Refreshment

It's been one of those relatively peaceful interludes with lots and nothing happening - that's to say, nothing chatworthy. A few decisions made, life reviewed, bullets bitten, forward planning considered, nothing firmed up.

But something momentous did occur - a new brand of morning coffee. I persuaded Madame La Propriétaire to buy in a new brand simply because I liked the packaging and, even more, I liked the name, which sums up precisely how I feel when I wake these days. Not the most professional of reasons, there should have been actual taste tests, much rolling around the palate, searching for suitably evocative imagery and sassy adverbs, spitting into buckets (or is that only wine?) but it turns out to have been an excellent choice. Very mellow.

The blood pressure crisis (made worse by NHS cutbacks which meant I was given a cheap substitute brand for one of the drugs which didn't work so there's to be no future economising on this woman) had cut me back to one cup of the essential nectar a day followed by an endless succession of teas, which wasn't such a trial as we now have a selection. In fact tea has become a bit of a ceremony here. Daughter Sophie gave me the cute tea pot and cups along with some subtle Chinese blends and a bag of Ayurvedic spices which my grandson and I have enjoyed trying. (I enjoy, he makes polite noises. He likes the little cups though and takes one up to bed with him.) That is for special moments. For the working day there are tea bags; Rose (very delicate and perfumed, Ginsemg (flavourless but wholesome) Lemon and Ginger (nice and a bit spritzy) Breathe Deep (a bit worthy) Chocolate (surprising) and so on and so on. Japanese twig tea and Dandelion Coffee which really should be called tea because it doesn't have much body to it but makes a change...

The fact is we could have a whole roomful of teas and there would still be someone come in casting an eye around and sighing 'Oh, what a shame. You don't have the one I like ...' Echoes from the bookshop.

There are similarities in all retail trades I suppose.

The Yogi Teas have little tags with sayings on, rather like Fortune Cookies and I've been collecting them for customers to pick a thought for their day. Sometimes I pay attention to my own. Tonight I got: To learn, read. To know, write. To master, teach. which I thought was - meaningful and possibly I should listen to it. Not the teaching bit though. Been there. Became master of nothing.

G'son watched 'Invictus' with g'dad Monday and was very impressed. I didn't know he was impressed - or even that he'd seen it until he passed me a peace of paper folded the maximum number of times into a tiny wedge and said 'Read That!' It was the W.E.Henly poem:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.


I was doubly touched; by the poem of which I knew only the last two famous lines, and much more deeply by the effect it has had on the Xandman. There's always something lump-in-the-throat-making when a child is truly moved to their core.