All the tea in China

This was different. Someone gave Donna a specialist presentation box of China tea. She brought it home and it had remained in the cupboard, overlooked. We hadn't tried it.

Chinese green tea with a difference

Just today, she was tidying the kitchen and found the box of tea. The tea is formed into a hard, dried ball (front left in the photo). The foil packet that held it is in the background.

I dropped one of these balls into a mug and added boiling water, gradually the ball started to unroll, green leaves appeared first and then a pale 'flower' in the centre.

We transferred the tea 'plant' into a glass of cold water so that we could look at it more easily. It's very ingenious, extremely clever tea 'engineering'.

I drank the green tea infusion in the mug and it tasted good, lightly flavoured green tea, in fact!

And of course I had to take a photo for the daily toast. It's the finest thing to post that I could have imagined, and it was completely unexpected! Amazing that you can do this with tea. Bet there's nothing like this for coffee.

Unless, of course, you know different...

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Tea with friends

Donna and I spent part of the afternoon with our friends Roger and Ruth. Tea on the patio in their delightful garden was fun and it was good to catch up as we haven't seen them for some time.

Roger with his Jetex model

Roger got back into aeromodelling more than ten years ago, partly because I encouraged him to do it. He's developed a particular interest in small models powered by rocket motors, either the original Jetex motors from the UK or today's Rapier motors. Either way, the models are of a wide variety of jet aircraft.

Not only has he built and flown many models (some of them designed himself) but he's been making reproductions of kits from the 1950s and 60s. This is painstaking work.

Roger begins with photocopies of original plans and photos of the models, or sometimes with an unbuilt kit. He enhances and remakes the original artwork, prints it on special tissue which can be applied to balsa sheets, cuts out the parts, and uses them to build replicas of the original kit versions.

As if all this isn't enough, Roger also writes numerous articles about his modelling and is planning to redevelop a website about it all.

The photo shows Roger with one of his latest models, his version of an original Swedish kit.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)