David’s Tea. It’s the last one in the calendar and it’s called Jingle Bells. It’s also a black tea, because whoever organized the calendar this year stuck all the black teas in the same frantic Christmas week.

Generously, they were probably trying to ensure we all had the energy to get through to Christmas Eve. Jingle Bells is a chai, and you notice that immediately. It’s got the same warm blend of spices you’d expect from a chai, and a few extra for luck. Cardamom, which we always like in tea, and cinnamo, ditto. Supposedly there’s chocolate in it, but we can’t taste it over the cardamom, and that’s okay. We like spicier teas, anyway.

It’s a bit of a day for chocolate teas. We snuck our German Calendar tea in over dinner while the others were having coffee, and it was a mint chocolate combination. Curiously, we couldn’t taste chocolate there either over the mint, though the black tea came through. Though in the case of mint chocolate tea, we think that a bit of milk might have brought out the chocolate. Sometimes you need the creaminess of the milk to do that. We never got a chance to find out, because dishwashing intervened.

It might work with the chai too. After all, you’re supposed to milk and sweeten it well. We just prefer not to. Drinking flavoured black tea as-is is tradition. And you know that old saw about Anglicans and traditions and how they never change….

On that note, here’s another Christmas tradition for you. Until we find a Christmas poem we like better, you’re stuck everlastingly with Thomas Hardy’s oxen. And that’s quite the challenge, because we love Oxen Kneeling. So enjoy – but do feel free to offer alternatives! We just don’t promise to be moved.

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.

Tea for a Winter Night

We opened the Advent calendar to an orange tea packet today, prompting the revelation that in spite of all these herbals, blacks and that one oolong, we hadn’t yet had a rooibos tea. There’s still time for this to all balance out, but it’s a glance we wouldn’t mind seeing redressed going forward.

Today’s rooibos is Alpine Punch, a staple of ours. It’s flavoured with almonds and brings back memories of damp, Scottish afternoons when we drank it to stave off the cold and put some heat back into our fingers. The almonds are a lovely compliment to the rooibos and give the tea a toasted flavour that tastes glorious.

To go with it, have a glorious poem by Hardy. We know, we know, we’ve used it before. But every Advent calendar has that one, recurrent thing. In children’s calendars its the St Nicholas, but it might be a particular chocolate, or tea, or, as in this instance, that one beloved poem. We’re writing by grey, wintery light, and it elevates the atmosphere like nothing else. Without further ado, here’s The Darkling Thrush.

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 outlet,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Wash shrunken, hard and dry,
And every creature upon earth
Seemed desolate as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimeted;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
With blast-beruffeld plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolling
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
This happy good-night air,
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew,
And I was unaware.

And remember, should you be overtaken by whimsy, pick a favourite hymn tune and set it to music. The thrush would almost certainly appreciate it.

Advent IV: Music and Favourite Things

In addition to the tea Advent Calendar, we keep going about four old-fashioned calendars with doors. At this point we must know what’s behind each individual door, but we still enjoy opening them. Today’s tea was a bit like that. It’s a black tea with candy cane pieces called Santa’s Secret. We knew it featured somewhere in the calendar, but not where and when.

It’s a good black tea. We’ve used it before now as a breakfast tea stand in. And after a day running between musical functions, we needed it. There was church in the morning, and then a singing lesson, The Messiah afterwards, where we were good and resisted the muscle-memory impulse to sing the choruses. We were less good at tonight’s Nine Lessons and Carols, where we defected to the descant at Hark the Herald. On the other hand, the alto next to us was having no qualms about singing the harmony line to every verse ever, so it wasn’t just us.

For a tea that’s familiar and predictable, here’s a poem to match. It wouldn’t be Advent if we didn’t give The Darkling Thrush an airing. And besides, there’s still no one who writes winter in England like Hardy. Unless we’re missing someone, in which case, please send material our way.

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.

In keeping with the Hardy, here’s a bit of Holst to go with it that ought to be better known than it is. It’s Hardy-adjacent, but on the other hand, we’re tolerably sure that of all Egon Heath’s many moods, winter was one of them.

And because it’s still Advent, specifically Rorate Sunday, we’ll leave you with the Advent Prose. We would sing them on a loop through the season, if we could, but apparently that’s considered odd. So here’s a choir to do that instead.

The Messiah, Music and Metre

We can tell Christmas is hurtling ever closer by the fact that today’s broadcast of The Hallelujah Chorus was followed immediately afterwards by I Know that My Redeemer Liveth, thus tipping the musical hand, had we not already caught on, that this was The Messiah in full. We resisted the urge to protest at the radio that it had just trespassed into Easter and that technically you can no more say ‘Hallelujah’ in Advent than you can in Lent, the liturgical year being ever symmetrical. Instead we made tea and enjoyed the music.

The tea was Chocolate Orange, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a black tea with essence of orange (don’t ask; we’re afraid to) and chocolate. It’s a good combination, or at any rate, we’re less likely to grouse about it than we are about other chocolate-and-tea blends. Though the strength of this one comes largely from extracting the tea infuser after the first cup. While the orange is flavourful, the chocolate and tannins conspire to drown it. It could very quickly become the kind of tea to take paint off a car if left to steep unchecked.

The Messiah on the other hand, was top-heavy, that is, biased towards the soprano, a fact which delighted us. Modern editors being what they are, no two editions can agree on who sings what when, and often include appendices. Thus we have previously sung How Beautiful are the Feet as a chorus, and it’s a good chorus too, if overlooked. We mention it only inasmuch as the all-hands-round approach is itself highly interpretive; the vocal colour a soprano brings to And the Glory of the Lord Shone all Around Them is brighter and lighter than it is in the hands of an alto, or even a tenor. Not necessarily better, but certainly different. And this was a bright, light Messiah. More like sleigh bells, say, than trumpets, and a lovely accompaniment to tea. Perfect, as it were, for rapidly-approaching Christmas.

It turns out we’re hard-pressed to find good poetry on music. It’s a tricky subject, and since describing it well is a bit like trying to catch moonlight, we’re not sure we blame the poets of the age for the omission. Instead, here’s Thomas Hardy on dancing. Taught the fiddle as a young boy, you can practically here the triplets in this piece.

The Night of the Dance

Thomas Hardy

The cold moon hangs to the sky by its horn,
And centres its gaze on me;
The stars, like eyes in reverie,
Their westering as for a while forborne,
Quiz downward curiously.

Old Robert draws the backbrand in,
The green logs steam and spit;
The half-awakened sparrows flit
From the riddled thatch; and owls begin
To whoo from the gable-slit.

Yes; far and nigh things seem to know
Sweet scenes are impending here;
That all is prepared; that the hour is near
For welcomes, fellowships, and flow
Of sally, song, and cheer;

That spigots are pulled and viols strung;
That soon will arise the sound
Of measures trod to tunes renowned;
That She will return in Love’s low tongue
My vows as we wheel around.

For more on Hardy and music, try his Fiddler of the Reels. It’s the kind of short read that will lose you an afternoon, and the descriptions of music are radiant. Just don’t, whatever you do, read it for the characters. Never read Hardy for the characters. That way madness lies.

Oxen Kneeling

Appropriately for tonight, we’re drinking a Santa’s Secret, a sweetened black tea with pieces of candy cane. We could be liturgically snippy and say really this belongs in the December 6 box, for St Nicholas, but this is a Canadian Calendar, and Santa has long been associated here with Christmas Eve, never mind the liturgical calendar.

Besides, we’ve always loved the little human embroideries of the biblical narrative. Christ falling three times during Stations of the Cross, for the humanity and frailty it gives Him, the tabby cat who got her M-shaped marking on her forehead when Mary blessed her for keeping the Christ warm in the manger, or the cherries she plucks from that cherry tree in the carol. Did any of them happen? Impossible to say, but someone, somewhere once believed that they did, and ever since people have cleaved to them in various degrees, and have kept adding. Santa and his sleigh, the tree that craved great purpose and so became the Cross -and here’s another for you.

An old English superstition says that on Christmas Eve the oxen kneel at midnight to greet the Christ. It’s immortalised forever by Thomas Hardy in poetry, who crammed such superstitions into all his writing. We’ve shared superstition and poem before, but the old-world awe of the image of the oxen kneeling is one that never loses its beauty for us. Perhaps we’ll find a better Christmas Eve poem in the New Year, but until we do, have the oxen kneeling.

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.

No oxen to kneel here, but all the same, a happy Christmas from all at Dawlish-uder-snow!

Cause for Carolings

It was Hot Chocolate Tea tonight, for the shortest day. We don’t usually care for chocolate in tea, but we make an exception with this tea because the creaminess of it is a nice compliment to the chocolate. It’s also more black tea than it is chocolate, not a balance people always get right when they blend the two. It’s featured before on this blog, and at the time we wondered if milk would enhance the taste or confuse it. We still haven’t experimented, and don’t think we will. As a flavoured black tea it is rich and full-bodied, and we’ve mostly decided adding milk would make it cloying. It would also drown the hints of vanilla that run through it.

Now, we promised you a poem the other night, but you still have to wait on it. Don’t worry, no Apocalyptic Wailing tonight about technology. But we wanted something hopeful for the shortest day -it’s such a drear, dark occasion. We did dither about giving you this one, as we’ve used it before here, and haven’t established what our rules are about repeating a poem. But the dithering was before we got a repeated tea. We think that completely justifies us in going back to what is for us the most beloved winter-themed poem of the English canon. Read it, enjoy it, and carry a bit of light through the growing gloom with you.

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.

*Remember a while back we said you could sing most Hardy to any hymn tune? Try it with this one. Our especial favourite is Aurelia, but Repton is good too. Don’t cleave to those though -be inventive!

Not as We Were

Tonight’s tea is an odd duck, a blend of white, green and jasmine tea with hibiscus for flavour. It’s called Buddha’s Blend, but that’s not the odd thing. It doesn’t taste the way it smells. That is the oddity. We opened the tin and observed to Miss Marschallin-cat that it was reminiscent of a blend we bought once from Wittards, Jubilee blend, a black tea flavoured with mango, mandarin and peach. That’s what Buddha’s Blend smelled of -suddenly we were back in the kitchen of the Grotto, number 68 North Street, spooning specialty Wittards tea into our teapot.

It doesn’t taste of those things though. Well, it wouldn’t, would it, with not a touch of mandarin, peach or even mango among the ingredients. That’s not to say it wasn’t lovely -it was – but it didn’t taste the way it smelled. A disconcerting culinary schism, by the way, if you’ve never experienced it. You might even say it was not as it was -for which reason, we’re giving you Hardy tonight.

Our love of Thomas Hardy’s poetry is well-documented. It might be the most beautiful in the English cannon to us. It conjures the England of coffee-table books as nothing else does, and is exhilaratingly playful in its word choice. Sometimes Hardy will even invent words wholecloth, like ‘norward’ here, or ‘illimited’ of The Darkling Thrush. At least, we’ve never seen anyone else make use of them.

More academically, Hardy, like Emily Dickenson, favours Common Metre -the metre of most hymn tunes. You can, if you’re so minded (this chorister is), set his poetry to everything from Helmsley to Aurelia, and quite a few others besides. It doesn’t work with this poem though. This one’s Dactylic Tetrameter, and if that sounds like a mouthful, suffice it to say you can waltz to this poem, more or less. Music and metre; preoccupations of ours. But here endeth the lesson. For a tea that’s not as it was, here’s a poem that breaks all its own -and Hardy’s -rules.

The Voice

Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

Christmas Eve and Twelve O’Clock

In what turns out to be grand Christmas tradition, the heating failed this evening at Midnight Mass, so we’re drinking a late cup of tea with just cause. It’s a black tea laced with candy cane and peppermint, and aptly called Santa’s Secret -and it’s exactly what we need. Our hands are still cold. Also, we’ve sung almost continuously for two hours and our voice gave out somewhere after the last top G in ‘Hark the Herald.’ We’ll do it all again tomorrow and gladly, but in the meantime, tea is welcome, especially when it tastes so nice as this one does.

Strictly speaking, we’re now into Christmas day, but as somewhere it’s bound to be evening still, here’s a poem by Thomas Hardy that has it’s roots in an old belief that at midnight on Christmas eve the oxen kneel to observe the Christ. Enjoy it -and Happy Christmas from Scotland!

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.