When people say “Cheap and…” these days, we usually expect the next word to be “nasty”. There’s an assumption that the two go together, an assumption that has been conditioned into us by the way retail works. Unless you are talking specialised areas such as perfume – because all major perfumes are exceptionally cheap to make and most come out of just a […]
There’s a cast in this post. There’s me, and Lady Devotea, whom regular readers will know and adore. There is also our eldest son. As our other son has been referred to on this blog as “Devotea Junior”, let’s call this recently returned one “The Prodigal”. The Prodigal is in Australia for just a few weeks after a year […]
Isn’t that title a mistake? Any tea blog with above title is going to be about Dong Ding, the Taiwanese oolong, right? Wrong. As a keen history buff, I often take the long view. My favorite bits to look at are all a few thousand years past, though I do have an interest in politics as well. I’m nearing 50 years old, which means that there is now some history […]
Last night, Lady Devotea and I put on an event. A tea event, naturally! As part of the Adelaide Wine & Food Festival, we have struggled to get noticed above the parapet of the festivals’s focus, which is wine and seafood, wine and beef,wine and more wine, wine, a bit more food with wine, and wine. Nevertheless, […]
I know from the evidence of my own 1.8 eyes (one’s not very good) that people often order coffee at the end of a meal. Most people do not eat out every day. Sure, some people might buy the same plastic burger everyday for lunch or start each day with an oil-soaked hash brown served at somewhere between the boiling point of titanium and the temperature of a […]
When one takes to the etherwaves these days, particularly on Twitter, one reads an awful lot about the weather, from exultant cries of delight to pure bellyaching. I always think these things are an interesting cultural reference. For example, some guy this morning said “Easter will be colder than Christmas this year”. My obvious first thought was “Christmas is ALWAYS hotter that Easter. ” I mean, […]
This is my 150th post on this Tea Trade blog. It’s true that this is only my sesquicentennial post if you do not count a couple of dozen on various other blogs I contribute to around Tea Trade. It’s not like I hold back at all. Heck, some of my comments on other people’s blogs are longer than […]
I’ve just searched the Internet for instructions on brewing a particular tea. Not because I wanted to know, but just because I had a shrewd idea what I might find. And find it I did. The first item to come up was 880 words. It involves scrolling down four times, it has eight really useful pictures. I mean, who […]
It is only a couple of weeks until that well-known event, International Devotea Day. And this is my 148th blog post since switching to Tea Trade and abandoning my previous blog. Not counting Beasts of Brewdom and another few sites I blog on, but the 148th Tea Spout. So, if I time it right, the highly anticipated 150th can occur on April 8th. If I have something intelligent to say […]
As dodgy as TV ‘reality’ singing shows like <insert your country here> Idol are, it’s still better to see great female singers front and centre, and not propping up some egomaniacal tuneless git with a jewellery fetish and a good dentist. That’s not to say that the male singers on these shows aren’t great, but […]