The Perfect Cup of Tea: Part The Second

The finest cup of tea I ever tasted was made for me by Mrs. Taylor. Tiny and silver-haired when I was born, to my eyes she aged not a day until her last illness twenty-eight years later. She lived in Winchester, near the cathedral immortalized in song by the New Vaudeville Band, and it was there that I arrived by train to visit her one drear afternoon in October,

Preparation for The Taking Of The Tea (I soon realized that tea prepared with such painstaking attention to detail demanded a formal title) began in her clean but comfortably lived-in kitchen. (I should mention that Mrs. Taylor was the only person I knew whose house never needed cleaning—at least I presumed it didn’t, since it was never dirty nor did I ever once see her with a dust rag in hand.) On the tea tray went a cloth of white linen with an exquisite cutwork embroidery design, and two matching napkins. The cloth was almost obscured by two teacups of finest bone china in a delicate floral pattern, a matching milk jug, a bowl to catch the drips from the tea strainer, a teapot complete with elegant cozy, and a thermal jug whose function was as yet shrouded in mystery.

In the kitchen, I witnessed Mrs. Taylor warming the pot, then adding a quantity of tea leaves so surprisingly large that I wondered fleetingly whether she had been taking lessons from the keepers at Bristol Zoo. I was greatly relieved when, in the comfort of the sitting room, our chairs on either side of the fireplace and the tray on the small table between us, it turned out that the thermos flask was full of just-below-boiling-point water that she used to dilute the extraordinarily strong output of the teapot. There was something almost mesmerizing about watching her pour, first the milk, then the incredibly strong tea, then the very hot water, until the cup was the exact taste I preferred. Oh, I'm forgetting the sugar! Mrs. Taylor was well aware I did not take sugar, and she certainly knew that neither did she, but there was a bowl of sugar lumps, complete with tongs, to spare me the embarrassment of having to ask, "just in case" I had changed my mind.

Gradually I became aware that I was witnessing a ceremony from a bygone era. The goal was not, as is the norm today, the speedy production of a large quantity of tea to be slurped from hefty ceramic mugs, but rather the making of individual, six ounce cups of tea, each one perfectly tailored to its intended drinker.

There didn't seem to be quite enough air in the room. At least, as I sat up ramrod straight, frantically trying to avoid disappointing her expectations of a tea guest, I found it hard to breathe; in retrospect, I can relate to the female actors of Downton Abbey who described how restrictive their crushingly tight corsets were. It’s hard to misbehave when you can scarcely breathe!

The funny thing, looking back, is that it was all about love, though the word was never spoken.  It was love that lay behind Mrs. Taylor’s extraordinary attention to detail in giving me a tea experience that remains vivid thirty-five years later; it was love that made me so desperately eager to please her in return. I imagine she fed me sandwiches and delectable little tea cakes, but I honestly don’t remember.

The love was in the teapot, and that’s what I recall.     

The Perfect Cup of Tea - Part The First

How may I approach such an exalted topic? Do I dare presume to add to the reams already penned on the subject? Perhaps the via negativa is the way to go, since for some reason it seems easier to state what a thing is not than what it is: and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you My Two Worst Ever Cups of Tea.

How well I remember my first cuppa in America: the memory pains me deeply, indeed, the wounds have scarcely healed after all these years. The waitress seemed to smirk as she delivered me a stone cold cup and saucer, on which lay a dispirited-looking teabag still in its paper envelope. Next to it, a small metal teapot betrayed no reassuring signs of heat; indeed, I could touch it quite comfortably with my bare fingertips.

Now, the first and cardinal rule of making tea, dinned into me since early childhood by every significant adult in my life, is this: Always Use Freshly Boiling Water.

Aghast at such a flagrant breaking of this law, but keenly aware that every passing second only made matters worse, I hastened the tea bag from its envelope into the cup. As expected, when I added the "boiling" contents of the teapot, the only perceptible change was a slight staining of the water in the immediate vicinity of the tea bag. Leaving it for several minutes did little to help, and neither did the addition of the synthetic contents of the little plastic pot of “creamer”.

It was the most insipid cup of tea I have ever had the misfortune to drink.

At the opposite end of the tea-making spectrum lies the choice brew served up by the zookeepers at Bristol Zoo. In his youth, my brother Ian (same name as our Eldest Son Iain, just with a different spelling) got a summer job tending the zoo’s animal inhabitants, and among his tasks was that of Chief Teamaker for the Animal Keepers’ Tea Break.  As he was to discover, there was quite an art to this, a strict protocol that came as something of a shock to Ian’s system, and had to be followed to the letter.

First, the pot. This was lined with a thick, tannin-rich scum, built up over years (decades?) of use and no cleaning whatsoever. Ian’s life nearly came to an untimely end the day he tried to help by giving the pot a good scour . . . His vocabulary was greatly enlarged that day, but there weren’t too many places he was welcome to try it out: certainly not at the Prentice family dinner table.

Next, the tea leaves which had to be PGTips (loose, of course—no sissy teabags for this rugged bunch.) How many teaspoons? Well, there’s a daft question! Just pour in the right amount, straight from the packet. If your spoon can stand up in the finished slurry, it’s strong enough. At this stage, milk and sugar were added and the whole given a thorough stir before the final stage: filling the pot with freshly boiling water (at last, something we can agree on!) stirring it once more and leaving it to steep for at least fifteen minutes to allow the full glory of the tannins to develop. Not tannic acid, mind you; this is not found in tea. Tannins, or thearubigins, are found a-plenty, and may cause antioxidant activity. Hooray! Tea’s a health food—I always knew as much!

Somewhere between these two extremes lies the magical brew favored by Mrs. Patmore, Agatha Christie (“Tea! Bless ordinary everyday afternoon tea!") as well as by my Welsh grandmother, whose every afternoon was punctuated at 4 o’clock on the dot by a singsong, “Now what I’d like is a nice cup of tea.” All other activity came to a halt until Gran had her Willow Pattern teacup in hand and an episode of The Archers, an early farming soap opera that she followed faithfully, on the radio.

But what went into making that daily cup of ambrosia will have to wait until Part The Second.

"Goodbye, and thank your mother for the rabbits": Part the First, March 2016

You can take the mother out of the homeschool, but you can’t take the homeschooler out of this mother . . . especially when it comes to (ta-da) . . . Unit Studies!

Take this morning, for instance, when I happened upon the seemingly innocuous phrase, “Goodbye, and thank your mother for the rabbits.”

Harmless enough, you may think . . . But not for a home-educating parent who thinks in unit studies. She would take this phrase and milk it for every possible drop of teaching content. You will be surprised how much there is!

Let me show you how it works for me, in hopes that you’ll find something you can use, or at least be infected by my enthusiasm. Let’s start with:

1)   “Goodbye”: the word originated in the late 1500’s; “Godbwye,” a contraction of “God be with ye”, was soon further shortened to a simple “goodbye.“ To find the reason behind this truncation, have the whole family say godbwye every time they leave the house—or just a room—for one day. Which is easier to say, godbwye or “bye”? Is anything lost in the simplification?

2)   “Thank you” and gifts: thank you letters always made me feel sick with guilt; I knew my children should write them, and I really meant to make them, but so much got in the way … End result, everybody felt bad, (especially me) and the letters never got written.

Now that I have 20/20 hindsight, I can do it right: I create a “Thank You Box” with paper, stickers, crayons, envelopes and postage stamps, and make producing one thank you letter per day part of every school day till they are all done. (I find that glitter helps.) The box makes it easy for the children, while envelopes and stamps make addressing and mailing easy for me until the children are old enough to do it themselves. I call attention to articles about letter-writing going out of style, and the children feel proud to be different.

We have fun brainstorming situations where thanks are appropriate.  These include Worship of God; thanks for gifts (of time, kindness, money, physical things etc.) Who do we suppose wrote the first thank you letter? What did it look like? Might it have been a scratch on a rock? A whale tooth? A feather? (I like that—a thank you feather!) When have I been particularly touched by a gift? Can I give a gift like that to someone I love? Do gifts always have to cost money? 

Google and read out loud the poem ‘Bobby’s Presents’ by Elsie Duncan Yale. Bobby buys things he wants for himself, and gives them to his family members—a baseball for mother, a bat for daddy, a jack-knife for baby . . . Being a thoughtful chap, he realizes that these gifts may not be entirely suitable right now, so he’ll borrow them—just for a while . . .

The poem is, of course, intended to be humorous. But I have a friend whose husband and two adult sons really like Games of Thrones, and just guess what she got for Mother’s Day last year? (and, I believe, her birthday as well!)Perhaps her husband should have read ‘Bobby’s Presents’ as a boy.

So I only got through goodbye and thank you; that’s what happens with unit studies.

Tune in next time to discover what happens . . . beyond the rabbit-proof fence!

To Draw, That We Might See: Part The Second (Still February ’16)

As I hope you recall, my last blog left you on tenterhooks, perched on the edge of your seat, pondering the burning question: Was John Ruskin, the famous nineteenth century London art critic, pleased by the advent of the camera? Would he have been thrilled out of his tree by the miraculous technology of today’s tiny cell phone camera, which puts capturing both panoramic vistas and intricately detailed close ups into the hands of the rank amateur?

As you may have deduced (aided, perhaps, by the title of this blog) the answer is a resounding no. Cameras, Ruskin came to believe, stop us seeing. He noticed that would-be photographers were so preoccupied with their cameras, so busy twiddling and fiddling with various knobs, that they quite forgot to look at the particular bit of the universe that had inspired them in the first place. Not so with the gentle art of sketching; having selected the scene, the artist takes out her sketchbook, pencils and paper, finds a place to sit that is neither too hot nor too cold, too bright nor too shady, carefully sizes up her subject, and finally puts pencil to paper. Producing even a simple sketch requires several minutes of intense looking, and it is in the looking that the magic happens.

Ruskin became a passionate enemy of the camera and promoter of drawing—indeed, he spent four years on a campaign to get people sketching again. He wrote books, gave speeches and funded art schools that still flourish today—schools that were (at least in his day) dedicated not to drawing well, but to drawing at all. His ideal was that people should slow down and smell the coffee (which had become quite a popular drink by his time): “The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

How beautiful is that—“his glory is not . . . in going, but in being”? (By “man”, of course, Ruskin and everyone else at his time, and many people today,  myself included, understand “and woman.”)

Ruskin died in January, 1900—the year the chief of the Patent Office famously observed that it might as well be shut down, since everything that possibly could be invented, had been (was ever a statement as colossally and monumentally wrong as that!) I am glad, for his sake, that Ruskin wasn’t born a century later, and so was spared the frenetic acceleration of life brought about, first by the motorcar, then by the computer.

So today, in honor of John Ruskin and all the many 20^th century self-help gurus who have rediscovered the beauty of life in the slow lane, I invite you and your children to join me on the cool, unhurried pages of a sketchbook. And when you have produced a drawing —you’ll notice, I didn’t say “a good drawing”—whip out your cell phone, snap a photo, and save it till I’ve figured out how you’ll send it to me.

To Draw, That We Might See: Part the First Feb ‘16

                                          

It’s not every day that a voice emerges from the pages of history to give a ringing endorsement to an educational notion you thought you’d scraped off a mossy rock somewhere in Devon some fifty years ago: but precisely such a great pleasure befell me This Very Day. I was fortunate enough to make the online acquaintanceship of the arrestingly titled The Book of Life, and in it the chapter that effectively shut down all other activity for the day: On the Importance of Drawing.

Those among you who have read my book, Entropy Academy, may remember that I waxed most enthusiastic about the benefits of drawing—not because cameras were so unwieldy and expensive way back in the 1990’s (which they were), or because film was so temperamental and annoying to have developed (which it was), but because drawing trained me to see!

I had discovered this during my son’s Special Olympics soccer practices, which lasted about an hour and a half. Hour one was easy—the dog and I wore ourselves out with a speed walk of roughly 60 minutes’ duration. The remaining 30-40 minutes lent themselves admirably to a more sedentary pursuit: finding a flower, whether two feet high or the size of a grain of rice, and painstakingly committing its details to paper. I was familiar with the parts of a flower from the enormous amaryllis we grew indoors every Christmas, and the more I drew anthers, stamens and pistils, the easier it became for me to recognize them in the field. (Incidentally, for those who care, moss doesn't have flowers.)

So picture my delight when I read about John Ruskin, a famous English art critic of the nineteenth century. Ruskin noticed that people have an innate desire to capture beauty and try to preserve it. In Ruskin’s day, the newly invented camera was about the size of a grandfather clock, and thus quite unsuitable for slinging around one’s neck on a visit to Niagara Falls. The only way to capture a “souvenir” (French for “memory”) was to purchase it from one of the aptly named souvenir shops that sprang up like mushrooms at every scene of great natural beauty, and have remained there ever since.

One might assume that Ruskin would have been thrilled by today’s tiny cell phone camera, which boasts some ridiculous number of pixels per image—far more than even camera cognoscenti can appreciate with the naked eye. Surely, technology that puts such creative power into the hands of your average Joe Sixpack enjoying his annual two-week vacation on the rocky expanse of Brighton Beach would have allayed Ruskin’s suspicious mind, and caused a hearty endorsement on his part?

You might well assume so: but the answer may surprise you.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for my next blog to find out.

Shoes and socks

Shoes. From soft, tiny baby shoes to gigantic clodhoppers, they demarcate the transition from infancy to teenagerhood. And with them (one might possibly be tempted to say, ’hand in glove’) go socks. Indeed, keeping track of shoes and socks might be termed a Metaphor for the Marvelous Journey of Motherhood

Time was, I could put my hand in my clothes pocket any time, anywhere, and pull out a tiny, soft, colorful baby sock. Happy indeed was a day when I would later find its mate. Matching a pair of socks became a Major Life Event and called for great rejoicing, representing as it did a successful foray into that day’s battle with entropy. I also knew, however, that the day would all too quickly dawn when my hand would search my pocket in vain, and come up empty. Fully aware of the poignancy of the moment, I’d give the sock an appreciative sniff (“Aah, baby powder!”) and return it to my pocket.

But socks , inevitably, outgrow pockets; and as they do, like cowboys and Greta Garbo, they want to be alone. Solitary mismatched socks soon filled a red plastic bucket kept (in what proved to be a futile attempt to stop them metastasizing the length and breadth of the house) behind the laundry room door. This was raided every Sunday morning in a desperate quest for a matching pair: “Surely somewhere among these tens of thousands of odd socks there must lurk two that remotely resemble a pair? “

But no. Incredibly enough, and in complete defiance of the laws of probability, never mind of logic, the bucket yielded an apparently infinite number of individual socks that were united in one thing and one thing only: a fervent desire for their rugged individualism to remain . . . well, rugged, I suppose, and individualistic.

Shoes, on the other hand, are a good deal more tractable. Pin a pair together with a clothespin, buckle a pair together or tie their laces, and there is at least an outside chance of them staying together.

Just please don’t tell shoes that I called them more manageable than socks. I shudder to think of the shape their retribution might take.

Guy Fawkes: Gunpowder, Treason, and Mushy Peas.

One thing I knew for certain: Guy Fawkes was a bad man. A very bad man. So bad, in fact, that every year, in the days leading up to November 5th, my brother Ian and I would round up old clothes from the rag bag, stuff them with crumpled newspaper into a reasonable facsimile of a human being, and trundle him around the streets of Clifton Village, requesting “a penny for the guy” from passers-by. The money went to buy fireworks, while Guy met his fate, sizzling on a bonfire. Gleefully, we sang,

"Please to remember the fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder, treason

Should ever be forgot."

At first it was all good, clean fun. Even when I learned the word “effigy,” and understood that the guy we were burning represented a real person, I was unfazed. He was a traitor, pure and simple. He deserved to die.

As I grew older, the black and white certainties of childhood history became clouded with nuanced shades of gray. Was Guy Fawkes really the scheming villain of my youth, or might he have been set up?

What is known is that on 5th November, 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament with several dozen barrels of gunpowder, looking for all the world as if he was about to blow up the Houses of Parliament, King James I, and with him, the cream of the English aristocracy's fairest and finest (which if you ask anyone of Irish extraction, isn't saying very much.)

Nobody asked questions like: how did he manage to procure so much gunpowder when it was so scarce, and how did he get it past the guards?

Guy was found guilty, and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. I won’t spoil your breakfast by describing the technique, which ranks among the most brutal methods of execution ever devised by man (which is saying quite something): suffice it to say only that the castration which began it was the easy part, after which things rapidly got worse. So determined was our hero to avoid the torture that he jumped headlong from the scaffold and broke his neck, thus depriving the assembled onlookers of their morning’s entertainment.

While not quite in the same league as the Borgias in Italy, the court of James I was not far behind. In particular, the Lord Cecil was a ruthless schemer such as would make Richard Nixon look like the Easter Bunny. There is some considerable evidence to suggest that Cecil masterminded the whole plot, including Guy Fawkes’ arrest. And execution. His goal was to stir up vehement anti-Catholic sentiment, and in that he was more than successful.

Historical revisionism notwithstanding, November 5 was always a good excuse for a party and the best were in Yorkshire. Being in the north of England, Yorkshire is considerably colder and darker than the south; and on November 5^th, the darker and colder the better. Certain traditional delicacies were prepared in advance: parkin, a dark and gloriously sticky gingerbread made with black treacle and golden syrup, and the aptly named "mushy peas"—overcooked peas mashed to a glutinous paste (a technique pioneered and perfected in the kitchens of British Rail)—and rendered strangely exotic by the addition of mint sauce (finely chopped mint leaves mixed with white sugar and vinegar.)

Most major holidays are relatively homogeneous, and involve dinners round a table using knives, forks and spoons. Not so our Yorkshire Guy Fawkes celebrations! The contrasts were thrilling: icy cold at our backs driving us ever closer to the ferocious, skin scorching, hair frizzing heat of the raging bonfire; fingers frozen numb, threatening to drop the paper cups that did little to insulate against the veritable furnace of mushy peas; the biting cold of the icy ground snapping at our feet through ridiculously thin soled shoes; the roaring whoosh of flames devouring everything we fed them— leaves, branches, broken down furniture, even on one occasion a piano deemed beyond all hope, wildly out of tune, with a cracked sounding-board….It serenaded us in its death throes, twanging a macabre melody as one by one its strings exploded, curling red-hot into the black night sky. Wild, pagan, celebrating a revolutionary who sought to overturn the status quo by unthinkably violent means: five dozen barrels of gunpowder, ready to blow the English government to kingdom come.

Or was he some poor stooge, easily manipulated by those more devious, more ambitious, more malevolent than he? Are the children’s voices, still urging their listeners five hundred years later, to “remember, remember the fifth of November” doing exactly what Cecil wanted: stirring up anti-Catholic feeling in a country where to this day “all religions are the same, except Catholics, and they’re wrong.”