More Excuses, More Tea

My friends, my blogging has slowed to a crawl.

I could make many excuses, but I think the simple truth is my need for sharing my bad temper and sarcasm is being assuaged in other forms.

There’s Facebook, where a quick twenty words can elicit a great response. There’s the blog I’m writing for someone else, which I have a free hand to make as appallingly rude as I see fit. There’s magazine articles, although I have to tone it down a bit there.

And there’s “real life”, which provides a few choice opportunities.

And there’s the field of tea writing itself, which can be full of excuses. Or just the absence of anything to make excuses about, by simply not mentioning things. You know, reviewers not writing reviews on bad tea, tea stories that leave out unpleasant truths etc.

This week, I have many tea-related things to write. For example, I have finished the last part of a small eBook. Stay tuned for news on that one.

I also am crafting a poster for a food fair, that has to say in a nutshell “If you are walking around with a cup with of teab*g tea, bring it here, we’ll sling it in the bin and upgrade you for $1”.

And so I find myself writing a blog about the blog post I will be writing, possibly next week. Just before the one about the ebook I mentioned two paragraphs back.

I’m building the anticipation, and so, I can compare myself to a cup of tea. It’s knowing it’s in the cupboard. The whistling of the kettle. The dancing of the leaves. The pour. The aroma. All this leads up to the tea itself.

And so, right now I am building your anticipation for my next post.

So far, I think I’ve got the pot out, and rinsed it. Now to add the leaves of anticipation: my next post will be critical of many tea “information” sites. Some of them friends. And it will not be a pleasant subject; but one of the darkest stories ever in the history of tea.

Last week, a quote from these very pages was used by Capital Teas on Facebook. Capital Teas put a quote in the shape of a teapot on Facebook once a week, and leading up to mine was Gladstone, George Orwell and Douglas Adams. Apart from being neither as famous or as dead as those three, I was quite chuffed. Especially the last two.

Especially the last one. I have devoured everything Adams ever wrote, and right now, I”m thinking of Deep Thought.

Deep Thought was a computer, designed to work out the answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything”. After centuries of calculations, it arrived at the answer: Forty-Two.

The problem was, of course, that even though they had the answer, they needed to know what the actual question was. And Deep Thought had designed another computer, far more powerful, to work out the question.

In a similar vein, my next blog will be about the question. But here’s the answer, as far as I can see.

Greed. Envy. Power. Pride. Inhumanity.

You can smell the leaves right now. And there’s some bitterness. Some astringency. And hopefully, some anticipation.