I’m here to say goodbye. I just read that there is now an oyster-vending machine in my home town, and I think that’s a perfect way to introduce my last ever blog post. The oyster, that snot-textured harbinger of vomit-inducing fishiness, that molluscory kryptonite to anyone with sensible taste buds, is the perfect demonstration of […]
In about 1992, we acquired a 1972 Valiant for Lady Devotea to drive. We asked my Dad – who was a car dealer – to find us a small, second hand 4-cylinder car at a modest price as we didn’t have much money, and a few days later, a car transport turned up and deposited […]
As those of you who hold a small celebration every time I post a blog post will be aware, December 22, 2019 was such a day. In that piece, I announced that the gift of spending some time and having some tea with me has actually been raised to the level of Christmas gift. Or […]
Last week, there was a day where I didn’t have a good day. Lady Devotea did not have a good day either. In fact, it was early on in a succession of challenging days. Now I don’t want you to think it was something earth-shattering. Nobody got diagnosed with some sort of terminal ailment, a […]
As I start writing this, I wonder if I will end up apologising for it. You might think that I often wonder if my unfettered sarcasm and wholesale sprays of invective, combined with poor attention to detail will have that result, but you’d be wrong. It’s not that at all. My readers generally love that. […]
This week marks the passing of the wonderful actor Geoffrey Baylden, who played the eponymous Catweazle in that brilliant TV show from my childhood, but this post is not about that form of sorcery. Rather, it is about drinking out of saucers. I was sharing a cup of tea with a friend the other […]
The cat you see pictured here was named Lily, AKA Mr Lil, and he recently passed away. You might, immediately, find the name confusing, but when he was born in the middle of the night on our bed, Lady Devotea may have been mistaken about his gender, and by the time we worked it out, […]
It has long been rumoured that Charles Dickens removed a “stave” from A Christmas Carol, in between III & IV. At the end of Stave III, Ebenezer Scrooge “lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him”, and at the start of Stave IV, he […]
I read a lot. I read surprising few books on tea. Of course, I’ve read my own a few times, and in the case of The Infusiast, should have read it a few more times before I okayed the print run with “1939” occurring twice where it should have been ‘1839’. I love novels that […]
When you have been involved in tea for any length of time, you’ll see the same old quotes come up time and time again. And they are usually from authors. Have you ever wondered: Who ARE these people? In what way are they qualified to make pronouncements about tea? Is there a dark, sinister undertone? […]