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?