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As a tea consultant, one of the best parts of my business is offering advice to tea business startups and seeing them flourish. It’s rather like a mother or father waving their child off to school. Mary Cali from The Tea and Jazz House is one such ‘cool cat’. After offering business guidance, I was like that proud mother waiving her child off to school. These are a few points on what The Tea and Jazz House as an online tea business has done extremely well:
Branding: Mary has created an extremely strong brand identity in The Tea and Jazz House. The logo, the look and feel of the website clearly shows how tea and jazz are intertwined. The website’s philosophy, vision and passion are outlined on the home page which demonstrates how the two complement each other.
Products: After learning about tea from yours truly, Mary conducted a lot of research about her target market to come up with a range of flavoured teas and herbal infusions. In keeping with the tea/jazz theme the names of each tea are inspired by Jazz artists. The jazz style of each artist is reflected in each of the fusion of herbs, flowers, spices and tea. Products are always more compelling if there is a story behind it; which increases consumers’ emotional attachment to the products.
Tea and Jazz House Meet the Artists Page
Education: For novice drinkers, it can often be daunting looking at a website and what The Tea and Jazz House have done particularly well is to provide information to consumers. The steeping tea guideline on the Home page; the How They Make Tea section which provides pictorial tea education and information about the all Jazz artists helps to create a great online shopping experience.
Sharing is Caring: Consumers are embracing the notion that people buy from people in Social Media and The Tea and Jazz House has embraced Social Media extremely well by sharing other people’s blogs such as Tea Time with the wonderful editor of the English Tea Store blog, A.C. Cargill. Consumers can also follow Mary’s tea journey and passions via Twitter.
What are your thoughts on what makes a great online tea store?
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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The consensus seems to be that tea is the second most commonly consumed beverage in the world, after water. It’s a fascinating fact that’s often repeated and I’ve done so myself on a few occasions. Of course, there are a number of other “facts” about tea that are of dubious origin, including the one about rinsing tea leaves for 30 seconds to decaffeinate them or the one about tea being discovered 5,000-odd years ago when leaves blew into a kettle of water being boiled by a Chinese emperor.
Given that these and other myths and legends about tea are so often presented as truth, I couldn’t help wondering if tea really was the second most popular beverage in the world. Or has this nugget of wisdom somehow become the truth simply due to the fact that it’s been repeated so many times?
A cursory spot of research reveals that Wikipedia also makes the claim that water and tea are number one and two (and beer is allegedly the top alcoholic beverage worldwide). But while Wikipedia might be a good starting point for a research venture, I thought it might be useful to seek out something more authoritative. Which is no small feat, as it turns out.
Though you can find this assertion repeated over and again, finding the evidence to support it is kind of a tricky business. While organizations like the Tea Association of the USA and Tea Association of Canada both repeat this claim, I was not able to locate a citation at their web sites to support the notion. In addition, I tried a large assortment of search strings and pored through numerous pages of related results only to find this “fact” repeated again and again, with no evidence to back the claim. And though it seems that such a conclusion could only be made by an agency that has access to beverage consumption stats worldwide, I was not able to locate any supporting evidence from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), among others
On the other hand, I’ve never claimed to be the be all and end all when it comes to research, and so I wouldn’t discount the notion that tea may very well be the second most popular beverage in the world, after water. What I will say is that the evidence for this claim (if there ever was any) has apparently become obscured over the course of time and the jury is out on the matter, at least for now.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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If you’re like me then your knowledge of collectible cards begins and ends with baseball cards and I have to confess that I’m not even all that knowledgeable about them. Baseball cards first came into being in the years just after the Civil War and were followed in subsequent decades by popular cards from cigarette companies as well as cards from other merchants seeking to promote their products.
40 years of collectible tea cards
Products like tea, for example. While these apparently never made much of a splash in the United States, tea cards were quite popular in the U.K. from about World War II onward until about the turn of this century. One of most notable purveyors of tea cards was Brooke Bond, a company which came into being in 1845 and took up tea selling about a quarter of a century later.
The company rolled out their first tea cards in the mid-Fifties and, according to one collector, were turning out more than 700 million of them every year in just a little more than a decade. The cards featured a wide variety of subjects, everything from natural history and wildlife to aviation to inventors and their inventions, the popular PG Tipps monkeys (advertising mascots) and even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
As is the case with pretty much any other type of collectible the range of prices for tea cards is a wide one, though perhaps not as wide as for some items. If you peruse the extensive selection of Brooke Bond cards from The London Cigarette Card Company you’ll find that prices range from about two dollars (US) to nearly four hundred dollars for the rare Butterflies of the World, Our Pets, and Transport Through the Ages sets, all of which were issued in the mid-Sixties. Which is small potatoes compared to the millions that a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card might bring but then again it’s hardly a small chunk of change.
For more information about tea cards than I could ever hope to provide, you could start with the Web sites already mentioned. Other good resources, particularly for novices to this sort of thing, can be found at the collector’s sites, TeaCard.com and Brooke Bond Tea Cards.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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It’s been a while since our last roundup of tea books, but that doesn’t mean that the flow of said books has abated. Here are a few titles that have just come out or are on publisher’s calendars for upcoming months. Half of the eight titles mentioned take a look at China’s connection to tea and tea culture in some way or another. Which is fitting, given that the Chinese have the world’s oldest tea culture, are the world’s top tea producing nation and the world’s top tea drinkers, in terms of total quantity consumed.
More books about tea coming every day!
All the Tea in China is hardly an original title, by any stretch of the imagination. If you do a quick check online you’ll see that it’s been used (verbatim or with slight variations) several times for books about tea and in numerous other cases for novels and books on other topics. All of which didn’t stop author Wang Jian from appropriating it for his All the Tea in China: History, Methods and Musings. If that’s not enough on Chinese tea for you, then be sure to reserve a copy of Luo Jialin’s forthcoming The China Tea Book, which promises to cover “everything from the leaves to the pervasive culture they spawned.”
Bearing the rather simple title Chinese Tea, Tong Liu’s upcoming volume will provide “a fascinating insight into the ancient culture of Chinese tea, the trade, tradition, literature, philosophy and ceremony associated with tea in China and its popularisation around the world.” Last but not least of the books about China and tea is one that’s not exclusively about tea. It’s a historical tome by Eric Jay Dolin called When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail.
For the crustless sandwich crowd there are a few upcoming volumes that are worth noting. There’s Susan Cohen’s rather specialized London’s Afternoon Teas: A Guide to London’s Most Stylish and Exquisite Tea Venues. Also on the schedule, Traditional Afternoon Tea, by Martha Day, a recipe collection that comprises “a delicious collection of teatime treats.”
HOB Tea Cozy - Cheetah Design
How wild can a tea cosy be? You might seek the answer to that immortal question in Loani Prior’s Really Wild Tea Cosies. Prior is the author of several other books on tea cosies and if you happen to see one you like you can make it yourself (that’s assuming that you know how to knit). Last up in this particular roundup is Agony of the Leaves, a fictional outing by Laura Childs. It’s lucky number 13 in her popular series of tea shop mysteries.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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It has become something of a tradition in my family to seek out both heritage sites and tea establishments when we spend time together. Fortunately for us, the two often come together. Almost every sizable National Trust property, and many other heritage sites, has a café where you can take tea and sample delicious baked goods. Here you can find the heritage-going British public enjoying a cup of tea after strolling around an eighteenth century mansion, or, on a dry day, the gardens that these properties often include. But sometimes the balance seems to shift. You might find yourself heading to a heritage site to enjoy their tea as much as, or more than, to see the house, gardens, or museum. When this state of affairs arises, I call it taking a bit of history with your tea.
V&A Museum Café
There are countless good places to enjoy both history and tea, but I’ll mention just the few that I re-visited on my recent trip home to London. If you like the historic house and accompanying gardens model, Osterley Park and House and Ham House are two properties in Greater London that have tea rooms in the outbuildings of the main property. At Osterley, the café is in the stables, and at Ham it is in the Orangery at the end of the kitchen garden. There is also the museum model: at the Natural History Museum you can sit in the Central Hall Café under the Romanesque vaults of the Waterhouse building, and the V&A Museum Café is located in stunning nineteenth-century rooms from the Arts and Crafts period.
And then there is the tea room that comes with its own history, not needing the surroundings of a designated heritage site to provide it. One such example is the Orchard Tea Garden in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire. This spot is a favourite haunt of Cambridge students seeking a bit of respite from the University, and this tradition dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. Early twentieth century patrons of the Orchard include a number of well known figures such as Rupert Brooke, Virgina Woolf, and Wittgenstein, and it is claimed that more famous people have taken tea there than anywhere else in the world (they have a list to prove it). When I was visiting my sister, we stopped here during an afternoon walk in March. We sat out in the orchard (it is not just a nice sounding name—it is actually an orchard) under a calm grey, overcast sky to enjoy our tea and scones. It has definitely become a heritage site of sorts in its own right and, judging by the large tour group we encountered, tour buses seem to now include it on their routes.
So, whether your preference is for houses, gardens, museums, or just for tea, taking tea with your history (or history with your tea) is an experience I would definitely recommend.
See also: Tea Tourist
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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To say that deciphering the terminology of tea is a tricky matter is an understatement of vast proportions. It’s impossible to say how many varieties of tea are currently in existence, but they surely number in the hundreds and possibly even into the thousands. Then consider that many varieties of tea, particularly those that are grown in China, may have more than one alternate name in both Chinese and English.
Young Pu-erh
Take Puerh, for example, which is a term for a category of tea and is a word that has several alternate spellings. Even after many years of writing about tea, I still don’t know which of these spellings is correct. Ditto for the likes of varieties like Green Snail Spring, which may also be known as Pi Lo Chun or Bi Lo Chun and possibly some other variations I’m not aware of. Or take the myriad of arcane grading terms (some of which are apparently still in use) such as Orange Pekoe, Flowery Orange Pekoe, Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe and so on.
If you really want to throw a monkeywrench into the works, consider that there are also many tea terms that have either fallen into disuse nowadays or are used very rarely. I’m frequently reminded of these terms when I’m reviewing the old tea books I often write about at this site. I was especially reminded of them when reading Joseph M. Walsh’s Tea-Blending as a Fine Art, which was first published in 1896.
Walsh’s book contains more of these outdated tea terms that I can really expound upon in a brief article. Although some of the teas he refers to are ones with names that we would recognize today, such as Oolong, Gunpowder, Souchong or Pekoe, to name a few.
Some of the other terms you may recognize if you’ve been around tea long enough, though they’re not used as often nowadays. They include Congou, Bohea, and Hyson and there are also more obscure variations on the latter term, such as Young Hyson and Hyson-skin.
Then there are the tea terms that you’ve probably never heard, unless you’re a tea historian. These include a number of varieties of Oolong tea, including Ankoi, Amoy, Foochow, and Saryune. About these, the author claims that Ankoi might not even be “real” tea at all, while he confuses the issue in the case Foochow, calling it one of China’s best black teas. Saryune Oolong, along with Pekoe Oolong, are cited as very rare varieties of this type of tea. Other obscure varieties that come in for a mention are the Congous known as Kaisow, Moning and others, as well as “Scented” teas like Caper, and green teas such as Moyune, Hychow, Fychow, Tienke, and Pingsuey.
One of my personal favorites of these archaic terms is Twankay. I’m not sure why. I guess it just has kind of a nice ring to it. Walsh calls this “a large, loose and flat-leaf tea, varying in color, liquor and flavor, according to the grades from which it is separated.” Nowadays the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a little more pointed with its definition, calling it “a green tea of inferior quality and of open leaves.”
You’re likely to read about these terms and others in any old tea book, but Walsh’s would be a good place to start. Or you might try Liu Yong’s The Dutch East India Company’s Tea Trade with China, 1757-1781. Some of these old tea varieties were also among those tossed into Boston Harbor during that renowned tea party a few centuries back. More about that here.
See also:
What’s All This “Orange Pekoe” Stuff Mean?
Tea Terms: Fermentation vs. Oxidation
The Mysterious World of Aged Pu-erh Tea
A Tea by Any Other Name
The A-Z of Tea Terms
Some of the Strangest Tea Names
Some of the Coolest Tea Names
Women’s Names and Tea
Men’s Names and Tea
Tea Name Circus
Tea Taste Terms Circus
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Need to compete? Put on a sale!
Just as competition in the marketplace spurs innovation and keeps quality high and prices low, so it goes with tea. But sometimes when folks hear the word “competition,” they think the worst: cut-throat tactics, dirty tricks, spreading lies about the “other guys,” and so on. I’m happy to say that most folks in business are more rational than that. They know that competition means they have to do better to get you to buy from them instead of from those “other guys.”
Let’s say you open a tea room. You’ve done the research, the hard work, the public relations, and the grand opening. The customers are coming in — maybe not a steady stream lining up around the block, but enough that you will see a return on your investment sooner than you thought.
Then, another tea room opens up across the street. Panic time! No, wait, stay calm — that’s just competition. Is it good or bad? That depends on you.
If you’re the type of person that loves a challenge, you will take positive action to keep your place ahead of that one across the street. You will do things like upgrading your décor with crisp white tablecloths instead of using paper placemats. You might add more teas to your selection and some new items to your menu. Maybe you will offer daily specials and coupons. Or you’ll launch a PR campaign that makes your tea room take on a certain character to make it more appealing. You might even do all of the above. Plus, you’ll cultivate a social media “presence.”
From the customer’s perspective, there are now two places to choose from when wanting a nice cuppa. And one of them just updated its décor with fresh-looking white tablecloths and expanded its menu and tea selection. Yay! It’s worth 50 cents more for that special tea you can’t get across the street, and the scones are so tasty!
See? It works!
Of course, the game doesn’t end here. That place across the street will do some upgrading, too, so you put in a Wifi hotspot and have some cool music playing. You develop a real cozy atmosphere so that folks will feel that they just have to stop in every day to make their lives feel complete.
The overall goal of promoting the consumption and appreciation of tea is the real driving factor here. You wouldn’t go to all this fuss just to make some quick “bucks.” Tea rooms and tea shops and even online tea stores are a lot of work. There has to be more to it than money. Plus, if you’re a real people person, a tea business gives you an ideal outlet for meeting and talking with people.
Competition improves tea in other ways, too. It spurs tea growers to try to develop new cultivars or even clonal tea plants. It assures that they tend their tea gardens well, update the equipment in the processing factories, or even make high-end teas more available to their customers. New equipment for steeping is another result (and you, dear readers, have seen lots of such devices talked about on this blog by me, Bill Lengeman, and others). For example, there are tea kettles galore, yet ever more innovative and creative designs come on the market. Ditto for other items used to steep and enjoy tea, from automatic teamakers and fancy teapots to overly complicated travel mugs (sometimes, the drive to be better than that “other guy” makes folks go overboard).
Collaboration is good, too, as May King Tsang pointed out recently, especially when you are a small business trying to compete with bigger companies.
Either way, the tea customer wins!
See also:
6 Things to Consider Before Opening a Tea Room
What Makes a Tea House Great
Educate or Cater To — The Role of a Tea Shop
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The consensus seems to be that tea is grown in about 40 countries around the world. Some of the powerhouse producers, such as China and India, account for much of the world’s total, while tea growing in some other nations — like the United States and England — is more of a novelty. Below is a rundown of the few of the world’s notable tea growing nations and regions.
As for the “almost” in the title, coming up with an entry for the letters L, O, P, and X was more than I could manage. If you can think of any, feel free to leave a note in the comments.
Where was your tea grown?
Assam
A state in India and the world’s largest single tea-growing region. Not to be confused with China, the world’s largest tea-growing nation, which is comprised of many growing regions.
Bangladesh
If you grew up in my generation you probably know of Bangladesh as the country Beatle George Harrison and others gave a much-publicized concert to benefit. Located in the same general vicinity of the Indian states of Assam and Darjeeling, Bangladesh is the world’s 11th largest tea producer.
China
The powerhouse of tea production, China is not only tops in quantity grown, but is also the first country to have a tea culture, as well as being the producer of a number of outstanding black, green, oolong, white, yellow and puerh varieties.
Darjeeling
A region in northeastern India that produces modest amounts of a premium black tea renowned for its distinctive aroma and flavor.
England
Never a significant producer of tea on their own shores in spite of being avid consumers. Tea is currently only grown in England at Tregothnan Estate in the western part of the country.
Fujian
A province in eastern China that’s probably best known for its output of Wuyi oolong, a tea grown in the vicinity of the northern Wuyi Mountains.
Georgia
Tea accounts for about of one-third of the agricultural output of this former Soviet republic, but they are not considered a major producer in the overall scheme of things.
Hawaii
Aside from South Carolina and Washington, the only state in the U.S. that currently produces a significant amount of tea.
India
The world’s second largest tea producer, after China. Comprised primarily of the Assam, Darjeeling and Nilgiri growing regions.
Japan
The world’s eighth largest tea-grower. Primarily known for its output of a wide range of green teas.
Kenya
An African country that’s ranked third in the world for tea production, Kenya is primarily known for its output of black tea.
Malawi
A small country in eastern Africa that grows the most tea on the continent, after Kenya. Ranked 12th worldwide in tea production.
Nilgiri
After Assam and Darjeeling, the other well-known tea-growing region in India. As with the other Indian regions, is best known for producing black tea.
Nonsuch Estate Tea
Qimen
A region in China’s Anhui Province that’s best known for being the home of a type of black tea known as Keemun.
Ratnapura
One of six main tea-growing regions in Sri Lanka. Located just east of the capital city of Colombo.
Sri Lanka
Formerly known as Ceylon (tea grown there is still called Ceylon), this island nation off the shores of India has been turning out black tea for more than a century following a failure of the thriving coffee crop there in the late nineteenth century.
Taiwan
Best known for its high-quality oolong tea, the island of Taiwan was formerly known as Formosa, a name still given to some of the varieties of tea grown there.
Uji
A Japanese city renowned for its production of high-quality green tea, which has been grown in the area for nearly a thousand years.
Vietnam
The world’s sixth largest tea producer.
Wuyi
A mountain range in the northern region of China’s Fujian province. The point of origin for a number of popular tea varieties, most notable among them Wuyi oolong.
Yunnan
Located in southern China, Yunnan province is a producer of a number of varieties of tea, including several well-known black teas and the post-fermented type known as puerh.
Zambia & Zimbabwe
Neighboring countries in southern Africa that grow modest amounts of tea.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“Tea is dehydrating, so if you want a hot drink then go for herbal tea instead.” I know: I nearly spilled my Travel Mug and spat out my tea when a speaker from the fitness industry made this bold statement. I bit my lip and wondered whether I should interrupt when the next claim was made:
“If you really need to drink a cup of tea, make sure you drink a glass of water to rehydrate yourself.”
Wah??? Right! That does it!!
Go ahead, get hydrated!
But as a Brit, I’m used to keeping that stiff upper lip (and moan to my hubbie when I get home) and growing up in a Chinese household, my parents encouraged us to avoid conflict at all costs. Conflicted between my British and Chinese upbringing, I finally raised my hand ever so gingerly. “Yes?” boomed the speaker. I politely informed the speaker and the audience that contrary to popular belief, tea is not dehydrating and can actually contribute to the daily two litres of fluid intake that the speaker was recommending. In fact studies have backed this hydrating claim although if people are really worried about caffeine in tea, they can limit their intake to eight cups a day. This is something I often mention in my tea talks.
So, I said my piece, and it was clear the speaker wasn’t going to be swayed and, as I didn’t want to interrupt the speaker any further, I bit my lip and kept schtum. I had a private chat with the speaker later which was somewhat challenging, but I did manage to persuade the speaker on one thing. Any beverage that is not derived from the Camellia Sinensis bush is not a tea and ought to be referred to as herbal infusions or tisanes. Dispelling myths about tea is a huge challenge bu,t cup by cup, tea talk by tea talk, my mission is making sure we’re on the right page when it comes to tea.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It’s a bird — it’s a plane — it’s a teapot in the sky! No, it’s not a teapot-shaped satellite or some space-age steepware aboard the space station. It’s the Teapot Asterim (a sort of sub-constellation), a group of bright stars that are part of the constellation of Sagittarius, which is usually visible over theU.S. in mid July.
Long ago, in fact long before that, and even longer before that…we’re talking a loooooooooooooong time here, people looked up at the stars and said things like, “Gee, that group of stars looks like two fish. The group over that way looks like a guy with a jug of water. And the group over yonder…” Eventually, these were named Pisces, Aquarius, and so on. People being who they are, soon each of these star pictures in the dark night sky were assigned special meanings, and a Zodiac of twelve “signs” was developed. This got tied in with the mythologies of ancient civilizations inEgypt,Greeceand theRoman Empire.
A photo taken by Marco Lorenzi in 2003 of the Teapot Constellation
One of those star groups, identified as early as 150 A.D. by Ptolemy, looked like the mythical creature called a centaur, which was supposed to have the body of a horse with the torso, arms, and head of a man rising up in place of the neck and head of a horse. Rather creepy, actually! It was named Sagittarius (Latin for “an archer”) because it seemed to be carrying a bow and arrow poised to zing to its mark; it became the ninth sign of that Zodiac system.
As is true with the full complement of stars in the sky, some appear brighter to us than others do. Somewhere as tea became a popular beverage, someone decided that some of the brighter stars in the Sagittarius constellation formed the shape of a teapot, as shown here:
An artist’s illustration of how the teapot sits in the constellation
There is even a cluster of clouds that look like steam coming out of the teapot spout, at least to those with some imagination. I must confess that to me they just look like stars — big balls of chemicals and gas burning in the frigid cold of space, a true contradiction.
Maybe if I drink a potful or two of tea… sip, sip, sip, gulp, gulp, gulp, stare, stare, stare! Hm… no teapot yet. Another potful… still nothing. Sigh! Time to try a little trick I discovered as a kid, gazing up into that inky darkness. I let my vision go unfocused just a bit. That way the brighter stars stand out. Okay, here goes… hmmmmmm… aha! There’s the teapot! Now, all I need is a celestial teacup. Time to blur my view again. Hmmmmmmmm… dang, no teacup.
Oh, well. Time to go back in the house and steep up another potful.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
