yonmei

02:22 pm: Apparently today is Hug a Vegetarian Day...
...why does that make me suddenly want to eat meat in a conspicuous and non-huggy way?

Except that would give me a stomach ache.

Oh the dilemma.

Why couldn't today be International Make A Vegetarian A Nice Cup of Tea Day?



Tags: eating some delicious food, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, tea

08:35 pm: Omegle and tea


Stranger: hello
You: Tea!
Stranger: no thank you
You: What, you don't like tea?
Stranger: not this time of night
You: Tea is good any time of day or night.
Stranger: i disagree
You: Tea has a fine essential virtue.
You: Providing you don't have dodgy kidneys
Stranger: whats those?
You: Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world.
Stranger: okay, cya.
You: Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: hi
You: Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time the comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.
Stranger: The rainbow was beautiful tonight!
You: OMG, rainbow? How lovely! Have some tea.
Stranger: thank you kind.... um what ere you? not an elf i presume?
You: No. *checks ears* No, definitely human.
Stranger: Lets introduce ourselves I`ll start!
Stranger: my name is Aferot de Voll.
You: I'm a little teapot, short and stout.
Stranger: an i am a traveller from the great beyond!
You: Do they have tea there?
Stranger: Yes and a fine one at that!
You: Just one?
Stranger: :) I like only one! made by the hands of my lovely sister!
You: Tea is liquid wisdom.
You: But I enjoy all teas. Perhaps your sister does too.
Stranger: Dont worry i like them all too. but the one she makes is the best!
You: What's it called?
Stranger: Crimson sunset
You: Ah they grow that at Nuwara.
Stranger: Where are you from?
You: From the minor yond.
Stranger: A wise answer indeed!
You: Tea is instant wisdom - just add water!
Stranger: And your name is ? or is it a secret of ages and thou shall not speak?
You: My name could be ?
You: That would be fairly unpronounceable.
You: At the moment, to me, my name is You.
You: But to you, my name is Stranger.
You: My name could be Orange Yurts.
You: Or Saner Yogurt
Stranger: An so you shall be called Mysterious Stranger! i need to make some tea.
You: OK. Me too.
You have disconnected.

Omegle

Poll #4221 Omegle community
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

If I started an Omegle community on IJ, would you join it?

Would you post your Omegle dialogues there?

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Tags: a stranger is a friend you don't like ve, omegle, polls, tea

06:01 pm: Awful Warning
For years and for decades, when in the right mood for it, I've quite enjoyed McVities Jaffa cakes. (They convinced a judge in a court case that they were cakes (VAT-free) and not biscuits (VAT-added) by making a giant Jaffa cake. I would like to have seen that.)

Jaffa cakes have a spongy cakey sort of biscuity layer, and then a round circle of something that looks (if you're patient and keep chipping away at the chocolate, as I once did when I was 8) a bit like a small flat circular piece of congealed marmalade, the thin cut variety, and then covering both cakey sub and orangey circle, a thin layer of rippled chocolate.

That's it. They're quite nice. You wouldn't want to eat a whole lot of them, but they're perfectly good buy-for-the-office biscuits. (They have 12 in the box, so when they were bought for the family, they were "two each and fight it out for the two left over".)

Anyway, McVities have produced something dreadful: strawberry jaffa cake. I bought a box out of curiosity. I ate one. It tasted like ... well, like slightly awful biscuit with some kind of slightly stale jam flavour. Chocolate barely discernable.

I made myself a cup of tea and ate another. I dunked it. It was still horrid.

I had to read A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down to take the taste away. Ugh, horrid. Stick to orange Jaffa cakes, McVities, they're what you're good at. (There were blackberry and apple jaffa cakes a couple of years ago: I don't think I even tried those.)



Tags: biscuits, cake, tea

08:47 pm: Copracat asked Fred
copracat asked fred questions (you can too):

1. Were you happy satisfied with the final episode of M.A.S.H.?

Yes, on the whole. It did not wrap it up too nicely: it was raw and bloody and embarrassing in places. Awful things happened to the wrong people. It was satisfying to me as a writer, in a way that too nice a way of ending it would not be. (Structurally, one of the peculiarly neat things about it is that every single character who is named in the opening credits leaves the 4077th by a different method of transport - none of them go together, but also none of them leave in the same way.)


2. Best onions for caramelised onion/onion relish?

The ones you have in the house, because it's way too meta to use the ones you don't have. Whatever. Really. I like onions.


3. You never post about the Edinburgh festivals in July/August; I wondered if you object to them or if you just don't care?

I have no objection to them, really. It's just... I've lived here all my life, well, 90% of it. Every year in August, the city goes slightly insane. Back once a long time ago - twenty years - it used to be entirely possible for anyone, during the Festival, to just spontaneously go look something up and go - tickets would be dirt cheap, concessions were half price (so a show that charged £5 to get in fullprice would be £2.50 if you were under 16, or a student, or unemployed, or a pensioner) and you could take a chance on something that sounded interesting because what did you risk? Nowadays tickets cost £10 and upwards, concessions mean getting £1 off, and anything good is fully booked unless you queue up well in advance. I still go to see something or other most years - last year I went to see RiK in Wyrd Sisters - but it's not something I plan out any more. I do take photographs - you can see some of them from last year - but I don't tend to write about it much, or often, not because I approve or disapprove, but mostly because... I rarely see anything I care about enough to make it the subject of a post, I guess. (Update: No, it's not even that - the Festival(s) in August are just there. Like Arthur's Seat: too big to ignore, but I don't generally write about it much.)


4. Tea Cosy: Yes or No?

If you make tea in a pot, yes. If you make tea in a mug, no.


5. Tell me something you've learned from photography.

That I can share what I see in other ways that by writing about it, and that sharing is almost as satisfying as writing it out.




Tags: edfringe, fred, m*a*s*h, photos, tea

01:10 pm: In honour of Waitangi Day
...I just had my first Tim Tam Slam.

(That website claims it's an Aussie thing, but KiwiSamurai assures me it is a New Zealand practice and custom.)

You bite off opposite corners of a Tim Tam, put one bitten-off corner in a mug of hot tea (or coffee), and suck. The moment the hot sweet tea is in your mouth, stop sucking, and eat the Tim Tam before it dissolves into a sticky mess.

(You can, briefly, see how the hot tea streaming through the biscuit has melted the chocolate in that line, before the biscuit begins to feel a bit soggy in your hand and needs eating now.)

Tags: *bounce*, chocolate, sometimes i love my job, tea

02:54 pm: *yawn*
Yesterday, I drank far too much coffee. I had my last cup sometime before 4pm, and decided that Wednesday was going to be a caffeine-free day.

No one's done my meme. It was a silly meme, but it made me happy. oh well.

I got chocolate and a book from afrai yesterday! But no clover seeds. Wail. Sadness. Loss. Why will no one sell me/send me clover seeds? It is very disturbing.

I am drinking caffeine-free tea. With milk. It is quite nice.

My socks got very wet this morning, and I am walking around the office barefoot. So far no one has commented, and I feel that no one may have noticed. I hate wearing damp socks.

I am tired. *yawn* It is probably best not to drink coffee for this reason.

Last night when I came back, my cats both slept on my bed. Wolf slept on my feet, or rather on my legs, and Bob was curled up by my right hand readily available for petting. Then Bob realised where Wolf was and growled and growled and moved further up the bed and curled up on the part of the duvet covering my shoulder. She wanted to make clear I was hers. It's rather sweet. Sort of.

More decaf tea, I think.

Tags: cat politics, not drinking coffee, tea

03:35 pm: Vanishing biscuits
When, on Thursday, one buys a packet of Cadbury's new oat-and-chocolate biscuits, and another packet of custard creams, for the purpose of treating the envelope-stuffing team (who perform wonders for us at very little cost and tell us gratefully that none of their other employers give them biscuits...) and note, on Thursday evening, that practically all the oat-and-chocolate biscuits are left but almost all the custard creams are gone, one does not expect, I say plaintively, to discover that on Monday afternoon at approximately 3:30pm just when one wants a chocolate biscuit to nibble on with a cup of tea, to find that every single biscuit has been consumed.

Or rather, having shared an office with Mouse and Homosamurai#1 for several years now, it's exactly what I do expect. My surprise is overstated. I bring in packets of biscuits when I bought them because I just fancied one, and knew the hollow legs of my workmates would dispose of the rest.

Biscuits vanish. It's what they're for. It's their purpose in life. It's their Quest.

But I did want a chocolate biscuit just now, and now I shall have to Do Without.

Tags: bloody work, sometimes i write about food, tea

12:40 pm: On lunching
Yesterday, instead of lunch, we had afternoon tea.

We started at two and we went on till nearly four, and after tea we sat around for over half an hour just doing nothing and smiling sleepily at each other and talking occasionally and reading bits of the Weekend Guardian.

(It was at the Howard Hotel in Great King Street. Costs £15.95 per person, you have to book in advance - though we rang Saturday and got a table without difficulty, so not far in advance.)

It was gorgeously delectable. There were finger sandwiches, various sorts, over half vegetarian. The bread was nice - not by-my-standards-good-bread, which is to say, not homebaked sourdough with stoneground flour: but decent-by-catering-standards bread. There were scones, which were still warm. There were little chocolate muffins with white chocolate filling (those were a little dry and crumby, but very chocolately). There were strawberry tarts with chantilly cream. There were tiny rich cakes to finish, and two tall thin glasses of a rhubarb mousse topped with whipped cream. And tea. Half a dozen choices.

And as I said: we ate slowly, delectably, enjoying each mouthful. It was all good. We took two hours over it. We were first there, so we chose a table for two in the window, with comfy but solid armchairs (not lean-back, but uprights) and ate and looked out of the window and talked about the luxury of the room and the service and class and sex and humor and family and Scottish/English class patterns and education and tea.

Today, for lunch, I had a baked potato and baked beans (bought at the chip shop across the road) and cabbage salad (brought from home) and for savoury a homemade vegeburger and a small piece of Arran cheddar with apple, also brought from home. I ate fast and was done in half an hour, including the time taken to walk over the road and get my potato and beans.

It was perfectly good food, what I had for lunch today. I wouldn't want to eat a lunch as rich as yesterday's every day. But I would prefer to take my time over lunch: I wish I did. I just don't, when I eat alone: except perhaps when I have a packed lunch to eat on a long train trip, when I am usually delving into the first bits by eleven thirty and may not finish till two. When eating out, or at work, or at home, if I eat alone, I eat fast.

Quite often I eat fast in company, too. But I can make a conscious effort to slow down and enjoy myself when eating with friends. Eating alone, I don't seem to be able to do that - except when, on a train, I know I am absolutely free to take my time because there is literally nothing else I could be doing, aside from getting from A to B, which I am already doing. (The same would probably apply, and more so, to long trips by plane - if the food was nice enough to want to linger over, which it isn't, and if the flight attendant let you, which they won't.)

When you lunch alone, do you eat fast or slow?

Tags: eating some delicious food, lunch, tea

11:57 pm: A nice hot cup of tea
You want to know the awful truth of how Brits respond to a crisis?

We make tea and tell sick jokes.

*hugs* to you all, with comforting hot beverage of your choice.

Tags: lol!, london, tea

08:34 pm: Health warning
If guybles offers you his homemade baklava, be aware that they are potentially lethal and should be consumed in extremely small quantities.

With tea.

Tags: baklava, imaginary friend meetup, tea

08:24 pm: Hot tea with whisky
...is very very fine stuff.

Mmmm.

Even if you don't really like whisky, which I confess I don't, the flavour blends wonderfully well with the flavour of tea, and, as Uncle* would put it, leaves you feeling warmed and braced. Gleamhound could have done no better.

Also, my printer problems are resolved (thank you glitterboy1), and I don't need to continue the saga.

===
*Uncle is an elephant. He's immensely rich, and he's a B.A. He dresses well, generally in a purple dressing-gown, and often rides about on a traction engine, which he prefers to a car.

Tags: books are what i read, childhood nostalgia, elephants, tea, uncle, whisky

12:10 pm: Friday five: tea
gacked from gryphonrhi

( it's all about tea )

Tags: friday five, tea