When is a blog not a blog?

So with R jetsetting to Europe this month to seek Fame and Outrageous Fortune (on DVD) I have been without a hot-beverage drinking buddy for some time now. Not that I need a companion to help me down a chai, it’s just that my musings and philosophies regarding tea usually spew forth from my mouth while I’m with R, much like a smooth, black Ceylon-leaf tea with curdled, month-old milk.

I have considered various posts since my last one, but they never seem to fit in with the main focus of my site: to blog about my personal rules and philosophies regarding tea and force them down the unwilling throats of anyone who Googles ‘loose leaf lea’ by mistake (did you mean ‘loose lea tea’), much like a lovingly-brewed Sencha tea with curdled, month-old milk.

My recent ideas for posts have included:

(1) Why does T2 peppermint tea taste like dirt? And would ‘dirt tea’ be such a bad thing? Blog abandoned. Yes, dirt tea would be such a bad thing, SUCH a bad thing! If you answered ‘no’, then go Google ‘dirty tea’ (did you mean ‘dirty lea’?).

(2) How did half a kilo for 500g of peppermint tea at Jasper Coffee in Fitzroy in 2003 turn into 100g of peppermint tea (albeit in a fancy canister) for $16 in 2009? But this blog isn’t about negative ranting (though it is based on a lot of ranting, I know...), so I just went up the road to T2 and bought loose leaf peppermint+dirt tea instead.

(3) If you find the perfect tea, but hate the attitude (pronounced ‘att-i-TUDE’) of the people serving it, does it become a bad tea? I don’t mean, does it soak in the negative energy of the tea-baristas, nor am I questioning whether the tea should be sent to its room for misbehaviour. I just mean: does it wreck the tea experience and hence become a tea to be avoided? But then I answered this through personal practice. Tre Bicchieri in Rathdowne Village do great teas, but the att-i-TUDE can sometimes be overwhelming. But I go back. The next best chai in the area (to my knowledge) is served next door at the Rathdowne Street Food Store – in what resembles a soup bowl.

(4) Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I watched this DVD last week but couldn’t get past the Meryl Streep character. This character initially intrigued me as she is obsessed with grammar, as am me. Later in the film (SPOILER ALERT – kiddies close your eyes; I’ll tell you when to open them), she leaves a fake suicide note riddled with alleged grammatical errors which form a code so that her reader can discover she's alive and hiding from Jim Carrey (OK, Simon says open your eyes now kiddies). What concerns me is that these weren’t grammatical errors but spelling errors. If you’re going have a character that’s pedantic about something, then I have the right to be pedantic about what they’re being pedantic about! However: (a) it was a good display of unintentional irony and I always enjoy a bit of that, and (b) this has nothing whatsoever to do with tea, so why would I add this to a tea blog?

So, no, I don’t have anything to write Well, not till R gets back from Europe, no doubt having devoured a cheap Portuguese tart or two along the way.

However, if you write in and wish to claim the leftover T2 peppermint tea, it’s yours! Free with a T2 orange scoop, three empty teabags and, um, a red Sanyo vacuum cleaner that may not work very well but is hardly rubbish (did you mean ‘hard rubbish’?).