M.C. Steep's Blog, page 4

Dec. 19

This has sort of segued into Bunker Reports From an Invalid Under the Duvet, lately. Apologies.

The thing is, it’s difficult to focus on stuff that isn’t the Dread Lurgy when you go to bed at 9:30 PM…and lie awake until midnight. Whereat, by the way, we got up and made camomile tea. This time it was bloody awful, which either meant we were getting better or itwas deteriorating with age. Then we went back to bed and still didn’t sleep, so in despair we got up and took Tylenol, which we haven’t trusted since it did terrible things to a relative, and eventually drifted off to light and imperfect sleep full of weird dreams.

But it’s not all doom and gloom over here. The cat was very solicitous. She did her best burrowing under the duvet and cozied up to our spine, with much purring. This was probably a last resort since a musle cramp prevented us from being comfortable with her on our knees and sitting on our chest induced hacking and wheezing. She took that Very Personally.

Also today, two packages arrived from friends. One, in Germany, featuring a pattern for quilted pillows (or whatever you call things are that are bigger than pillows but go on the bed) that we’ll tackle when our brain clears. It features Dachshunds, because of course it does, and looks delightful.

Serendipitously, the other offering was full of tea and one of those mugs with a built-in strainer. One of the teas was even heavily ginger-infused. Just what we ordered.

Actually, ginger was the them of the day, because the Advent Calendar produced a ginger chai. It’s a good tea, but drinking it alongside tasteless soup didn’t improve it. Also, it’s better without sugar. We added some experimentally, and it’s definitely better unsweetened. We didn’t even go near milk, because who does when congested? But we can’t see ginger and milk working together, so we may not do that.

All this to say, it felt good to remember there was a world outside the duvet. One where we quilted stuff and met people for tea, and danced Scottish. Friends – who’d be without them, eh?

On which note, have a poem.

In the Company of Women
Gill O’Neil

Make me laugh over coffee,
make it a double, make it frothy
so it seethes in our delight.
Make my cup overflow
with your small happiness.
I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle.
Let your laughter fill me like a bell.
Let me listen to your ringing and singing
as Billie Holiday croons above our heads.
Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found.
Not tonight. Not here.
No makeup. No tears.
Only contours. Only curves.
Each sip takes back a pound,
each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul.
Can I have a refill, just one more?
Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives.
Let us take this joy to go.

Dec. 18

The lurgy is still here. Tests don’t agree, but we’re pretty sure it’s COVID. It sure feels like the last time we got COVID. It is not particularly joyful.

We’ve been going back through the Advent teas today, and noticing that this year the calendar went weirdly e. e. cummings on us. Nothing – bar nothing – is capitalized. It’s bizarre. Not even the country names, as in English Breakfast. No, David in his infinite wisdom, calls it ‘english breakfast.’ It looks all wrong.

We can confirm that Lavender Earl Grey is as lovely as we suspected. We managed to drink that when briefly free of the fever, and it was nice. Don’t add milk to it. You’ll spoil it.

By the afternoon everything was so awful we were drinking camomile. And you can tell it was terrible, because we liked it. It didn’t taste vilely of hay. We blame mucked up taste buds. On the plus side, it bought us approximately three hours sleep…until the Dachshund Chorus decided at four o’clock that it was actually five and refused to stop barking.

Whereat, we came down and magnificently shunned dachshunds (you have to remember a cat trained us), and had today’s tea. It’s a green tea called Hojicha (hojicha on the calendar…) It’s a really lovely floral green tea, and in all the time we sat there drinking it – this was a very long time because our head ached and we felt miserable and were plotting the slow demise of dogs that wouldn’t let us sleep even though we weren’t really sleepy any more – it never went bitter. That’s a trick with green tea.

Here’s where we should segue into a poem by e. e. cummings.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
e. e. comings

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
…. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

See? Even Mr. No Capitals capitalizes his proper nouns. The calender is on drugs. Or maybe just cold medication…

Dec. 17

Today’s tea was a lovely Lavender Early Grey that regrettably, we can’t do justice to. It’s probably lovely, but somewhere between Christmas parties and book club we’ve come down with a lurgy.

It’s not testing as covid, but everyone we know whose had the latest variant says it never does until you’re over the symptoms, so that’s deeply joyful. Just how we want to spend the run up to Christmas.

It has solved the vexed question of where to put tonight’s poem. John Donne and the scientists have a fundemental disagreement about exactly when ‘The Year’s Midnight’ is. We were going to hold off until the 21st, but on the other hand, we are freezing, have been all day and can’t remember what warm feels like.

Here’s a poem about an unfortunate chap who knows how that feels. We’re very glad we don’t live any further north!

The Cremation of Sam McGee
Robert Service

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
“It’s the cursèd cold, and it’s got right hold till I’m chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet ’tain’t being dead—it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”

A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: “You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.”

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.”
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside.
I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”; … then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

We owe a tip of the hat to book club for this one. We’d forgotten Robert Service wrote it until his poems became the lynchpin of one of our novels. If you want a good book to get stuck into over the holidays, look up The Great Alone. It’s excellent.

Dec. 16

Today’s tea was a breakfast blend, which you might think the Advent Calendar associated with England, but which in practice they associated with India.

Fair enough. Many of the black teas in this blend were Indian – Assam, Darjeeling, that kind of thing. It’s not the world’s most exciting tea to write about. Once you add milk it tastes like any other store-bought black tea, however big the leaves are. But it’s good for waking up to, and we still have some left over.

At this point in the calendar, it’s worth saying this is the most well-balanced David’s Tea has been about it’s 24 Days of Tea thing. For one thing, there’s a lot less stevia in these teas. We aren’t frantically trying to describe sugary herbal blends that all pour out pink. These are teas that are teas. The Around the World them helped keep it focused.

Next week will be the test, presumably, but so far, so good. We’d buy this calendar again. Even without the tins. It’s been fun.

So, this poem isn’t a reflection on the tea at all – except inasmuch as whatever the calendar says, we associate breakfast blends with England, and it’s hard to get more quintessentially English than Inspector Morse – TV and book models.

But the thing TV Morse doesn’t tell you is just how wide Dexter cast his net of allusions. One book opened each chapter with a cryptic crossword clue, which, by the way, is how we learned to solve cryptic crosswords. Every book had one pivotal reveal contingent on Morse solving a crossword clue that stumped him, and the trick was to crack it before he did, because it was always thematically relevent.

But the last Morse book took it’s title from an A.E. Houseman poem, so every chapter opened with a stanza from a Houseman poem. And this is the one everyone remembers, because it gets quoted as that ubiquitous theme plays over the series final episode. We haven’t seen the final series of Endeavour, but we sort of hope they loop back to ‘How Clear, How Lovely Bright’ for the symmetry. And because Morse was right; Houseman’s a brilliant poet.

How Clear, How Lovely Bright
A. E. Houseman

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Dec. 15

The big news – the thing we have you in suspenders about, we are certain – is whether we got to the end of the book in time for book club.

We did. We may or may not have read the last 5% on our commute to the restaurant, but we absolutely showed up with the book read. And it’s good.

If you want a fun, fast, uplift read, go buy Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard. It reminded us of another favourite read, also with this book club, Little Ray Of Sunshine. Both are nominally romantic comedies where the focus is pretty squarely on the mother-daughter relationship and how we approach love. By that we mean all kinds of love – think C. S. Lewis Four Lovesian approach, here.

Books are good, is what we’re saying. Stories are powerful. Here’s a poem that wants to remind you of that. We picked it while unwinding with Moroccan Mint Tea. You should really drink this tea cold, but it’s December. Cut us some slack.

Besides, who ever curled up with a favourite book and…a cold cup of tea?!

I Met A Dragon Face to Face
Jack Prelutsky

I met a dragon face to face
the year when I was ten,
I took a trip to outer space,
I braved a pirate’s den,
I wrestled with a wicked troll,
and fought a great white shark,
I trailed a rabbit down a hole,
I hunted for a snark.

I stowed aboard a submarine,
I opened magic doors,
I traveled in a time machine,
and searched for dinosaurs,
I climbed atop a giant’s head,
I found a pot of gold,
I did all this in books I read
when I was ten years old.

Dec. 14

We’re trying to get ahead today, so of course the bloody blog is playing up. Actually, it’s doing this because we said the laptop (13 years old) was still nice and reliable and didn’t need replacing. Look, 99.99999% of the time, it doesn’t. Except when we use Chrome.

When do we use Chrome? To write everyone’s favourite tea-and-poetry blog.

But why, says you. Why not use a functional browser?

Ah, friends, so said we. Our normal browser is Firefox. But the thing about operating a 13-year-old computer, is that after a certain point it refuses to run new software. So, we’re stuck on an antiquated model of firefox, not that you’d know it, because it runs at a perfectly good speed.

But Chrome…Chrome wants to see if it can be outpaced by a snail. Or maybe a tortoise. We told it that was silly because the tortoise won the race, but….Since when does technology listen? We regularly tell the Google Home to stop babbling and it keeps right on going.

Anyway, all this started because (don’t tell!) we’re trying to get ahead on the book club book that we should really have read last week so we can discuss it tomorrow. But then family dropped in for a visit, and stuff happened, and the computer won’t go at speed, and now it’s twenty minutes until a singing lesson and our kindle still says six hours, eight minutes to go. Totally doable, right? We’ll just wake up at six, skip breakfast and get stuck in…

It’s a really good book, by the way. So’s today’s tea, which is black, inspired by Capri, and called Southern Lemon. We think it’s supposed to taste of lemons, but it doesn’t, hugely. Which…if you’re the type that flavours Earl Grey with lemon because of theological and/or personal objections to milk in Earl Grey, probably makes sense.

It’s really good tea. We want more of it. It’s perfect for waking you up, if, say, you are racing the clock to read most of a book before a singing lesson and a Scottish Country Dance session and are failing miserably.

And now that we’ve got the computer more or less functional, we’ve almost finished the bloog. We should give you a celebratory poem about technology to mark the occasion, but that seems sort of soulless. Have this poem about really good books, instead.

Good Books
Edgar Guest

Good books are friendly things to own.
If you are busy they will wait.
They will not call you on the phone
Or wake you if the hour is late.
They stand together row by row,
Upon the low shelf or the high.
But if you’re lonesome this you know:
You have a friend or two nearby.

The fellowship of books is real.
They’re never noisy when you’re still.
They won’t disturb you at your meal.
They’ll comfort you when you are ill.
The lonesome hours they’ll always share.
When slighted they will not complain.
And though for them you’ve ceased to care
Your constant friends they’ll still remain.

Good books your faults will never see
Or tell about them round the town.
If you would have their company
You merely have to take them down.
They’ll help you pass the time away,
They’ll counsel give if that you need.
He has true friends for night and day
Who has a few good books to read.

Dec. 13

Today’s tea was a Jade Tieguanyin Oolong. It’s a lovely, creamy oolong. But again – and we say this every other day lately – you have to watch the steeping time religiously. We could tell it was strong from the smell, so only used a pinch, and after last night’s disastrous ms-timing, poured out early. The result was a gorgeous oolong. But we could see how if you left it much longer, it could be bitter.

Today’s been full of family stuff. Can I skip Christmas Mass (no). Cost of train tickets on Boxing Day (don’t look!), and a surprise saga involving family ashes that is so convoluted we couldn’t make it up if we wanted to. It has all the constituent parts of a best-selling novel, except no one would think it was plausible. We’d go into it, but figure family would object.

Instead, have a poem about families. Who’d have them, eh?

This Be The Verse
Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

We first encountered this poem in A Series of Unfortunate Events, where the villain quotes it. In retrospect, that whole last book is built around the third stanza. Crucial, because this being a kids’ series (albeit an absurdist, gothic, often dark-ish one), the publisher couldn’t print the first two verses, because of the swearing!

Dec. 12

Tonight’s tea was a Japanese Sencha. We love Sencha, but it’s an incredibly fussy tea. Leave it a split-second too long and it turns from green tea to extremely bitter drink. We left it a split-second too long.

In our defence, we’re just back from the annual Christmas Party for the Tuesday Scottish Country Dancers. You want to dance with these Tuesday folk. They ask things like, ‘Have you ever seen a man in a kilt, wearing oven mitts, try to put on ladies’ panties?’

See? Now you know everything about 1950s Hogmanay in Scotland.

They’re also notorious for body-checking one another when dancing mirror reels. In our slow dance step. I love the Tuesday group. We have so much fun going wrong together.

There are, actually, Scottish Country Dance poems…But we’re pretty sure we’ve used up the best ones. So here’s a poem to go with your Japanese Sencha. It’s short, so you can avoid that fatal over-steeping error.

Goes Out, Comes Back
Kobayashi Issa

Goes out,
Comes back —
The love life of a cat

We love these little poetic gems by Issa. There’s tremendous humanity in them. And it proves people worshiped cats before us. Miss Marschallin could have told you that, but would you have believed her?

Dec. 11

Today’s tea was Darjeeling Afternoon, which, full admission, we drank in the morning.

An excellent choice, because this black tea is wonderful for productivity. We’ve done al lthe Christmas cards, posted several parcels, sorted everyone’s gifts, and did battle with the fleas. They thoughtfully showed up in September, and even though it’s December and it’s the world’s mildest infestation, they refuse to die. The cat is unamused. We’re unimpressed. The dogs don’t even notice.

We ran out of Darjeeling Afternoon by four o’clock, so we switched to a Harrods’ Christmas bend courtesy of a friend. Also a lovely tea. We drank it while writing the Christmas cards.

Along the way, we battled the customs form for Canada post. Did you know it’s now impossible to fill one in in person? Neither did we. It’s great. The form won’t do large-print and it willfully infilled misinformation that we weren’t allowed to change. Canada Post, in the unlikely event you’re reading, take note: This violates the Ontario Disabilities Act. You’re supposed to have options for your partially-sighted users that accommodate us. And, you know, maybe accommodate the little granny types who don’t want to fill the form in online while you’re at it. It’s not hard. There are lots of people who have valid reasons for not filling this stupid customs thing in online. And it’s not like it saved us any time, because the woman at the post office had to correct the willfully mistyped stuff that I couldn’t correct (there is no Toronto in Germany, autofill!), but she still had to input all the info!

So, who does this help? Not us. Not the postal workers. But it does actively discriminate against great sections of Canadians trying to send their Christmas parcels! Huzzah! Sort it, guys.

Sorry. We didn’t mean to read you the accessibility riot act. Please have some light verse in compensation. No one writes it like Wendy Cope.

The Orange
Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Dec. 10

Double digits already?! This happens every Advent, and every Advent we’re confused. Honest to God, the only month that outpaces December is February.

Right, we promised you a rant on Conditor Alme Siderum. Otherwise known as a perfectly inoffensive hymn.

So, what’s it done to offend us? Nothing.

There’s a thing in the order of service called a Sequence Hymn that basically exists to knit the first lesson to the psalm. Lots of churches have them. My old church had one every Sunday and it was always different.

Enter St Thomas’s, Huron St. Where, every Advent, come hell or high water, we have to sing Creator of the Starry Height as a sequencing hymn. Every. Single. Sunday. And then it sods off for Christmas and a great whack of Epipheny. Until Lent comes round and the sequence hymn comes back, and even though Lent is a completely different liturgical bloody season we have to sing this thing again. For six weeks.

As hymns go, there are more offensive ones. It even has a decent tune, except that’s not what we sing. For reasons best known to this church, we sing the plainsong tune, and it goes on for bloody ever. It’s also super unwieldy for anyone who A)can’t read nuems or B) struggles to sing without hefty backup from a choir.

And even if none of that were true, four consecutive Sundays of this thing is A Lot. Five years on, we officially hate this hymn. We are sick to death of singing it, and we don’t understand why the weird penitential season obsession with it our church has.

We actually fell down an ecclesiastical rabbit hole chasing this up once. We thought maybe this was an Anglican Church of Canada quirk and read all the fine print of all the manuals for music directors of said church. It’s not a thing. There are zero rules insisting you drive your congregants insane by using this hymn – and only this hymn! – every time the purple vestments come out.

There is no rhyme or reason, and we’re doubly not coping this Advent, because we may or may not have rebelled during the era of the Covid Live-Stream and picked our own sequence hymns, with zero plainchant sung at a key only a coloratura could pull off. No, seriously. We ended up on High F more than we didn’t and it was fabulous. Jerusalem the Golden never sounded so good. Ditto Lo In The Wilderness A Voice.

But now we’re back to in-person worship and nothing but Creator of the Starry Height, and two Sundays in we just want to murder it. Slowly. With a spoon.

Probably just as well we’re drinking a refreshing peppermint tea tonight, eh? This isn’t for you if you don’t like mint; The clue’s in the name. It tastes very strongly of what it says on the tin. We love mint, so it’s always a winner.

Again, some of the strength comes from tipping the whole packet into the pot. It’s just too hard trying to portion stuff out of those recyclable plastic bags they’ve switched to. You end up with tea leaves on the counter, and that’s a sad waste of tea.

After all that, here’s a poem about stars that doesn’t get old. Maybe because no one’s set it to plainsong…Maybe because that guy Keats was good at his job.

Bright Star
John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
 Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.