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.