Tea, Anyone?

The tea I'm most familiar with is cut black tea.  This is often put into tea bags, and you can make either hot tea with it, or iced tea.  Hot tea is lightened with a little milk, or just drunk plain, sometimes with sugar (or sweetener); it's the same with ice tea.

When I was in high school, I was introduced to tea.  I drank gallons of the stuff--- not all at one sitting, but over the years.  I gave up tea in favor of coffee while at university, and even while I taught, because that's what was available.  But every once in a while, I get a hankering for tea. Not just any tea, but good tea. 

Tea has four aspects: fragrance, taste, tartness, and color.  Fragrance and taste are self explanatory.  Tartness is, too; but I think it might be different than the tartness of an apple, for instance, which is related to sourness as well.

Color is the least important, but for those who drink tea with milk, it becomes important as a means for judging the milk/ tea balance.  (I'm sure there are those who will ascribe a mystical flavor element to color as well, and I'm not going to argue with that.)

Teas that are grown in the highlands of Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Kenya, at higher than two thousand feet (I'm not sure of the exact altitude) is fragrant, but lacking in color, taste and tartness.  Tea grown at lower altitudes are considered to have a more robust fragrance, and more color and tartness.  Connoisseurs don't like the robust fragrance.  Tea grown at a few hundred feet has an even coarser fragrance and color and tartness, but they are favored in places where the tea is spiced with coriander and cardamom.

Most tea drinkers, especially in Britain, like consistent cups of tea, which have a fair fragrance, tartness, taste and color, consistently cup after cup.  This is achieved by blending tea; high- grown and mid- grown, and with teas from different plantations together.  Tea from Lipton's and other old firms, are made this way.  The bulk of tea sold in the US is blended tea.

Recently, I'm having difficulty finding a variety of tea that tastes right to me.  In one sense, being a (mostly) natural product, we can't expect it to be absolutely consistent from one cup of tea to the next.  Further, I'm getting older, and my taste-buds don't seem to know what they're doing!

While I was living with my parents, I seldom drank tea; then at my ɓoarding school, we drank tea every day in the morning (if we wanted to), and it was sort of unremarkable stuff.  Then, once I got taken out of that school and made to attend a school in the hills, in 11th grade, we were allowed to leave the school compound during free periods.  My friends, as part of my cultural education, took me to Hotel Silverdale, a restaurant on Brownrigg Street. As a law-abiding citizen, I was extremely anxious.  We went upstairs, and they ordered a pot of tea.  (This seemed quite harmless, and my heartbeat slowed down.)

A pot of tea, and a small pitcher of warmed fresh milk was brought out; everyone served themselves, and–with some help–I began sipping my very first cup of tea that I was drinking voluntarily.  I needed six spoonfuls of sugar (I know, I know; my health deteriorated as you would expect), but the tea was heavenly.  I frequented Hotel Silverdale so much that I was in fear of being sold shares in the ownership!  Jk.

To explain to an expert what kind of tea I would like, I will have to get into the subject of tea in greater depth.  But I'm retired, and unwilling to exert myself so much.  I have three types of tea I drink in rotation, and the one that satisfies me most is PG Tips (the fine print says Unilever.)

In the USA, unfortunately, the common drink—in these parts, anyway; in the south it might be different—is coffee.  By the time I had left university, and was becoming curious about what sort of tea I could get, it was 1983, and I was fearsome about returning to the motherland, especially since no post was waiting for me, and many of my friends who had returned to Ceylon were re-returning here.  When I finally visited Sri Lanka, it was 1997.  Nobody there could steer me towards a reliably good brand of tea, while I was in Colombo.  When I returned, I brought with me some Lipton's yellow- label tea.  The next visit to Sri Lanka, I discovered Bogawantalawa tea, which I really like, and brought back several bags of the stuff to distribute among my tea-deprived ex-pats.  I drank tea from that bag until it was over, and asked my daughter to return the bag I had given her (which she hadn't used, but she's an American, despite her parentage) and drank that until it was gone.  A friend, a Trinitian, brought me Loolecondera tea, which was excellent.  This time, when I was flying back, the young lady at the duty-free tea store listened to my story, and insisted that that Loolecondera tea (what an outlandish name!  Certainly not Sinhala) was too strong.  "Too strong, sir!"  So I bought the type she recommended, but, to cover my bases, also bought a tiny tin of Lool… that thing.  It is too strong, though I had been enjoying it for a year. 

I feel a lot better now, having complained to you chaps.  Any advice will be cheerfully read and appreciated, but bear in mind that Sri Lankan tea is about $5 an ounce in the USA, I think, which does not encourage experimentation.

Anyway, there's always PG Tips to fall back on, though some importer is probably making a killing at the cost of some Sri Lankan exporter.

Arch

John Lennon's Eternal Christmas Anthem

I have been a staunch Beatles fan for close to 57 years!  (I initially wrote '67 years,' but I was off by a decade.) I have been an ardent fan of each of the Beatles for most of these years, but most definitely a John Lennon fan since he was denied immigration into the USA.

Most Beatles fans, early on, took a strong dislike to Yoko Ono; no doubt they felt that she was at least partly responsible for the breakup of the group.  I'll say what I think about that another time, but, you know, people can't go on being the same as they always were (ask David Byrne!) ... sooner or later you have to accept that, if you had to choose between what you want, and what the fans want, you can't choose the fans every time.

Yoko certainly had a huge influence on John Lennon.  She was probably instrumental in urging him to stand up for himself, and not to succumb to the group---thing.  In addition to that, she made John Lennon aware of what was happening in Vietnam---things that many of us have come to accept as being wrong-headed.  The US military and the US congress was determined to stop the spread of communism.  It wasn't our job to halt this spread, just as much as it isn't the job of the Christian Church to stop the spread of alternate lifestyles.  Thoughts and prayers will have to do.  It was the military might of the USA that prevented the Vietnamese nation from prosecuting the illegality of the war in an international court.  On a personal basis, many Americans have made their peace with Vietnamese citizens whom they have come to know as individuals, but as a nation, we have taken the principle of "Never say sorry!" too far.

Given the confluence of Christmas, the (imminent) end of the Vietnam War, and John Lennon's immigration status, I feel that the song (two songs, really: So this is Christmas, and Give Peace a Chance!) is an amazingly gentle piece of persuasion.  You can see the influence of Yoko, in the strong rhetorical points, and the gentleness, which comes from nowhere: whose is it?---that moderates the severity of the tone of the lyrics:

[John Lennon, Yoko Ono]
So this is Christmas!
And what have you done?
Another year over,
A new one just begun.

Most of my readers very likely know these words.  They're essentially an introduction to the rest of the song.  ('And what have you done?' probably comes across as a bit sanctimonious.)

And so this is Christmas,
I hope you have fun;
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young.

This verse captures an important characteristic of the feast, namely the gathering of the tribe, the old and the young!  During Covid, of course, we couldn't do the traditional thing, but in the mid seventies, we did, and Lennon / Ono embrace the full spirits of the festival.

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

...

[chanting]
War is over over
If you want it
War is over

 

Israel

Recently, Hamas, an organization that is constituted of the most anti-Israel members of the Palestinian population, launched an attack on Israeli civilians—on October 7th—which involved killing many Israeli civilians, and kidnapping hundreds more, and taking them into Gaza.

Immediately, Israeli forces retaliated by launching massive counter-attacks, which killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including hospitals. 

While responding to these attacks, Americans—people living in the USA—have condemned the Israeli military, and those who have condemned the Israeli military action are being labeled "antisemites", and those who condemn the Hamas attack are being labeled "anti-palastinian", and so on and so forth.  The anger of all parties is increasing, and it's all exacerbated by the vagueness of the terms antisemite, zionist, accusations wanting to eliminate Israel, wanting to eliminate the Palestinian people, and similar motives.

Responding to each accusation is difficult, because as outsiders, with little knowledge of the facts, shooting from the hip we're more than likely to say the wrong thing.  Confusion helps Hamas, who clearly hoped that the world population would take one side or another, and thus infuriate either moslems worldwide, or jews worldwide, and certainly US jews, who are powerful in the US.  The Hamas attack was clearly planned to cause anger everywhere.  But Hamas, though it consists of Palestinians, does not speak for all Palestinians, nor do Palestinians have a means of controlling Hamas.

I urge my readers not to take sides on the issue of who is at fault in this conflict, except that Hamas—but not the entire Palestinian population!—is culpable for triggering off the hostilities. 

There's plenty of blame to go around. Palestinians are continually singer to Jewish homesteaders driving them off their properties and setting up their own farms in their places.  Palestinians are forced to live in poverty, in ghettos.  No doubt, Palestinians would have briefly rejoiced in the Hamas attack, but would have known that it would only result in massive retaliation.  But Hamas does not care; they want all out war, and they want the entire middle east to be involved.  (I don't know this; I'm just guessing.)  But taking sides does not help the situation.  I don't think taking sides is required here.  The only intelligent thing to do is to say that it's too complicated to take a side. 

Arch

Lights!

Well, today Katie decided it was the best day to put up decorative Christmas-type lights!  Two of my close friends died, but I guess these sorts of decorations should not be left undone for the sake of mourning. 

It hasn't been long since holiday decoration lights ate up a lot of electricity over the holiday season, and I cringed every year, thinking about the waste of energy.  But the tiny LED lights we have draw a fraction of the power their predecessors did, so I make sure I'm not being watched by the energy police, and help Katie hang up the lights.

Even when I was still teaching, I encouraged the student club to decorate a large lobby with an artificial tree that was visible from outside the school building, so students who have known me have cause to class me with the decorative light maniacs on our street.  (Whatever the season: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the lights blast out.  Of course Spring Lane in South Williamsport has us all beaten.)

The time will come, though, when we shall have to desist from unrestrained electrical splurging.  There will probably be multi-national pacts to say that we're going to cut down inessential use of energy by a specified amount each year, and using fewer Christmas lights will be a painless way to do it. 

Arch