M.C. Steep's Blog, page 2

Dec 14

Camomile tea tonight. Perfect for a late night cup of tea, if you like that sort of thing. We don’t. Of all the sleep-inducing teas, we’ve never warmed to camomile. Too much like drinking a cup of warm hay. Uf we want something warm before bed, we’ll make hot chocolate.

Still, it’s not a bad way to unwind after an evening dancing. One more Christmas Party with the Tuesday grannies, and after that we’re off for a month. And Monday’s book club. We always swap favourite books at the Christmas meet up, so I was out browsing choices earlier. Appropriate then, that tonight’s poem is about reading. Even if we take issue with some of it.

The Reading Mother
Strickland Gillilan

I had a mother who read to me
Sagas of pirates who scoured the sea,
Cutlasses clenched in their yellow teeth,
“Blackbirds” stowed in the hold beneath.

I had a Mother who read me lays
Of ancient and gallant and golden days;
Stories of Marmion and Ivanhoe,
Which every boy has a right to know.

I had a Mother who read me tales
Of Gelert the hound of the hills of Wales,
True to his trust till his tragic death,
Faithfulness blent with his final breath.

I had a Mother who read me the things
That wholesome life to the boy heart brings–
Stories that stir with an upward touch,
Oh, that each mother of boys were such!

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be–
I had a Mother who read to me.

Look, we too had a reading mother, and apparently she had the brains not to read to us about Gelert, because the first we heard of the poor dog, our Welsh Vicar Connection mentioned it. Don’t know Gelert? You may be happier that way. The cliff notes version goes that a hunter came home to find his faithful dog at the foot of the baby’s crib, covered in blood. Seeing this and seeing his child was also covered in blood, he skipped asking questions, presumed a dog with no history of savaging children had slaughtered the child and stabbed the unsuspecting Gelert. And then, because this is a nice, happy story for kids – the poem has it filed under wholesome – and their beloved dogs everywhere, he saw the dead wolf on the other side of the crib and realised that in fact the child was alive because Gelert had killed the wolf. This is why Geleret is the only dog who is a saint, which seems like pretty cold comfort.

The thing is, we’re not otherwise averse to reading kids stories that can be grim. It’s just…speaking as a person with dogs, we’d be quite happy still not knowing about this doomed Welsh dog. So, you know, I guess all we’re saying is that mothers who choose not to read that one to their children aren’t exactly doing it wrong.

Dec 13

Inexplicably, today’s tea is Pumpkin Spice. No, we don’t know either. It’s definitely December, and it’s definitely barrelling inexorably towards Christmas, so you have to wonder what possessed them.

Full disclosure: We are the wrong person for this review. We hate pumpkin spice. We hate pumpkin, and we hate spice. We don’t like it in coffee, or in baking, not with a fox, not in a box, not on a train or in a plane…You get the idea.

Though having had a few mouthfuls – it’s not terrible .We haven’t spat anything into the sink, and we have done that on occasion. There’s a reason we always brew the Advent Calendar tea in our mug before we use a pot, unless like yesterday, we draw something we know we like.

There was a memorable year DavidsTea did a pumpkin spice chai, and it was dreadful. Murchies do one that’s respectable, but they have other black teas we would drink first. For some reason, as a herbal tea, the pumpkin spice sort of works. We know, we know. Really selling it over here. Don’t all rush to buy it.

Our working theory is that there’s less sugar in the herbal tea we’re trying. Or maybe the fact that it’s all spices and no tea base is balancing the orange horror of pumpkin better. Who knows. We won’t be adding it to any loaves for flavouring, but we might, just possibly, drink this again.

There’s no graceful segue here. If there are poems about the wonders of pumpkin spice, they probably live on the TTC, and look, the TTC poems are great. No, genuinely. A few of them we’ve read and would love to repost here. But we can’t, so in the meantime, have a sestina. You don’t see a heck of a lot of those because the rules are a special kind of hell. We had to write one once in high school. We had to write six different kinds of maniacally precise poem for this assignment, including at least one sonnet, and you know what? The sonnet was easier. The contrapuntal poem is easier, and you have to make that make sense in two different directions. We’ll find you one another evening and prove it. Until then, the sestina.

The Proposal
Laura Barkat

“Perhaps, let’s go to Delft, ”
he said, taking the silver tea caddy
gingerly off the shelf. It was Betjeman and Barton—
not the shelf, which was of rosewood,
but the caddy painted slight with numbers, avoirdupois,
the weight of tea I steep to pour in porcelain.

“Why should we?” I lifted porcelain.
Not the kind they make in Delft—
copied from the Chinese, high-resistance, unlike the measure avoirdupois
adopted through a confluence of words… Latin, French as the tea caddy
I opened for the promise, that petaled-rose would
spread its fragrance with Darjeeling; Betjeman and Barton

sell it so. I wonder if it’s Betjeman or Barton
who dreamed of almonds, grapes and peonies to drift in porcelain.
Who bare-suggested in a whisper that a hint of rose would
be a better choice than, let’s just say, a tulip, yellow, plucked from Delft?
I mused on Netherland’s canals and stretched towards the tea caddy.
What if he could weigh my thoughts in dark avoirdupois?

A measure partly from the Latin, avoirdupois
came over from to have, to hold, possess, like the Betjeman and Barton
I hold this very moment, twisting cover of a tight-sealed tea caddy
which, had it come from long ago, might rather be of bone-ash porcelain
hand-painted blue with scenes of domesticity from Delft.
Milk maids, windmills, a tulip— not a rose— would

play across it like the Madagascar sun on rosewood
stolen from the tropics, shipped through China, measured in avoirdupois—
all multiples of which are based on pounds, like stones of city walls in Delft.
You cannot find this in the catalog from Betjeman and Barton,
the knowledge that the British added stones as hard as fired porcelain,
or that the city once exploded like the fragrance from this silver tea caddy,

assaulting air and narrow streets with powder they don’t sell in tea caddies,
brass-mounted, inlaid carefully, satin-wood or rosewood,
the larger ones called tea chests, often seated near the porcelain
in dining rooms where merchandise bears not the paint of bold avoirdupois
but is quite fragrant with rare teas of fine purveyors. Betjeman and Barton
is my favorite, see, residing in the heart of passion—Paris—not in Delft.

I place the silver tea caddy directly on the shelf, unpainted with the weight of ebony avoirdupois,
silver tipped with fresh-spilled leaves scattered on the rosewood, lined with Betjeman and Barton
rarities to pour into my porcelain, which would, I tell him, never come from Delft.

Dec 12

Again, how are we here? We’re halfway to Christmas! That can’t be right.

It’s also quite late so you’re getting another lightening round of the blog. Today we had English Breakfast tea, belatedly, around 6:40. That’s twenty minutes later than usual, but after last night we thought we would sleep in – except we’re too set in our routine to fall back asleep, so we gave up and went into the office anyway.

Then we went to the Scottish Dance Christmas party and the evening out afterwards, and now here we are, still unable to bring ourselves to use Dickenson, but still short of poems about dancing. As much as possible we like to give you variety, so we try not to repeat them.

But we also thought something so quintessentially British as English Breakfast with milk should have a British poem. So here’s one by a writer who was also a musician. You can here it in the meter – a lot of Hardy’s poems can be set to hymn tunes. And if they don’t fit hymn tunes there’s a good chance they fit fiddle music.

A Commonplace Day
Thomas Hardy
The day is turning ghost,
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
  To join the anonymous host
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
  To one of like degree.

  I part the fire-gnawed logs,
Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends
  Upon the shining dogs;
Further and further from the nooks the twilight’s stride extends,
  And beamless black impends.

  Nothing of tiniest worth
Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or
praise,
  Since the pale corpse-like birth
Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays –
  Dullest of dull-hued Days!

  Wanly upon the panes
The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and
yet
  Here, while Day’s presence wanes,
And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,
  He wakens my regret.

  Regret—though nothing dear
That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime,
  Or bloomed elsewhere than here,
To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime,
  Or mark him out in Time . . .

  —Yet, maybe, in some soul,
In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose,
  Or some intent upstole
Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows
  The world’s amendment flows;

  But which, benumbed at birth
By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be
  Embodied on the earth;
And undervoicings of this loss to man’s futurity
  May wake regret in me.

Dec 11

Today’s tea was Cardamom Spice Chai. Since we still had no sugar, we were canny, and took it to work, which is swimming in the stuff, and steeped it while waiting for the remote browser to load. In a sequence events that featured anything that could go wrong going wrong, this is the one thing we definitely got right.

It was a really lovely tea. The cardamom balanced the sugar, and the cream (the office only has milk once every six weeks for reasons we’re afraid to ask about) gave it a lovely smoothness. A little bit of sanity while around us research monitor malfunctioned, email filters worked overtime and Chrome didn’t work at all.

One of our great nemeses is the intersection we cross when liberated from this office. It’s terrible. And it’s not alone. All the intersections between the office and approximately the Banbury Road (possibly also the Banbury Road) are terrible for pedestrians. They are designed to one day kill all of us.

I was doing my usual grouse about this to no one in particular while rushing across the road on the green light. Rushing primarily because I realized around noon that I’d gone to work sans dance shoes. I did ask the teacher if she had a spare pair I could cadge, and she has dozens, but unhelpfully, she’s in Scotland. So I came home, bolted dinner, got the shoes, and the combination of all the dotting about with dance and traffic reminded me there was a dance-adjacent poem I’d stockpiled for you.

It’s not actually about dance. It was recited to me by one of the teachers en route to the Dance Achievement Awards classes. There’s lots of variations, but this one goes like this:

Here lies William Day
Who died protecting his right of way
He was Right, dead right as he sped along
But he was just as dead as if he’d been wrong.

A silly reminder that it’s always worth stopping to take the time to make tea and borrow sanity where you can as we squeak in before midnight. More tomorrow.

Dec 10

Double figures already?!

Welcome to the lightening round of Chorister at Home, where a conspiracy of TTC train delays, dancing and walking home (see above re TTC delays) forced us to make our tea and drink it while searching for poetry.

The tea today is Turmeric Spiced Herbal. Moving swiftly on to other news…Well, okay. It’s not that quite rapid-fire a post. Here’s the thing: We were going to find you a poem about dancing, because also see above re dancing. We had an excellent teacher in tonight briefing us, and she had some fabulous selections including easy Lea Rigg and the trickier Smiling Lila. All Greek to you, I know.

[Stopping to note; If anyone reading does also dance Scottish, say so! We’d love to know!]

The thing about the Tuesday Grannies is that they are the loveliest women ever, and they’re very keen on their tea. But we did get lots of dancing in, because today’s effusive teacher is nothing if not effusive and efficient, but anyway. Turns out unless you like Emily Dickenson (she drives us batty), there’s just nothing good and readily available about dancing. Okay. Nothing good and new. We’ve given you all the best Pat Batt RSCDS poems over the last however many years. So no dancing poems. Look, we just can’t inflict Dickenson on you. Or us. We have limits.

So have this, instead. Bet you know it.

The Summer Day
May Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The tea? We told you, Turmeric. Plenty of heat to it, and we don’t mean the water temperature. On a bitterly cold day (not this one, then) or if you’ve got a head cold (we do not) it’s probably perfect. For any other occasion…Well, it tastes the way you imagine a cold cure would taste. It’s perfectly serviceable. It’s just not what we necessarily go to tea for. And that’s okay. You can’t win every calendar door. Especially not when you pull the tea out of the calendar at random.

Until tomorrow, when we will also have been dancing. But at least we’ll know better than to try and be topical about it.

Dec 9

Today’s tea is Mint Melody, a green tea with lots of mint added to it. It smells far more of mint than tea, which is probably inevitable with something as aromatic as mint. Luckily, we’re pro-mint, which not everyone is. And it does taste quite strongly of mint, even seconds after steeping. The green tea gives it a nice, rounded quality though. It’s not all mint, like some teas we’ve had in the past, and it’s not a weird cocktail of tea-like herbs someone threw in a sachet with extra sugar. It’s very seasonal. Sort of like. drinking an After Eight, but without the chocolate.

Talking of seasonal, the tree is up, and so’s today’s poem. If you don’t know Brian Bilston, you’re about to become addicted . He’s a genius at light verse.

Dec 8

Today’s tea was “Assam Exotic.” One thing we appreciate about this calendar is that its teas are extremely tea-like. Much as we love the David’s Tea Advent Calendar, there have been years where we’ve drawn eight vaguely adjacent sachets in rapid succession, and they’re all lovely and sweetened and full of hibiscus, and after that it becomes difficult to describe them.

Assam Exotic was a full-bodied Assam, but not so strong that it needed milk. That’s sometimes a tricky balance to get right, and we appreciated being able to drink it unadulterated.

We drank it before rushing out the door to church and then off to a singing lesson. It’s been sort of music all day, because later on we met up with family to go see Maria. It was enjoyable, and it’s always a treat to hear someone sing Vissi D’Arte better than we currently do, but it wasn’t really about the singing so much as the love story (?) with Onassis. It’s not that that’s uninteresting, it just strikes us as a bit bizarre when the whole first act is called “The Diva” and then proceeds to be about everything but the music or even the woman who sang it. But we’re biased. We signed on for the story of La Divina and what did or didn’t happen to her voice in all kinds of technical detail. Probably no one else did. So, have a poem instead.

I Am In Need of Music
Elizabeth Bishop

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colours deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Dec 7

Today’s tea was high mountain darjeeling. It had much more body to it than the last darjeeling – perfect for a pot of tea.

We drank it while reading a book for book club. There’s all of two of us in this book club, and lots of people make fun of it. But 100% of the book club shows up 100% of the time when we meet. We love it. And the books have never been bad.

Because of that we didn’t have loads of spare time to think about poems, so you’re getting one of our emergency ones. Not to worry, it’s a staple of this calendar for a reason.

The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
 When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
 The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
 Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
   Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
 In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
 Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
  His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
 And I was unaware.

Dec 6

Tonight we’re typing with two hands while trying to simultaneously play the wand game with the Marschallin Cat. It’s going about as well as you’d expect. We stop, she meows. We resume, the mouse on the end of the wand is savaged, her claws get stuck in the mouse, we let go of the mouse, there’s meowing…It’s a whole cycle.

While all that’s going on, we’re also trying to drink our tea. It’s hibiscus rose tonight. We had doubts; It smells strongly of a travelling pharmacy. But it’s got sort of a liquorice taste that we like better than standard hibiscus. That goes tart quickly. The rose in this adds an interesting grace note. There’s fennel mixed in too, and it’s the strongest flavour when you smell the tea, but happily not the main one when it’s infusing.

We were right, the other night, by the way. These tea bags steep much better in a mug. The quilted cats are out again (they’ve served us loyally through several calendars) and it’s half full of very red tea that tastes a bit of roses and a bit of liquorice.

Speaking of roses…The other day we brought you a sonnet we thought was part of a longer poem but wasn’t. Tonight have an excerpt from a longer poem that we thought was a poem in it’s own right.

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake.
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Though, since you ask, we know this better as part of a Vaughan Williams song cycle. It’s got five parts, and this is neither the most famous nor the most memorable. Remind us, and we’ll dig out that one for you, too.

Dec 5

Today we drew Darjeeling Spring from the mix. It was a nice tea to have for breakfast. Very light and floral. Though it never got above what a family member calls “winkles tea.” We have as leisurely a breakfast as possible given the ninety-minute commute. We eat our otmeal, we start our online scrabble, and only then do we pour out the tea. It gets anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to steep.

You wouldn’t have known it with this Darjeeling. We can normally cope with watery tea, but even by our standards it was almost too weak. We think it’s the leaves. They’re very big and very loose in the tea bag, which is what you want for a good cup, but you do need more than a pinch of tea to make a pot. A mug might work better. We’ll try that next time, although we didn’t have the same issue with yesterday’s masala chai.

We didn’t actually end up commuting; there was a pllumbing thing we had to be in for. Except, of course we didn’t, because the plumbing thing took all of thirty seconds if one’s generous. Why we had orders to remove all furniture from the area so they could work absolutely boggles the mind.

Later, we went dancing. The snow’s still there. We still have no boots. It’s a whole saga. Have a poem instead.

Dust of Snow
Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.