A Nice Cup of Tea

The Twenty-Seventh of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Tuesday.
 
I have come back to tea. I’m trying to remember why exactly I left, but the memories (as always) are a little bit fuzzy.


I know some of the contributing factors. Tea and cereal are about the only things I use milk for, and breakfast is usually me chomping down a bagel as I rush out the door on my way to work, so I’m lucky to get through half a pint of milk before it goes off. Annndd, I like black coffee so it becomes easier just to go with that and not bother getting any milk


I do enjoy a bit of the old rooibos (and, as the synchronicities that afflict this blog continue to unfold I have just been brought a mug of redbush tea even as we speak. Spooky, huh?). That's pleasant enough to drink without milk too. In fact, now that I think about it I do remember one of the reasons I cut back on my tea consumption. After about your fifth cup - and believe me at work, sometimes it gets as far as that fifth cup - it does tend to churn your tum up quite a bit. But then again, the same can be said about coffee. And sometimes, redbush just doesn't have the 'kick' that's necessary to get you through the day.

So I'm back on the tea. Not that I was completely off it. Sometimes a mug would turn up with the occasional cooked breakfast and it would be impolite to turn one down when offered at a friend's house.  When I was in charge of my own beverages I wouldn't bother though. Until one day, the oppressive weight of cultural expectation became too much and I gave in to the lure of Rosie Lee.

I think my recent reintroduction to The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was my gateway drug to the East India company's famous export (not opium - the other one. No, not indigo or saltpetre either. The other other one. Oh, for Glob's sake, the blogdule's about tea, it's tea, isn't it?). Douglas Adams liked his tea, didn't he? (I'm thinking here of the "one lump or two" joke in the unfinished Doctor Who story Shada, among others). Certainly the part of him that was a bit Arthur Dent did. In fact, up until not getting very far with a physics degree I thought Brownian motion was so called because the tea in which the Guide suggested you dangle the atomic vector plotters of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain to generate finite amounts of improbability was brown.

I find it staggering now to think that when I first drank tea as a child I actually took sugar. That that was eventually phased out is the one claim to maturity I can make about my self. I know some people enjoy very strong tea (in my family, if you are served with what was clearly the dregs of the kettle resulting in a less than full mug of v strong tea you are obliged to admonish the charperson as follows: "what's that? Half a cup of mud!") but I prefer it 'as it comes' - that is to say, of medium strength. And, as the American Pop Cultural Attaché well knows, I am a mugman rather than a teacup person.

I am lucky enough to live just around the corner from Scarborough's charming Francis tea rooms. There they serve loose tea - pots, strainer and all - which is all very good on occasion but I firmly believe that teabag technology has advanced to such a point nowadays that the small amount of extra quality this affords is barely measurable. I do have one of those metal tea ball infuser things that I used with some caramel red bush I once bought (it's a bit too sweet, though. I'm weighing up whether to get some plain rooibos and mix it to make a less sickly blend) but for the most part it's bags in this house.

And some nice biscuits, preferably garibaldis.

Of course, the definitive work on tea is the essay A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell. I think if you follow the instructions contained therein you can't go wrong.

Right, kettle's on.

More soonliest.

Kindling

The Nineteenth of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Monday.

I don't write enough. Probably part of the reason for that is I don't read enough. And probably part of the reason for that is books are just too darn long.

Well, they're not really, are they? But for some reason, unless I am completely and utterly gripped by a book I seem to find it difficult to get to the end these days. I think it's yet more evidence of my dwindling powers of concentration as I approach my dotage (ah, there it is just across the square. I can see it now).

The more pragmatic among you may wish to point to the invention of something called the 'short story', but these have a troubling tendency to turn up in collections. I feel the same disappointment in having read four out of ten stories in a short story collection as I do in getting only barely halfway through a novel. Yes, those might be complete and self-contained tales, but like listening to half an album (remember those, o generation of downloaders?) it still feels like a job not completed.

(Actually, I don't know why I'm being all snotty to downloaders. The whole thrust of this blogdule (is that what individual blog entries are called? Is it? IS IT?) is about downloading stuff.)

So thank goodness something has come along that means you no longer have to read a whole book.

What am I talking about?

Kindle samples!

I don't have an actual Kindle - although if they actually sold the 8.9 inch screen Kindle Fire in this country (what is that all about? Why do they region lock US Kindles? Let's just assume here that DRM and region locking is a dumb idea and move on) I might consider getting one to read my comics on - but I do have the app on me iPhone. Even on that tiny screen, it's easy enough to read. And, as I have mentioned elsewhere, as space becomes a premium in my tiny non-dimensionally transcendental flat I am embracing the digit-all age with all digits (bit of a stretch that, but I couldn't resist). So I have downloaded the odd virtual novel or two but they do have the nasty habit of costing actual money.

Actually, in struggling to come up with a punny title for this blogdule (that doesn't really work, does it? And yet I can tell - even now - that I am going to continue to use it) it occurs to me that the idea of book burning does seem implicit in the name Kindle. Is that deliberate? It seems a fairly obvious connection. Interesting that there isn't a copy of Fahrenheit 451 in the Kindle store. 

In an amazing piece of metatextuality here, the reason these sentences don't make sense is I am listening to an edition of Just a Minute from 28 May rather than concentrating on what I'm writing. They mentioned Tristram Shandy, which, after enjoying Michael Winterbottom's film A Cock and Bull Story, inspired me to immediately download a free Kindle edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a book famous for its constant digressions.

When the radio recording had finished, the recorder reverted to the last channel it was on. In this case ITV3, and Doc Martin featuring Caroline Catz was on. Now I'll admit to having a bit of a crush on the lovely Caroline so I had a quick look on Wikipedia to see what she's up to at the moment, whereupon I discovered she is married to Michael Higgs, who I had been watching as the dad on Wizards vs Aliens earlier. Why is it when I start writing this blog thing I can constantly get distracted by the fundamental interconnectedness of things?

The more you write, the more you begin to recognise your own ticks (some might say 'clichés') as a writer. Digressional hyphens seem to be one. And have you noticed how more and more rhetorical questions seem to be creeping in?

Anyway, I invoke the works of Douglas Adams (on a bit of an Adams kick at the mo - finally bought the DVD of the TV Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which, let's be honest, has got to be my Eighteenth Telly Recommendation) because he is responsible for my latest addiction: Kindle samples.

Kindle samples are great. They're free and as they only make up the first few pages of a book you can polish them off in no time and not worry about how the rest of the book turns out. Where they are particularly effective is when they release a new edition of a book you already have but it features a brand new introduction. This is where Hitch Hiker comes into it, cos a few years back they brought out new editions of the books with intros by the likes of Russell T Davies and Neil Gaiman - yours for free. In fact, it's only just occurred to me that they've done the same with rereleases of a dozen of the Target Doctor Who novelisations, and I have just cracked on and downloaded the new intros to those while enjoying a slightly stale chocolate eclair.

Obviously, the idea is to entice you into buying the whole thing. And there are samples in my Kindle library that I might just do that with. But for now I am enjoying completing the incompletness of books by Tina Fey, Tim Key, Stewart Lee, Haruki Murakami, Caitlin Moran and Mark Kermode. Biographies and factual books are great because not knowing how the book ends doesn't really affect the bits you're reading. I'm getting very clued up on the early childhood of an awful lot of people. 

More soonliest.

A Matter of Record

The Sixteenth of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Thursday.

I'm thinking of reading The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy again. It's years since the last time I did - I think my last encounter with the Hitch-Hiker universe was with the film from a few years ago. Didn't really cut it for me. But I was in Waterstone's the other day and I had a quick flick through the latest edition, reading the new foreword penned by Russell T Davies (the genius writer behind Bob and Rose - oh, Ninth Telly Recommendation ahoy. Joyous, joyous telly. Ninth and Tenth Telly Recommendation actually, that's how good it is). I was quite young the first time a read it (an American hardback copy that my next door neighbour's dad had brought back from working overseas. I orginally thought it was an American book), and as funny as I found it it's only as I've gotten older that I've started to understand some of the jokes in there.

In fact there's one joke in particular - in another book written by Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - that has only relatively recently made sense to me. There's a section featuring an Electric Monk, a robot that saves you the effort of believing in things by believing them on your behalf. A comparison is made with the way a video recorder will watch programmes for you so you don't have to.

In my younger days this didn't make sense to me. Surely you got a video to record the programmes you wanted to watch most of all. In the twenty-plus years since I first read that I have now realised the truth - Douglas was right.

I love my Humax PVR.

You can record off digital radio, the EPG has a search function, you can trim recorded programmes and you can upload files onto your computer. It's ace. But it's also full of telly I haven't got round to watching. The oldest is from 2 years ago - there's Series 4 and 5 of The Wire on there. Also Series 3 of Weeds, Series 2 of Dollhouse. I still intend to get around to watching all that at some point. It's all the stuff that I've recorded, didn't watch and subsequently deleted - stuff from Christmas, various films. The hard drive is more or less full so as soon as something new comes along that I might want to watch space has to be made and quite often the stuff that goes hasn't been watched yet. The most telling thing is when a film that's been on your recorder for a long time gets reshown. And you still don't get around to watching it. I think I've recorded Pan's Labyrinth  3 times - still haven't seen it. But the recorder must think it's good to have watched it again and again like that...

In fact, I'm saving up my pennies at the mo so I can afford to upgrade to a recorder that can watch in HD the things I'll never get around to seeing. So at least if I don't see it, I'm not seeing it with the best possible picture quality.

I think that makes sense.

More soonliest.