A Matter of Manners

I’ve been told that if you slurp it you mix more oxygen into the tea to enhance the flavour. This is one place where you have to trade manners off against taste. Do we praise refined sippers for their ascetic prioritisation of appearance over pleasure, or blunt slurpers for their healthy disdain for pretense? I’m a slurper – in private – myself. Given that she’s using a teacup rather than a mug, and drinking at something like a garden party, Yoshika’s probably better off sticking her little finger out and sipping – unless she wants to stick her middle finger up at the Establishment!

(Having taken the tea into your mouth you’ve a choice: taste it at the front before shunting it to the back of your mouth, so that you get the lighter aspect of its taste followed by the bitter aspect, or attempt to hit all of your tongue with the tea at roughly the same time, so as to take both aspects at once.)

GAR (I): Prelude to the Storm

Image chosen with care, trust me

GAR is fascinating. Or at least if you’re partially emasculated by working in seminar groups with a 1:4 male-to-female ratio it is. And I would be forced to commit ritual suicide with my very fine Parker fountain pen if I couldn’t adequately explain a word. Now that SaiGAR ’08 getting into full swing, the time would seem to be ripe for me to build together a few thoughts on GAR. Entirely in keeping with my habit of applying too much thought to too little matter, of course.

Rather than fitting all this into one post, I decided to split it up into a series, and scatter the resulting posts among the rest of my blogging. Hopefully this way each individual argument will be discernable, but they will still form a cohesive whole. Also, things won’t just be a flood of tl;dr.

So cut yourself a slice of sunshine pie, pour out a cup of MANLY TEA and settle down for the not-entirely-serious ride.