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? […]
Having a delightful afternoon tea with friends is of course, the ultimate way of enjoying a Sunday. Of course, some people might say “But Lord Devotea, my idea of enjoying a Sunday is on a motorbike driving like an idiot on dirt roads / attending some sports / visiting a leper colony / being chained […]
My preferred title for this blog post was just too long, so let’s just enjoy it here: Brexit, Elections, The Politics of Loss and the Implications in the Marketing War between Tea and Coffee. DISCLAIMER: many of you are used to my habit of (a) adding a little tea to make a long-winded rant about something […]
The image at the top of this post is a swimming pool we spent some time in and around yesterday, and during the day, a theme for today’s post coalesced in my mind. Too bad, it will have to wait, because life had other plans. A day of relaxing and local wandering involved a lot […]
ACT 1: IN WHICH ONE RESPONDS TO SOGGY DESPERATION In one long dark teatime of the soul*, I stared into the abyss, pondered the hell hole that was my surroundings, and wondered at the inhumanity of it all. Yes, I was in Melbourne Airport. In late February, 2008 I blogged about a trip interstate. At […]