More tea, vicar!

Delighted to see The Artist and SarahB scrunching up the gravel over the festive season but encountered a problem when offering some liquid refreshment. I'd just uncorked a bottle of something suitably alcoholic when Sarah wondered whether she could have a cup of tea.

Now a cup of tea really should be quite a simple request. However, in my case it presented two immediate problems: one concerned the matter of tea itself and the other the process of making it. You see, I've managed to avoid making tea for anyone for approximately six years but, well, it is Christmas and they had come bearing gifts so I thought I should make an effort.

From a recent visit to my aged mother I remembered that she'd emptied the contents of a hamper someone had sent her into various bags and given one selection to me in a kind of reverse interpretation of Help The Needy. In that bag I had spotted a packet of tea. I extricated that and was about to fish out a bag when I realised that this was actual tea rather than tea in a tea bag with string and stuff.

So now I needed a tea strainer and a tea pot. A sieve might serve as a substitute for the former but the latter might need some more thought. I definitely did have a tea pot. But where? Most of the cardboard boxes I have been living out of have disintegrated over the years and contents decanted into odd drawers, cupboards or longer lasting boxes and I did have a faint recollection of a tea pot being one of the objects I put somewhere and thinking at the time that that was a silly place to put a tea pot. Now, a kitchen cupboard would have been the obvious first place to look had I been anything approaching normal but as I'm not I looked in a broom cupboard and there, to my delight and some relief as the process was taking some time, was a nice comfortable-looking brown china affair.

I dusted that off and also blew the top layer of dust off some sugar. Swilled some hot water around and disposed of anything that shouldn't have been in a tea pot and was able to create a pretty passable cuppa or two without as much ado as I'd feared.

So now I needn't hide should the vicar pass by.

Beach Boy

Astcote, that's ASTCOTE, Northamptonshire

If you search for Astcote the only results that come up for this blog are two related to The Astcote Arms so it looks as though I need to mention the village in post titles to get noticed. Hopefully this will appear on Google page 1 after a while and if you've arrived that way then click the big button above to go to the beginning.

Those cards

All those people with birthdays late in the year. Most inconsiderate! I mean, as if we haven't got enough to do running around wondering what to do with Grandma for Christmas. So last minute cards have been the order of the day recently and the theme of ridiculous story + kids' writing seems to have worked surprsingly well. So much so that, by popular request, links to these are now available on-line.