Facebook Confessional

If you're a new or sporadic reader, you might want to look here first. But following that post, I received this notification from Facebook yesterday.

Simon ***** also commented on his post:

"By the way Jenny, I have a TERRIBLE admission to make: I murdered a tea bag yesterday.

Not just any tea bag, but a PG Tips tea bag. I was taking it out of the caddy and managed to put my finger through it somehow. I don't know how, but it just lay there with tea leaves pouring out of it's stomach. It felt just awful.

I considered trying to glue it together again hoping that no one would notice .. but that wouldn't have worked. I even considered burying it under the patio like that scene in Brookside .. but we dont have a patio. I even considered drying out one of the old tea bags from the slops pot and having it masquerade as a new one. But no, I realised that none of this would work and I'd just have to own up to my deed.

My head is hung and I feel a cad. Such shame and self-loathing. Can you ever forgive me?"

Well, what do you think, readers? Should he be forgiven?

Dear PG Tips

JJ Beattie
Bangkok
Thailand

Dear PG Tips

I just opened one of your boxes of teabags. The box, which had travelled from the UK to me in Thailand, was undamaged.

Imagine my horror, however, when I discovered that not one, but two teabags had spilled their tea leaf guts all over their compatriots inside the carton. There were tea leaf entrails everywhere… I had to take all the teabags out, tend to them individually so that they weren’t harbouring their loved ones innards in their little pyramid® crevices. (See illustration one.)

As though this wasn’t disturbing enough, imagine my shock when, on sorting through the debris of this horrible atrocity, I noticed this anomaly: a baby teabag (see illustration two). I note your pride in the ‘ingeniously designed pyramid® bag’ which ‘gives the tea more room to move’ but what about this little fella? What if he can’t ‘free the delicious taste’?

Not only am I traumatised by the images I encountered but I’m horrified that I have been short changed to the tune of at least three mugs of tea.

Yours in anticipation

JJ Beattie

One

Two

O.M.G.

Husband has visitors.

I won’t see Husband all week but they brought STUFF to make up for that.

I have, in my sticky mitts, all of Mary Wesley’s books. Plus, in my kitchen, I have TWO boxes of 120 teabags and THREE jars of marmite.

Mary Wesley’s books have been repackaged with gorgeous period feel photographs since I last had them. I much prefer these new ones.

Blocked and Unblocked

I was horribly blocked yesterday. The truth is that it’s been brewing for some time and I’ve been mangling the words out … My mentor has been saying that I must keep the juicy stuff back and not give the readers answers yet…so I was trying to work out what I could talk about.

My big hope for my lead character is that the readers won’t be shouting ‘For GOD’s sake woman – just ask the question you want answered.’ I hate pathetic heroines who just won’t do the things that would sort the story out. It’s weak.

So. Yesterday I tried the foot massage approach. It relaxed my brain which was whirring and squealing at me … but it didn’t give me any answers. It might have set up the right thought processes though because this morning I stuck the Magnetic Fields* on the Ipod and played Bejewelled and my mind wandered off and … ta da! I’ve got the next couple of scenes sorted and a couple of long term questions answered too.

*Because I love Stephin Merritt’s music more than PG Tips …so there.

More Mysteries

The first thing I do every school morning is wake the children. The second thing I do is fill the kettle for my first cup of the day.

The kids went off to school this morning and I decided to make my second cup, which is never as nice as the first one (Why?) There were only two bags left in the caddy so I got down the new box to refill it. Now I don’t need to put the two old bags (fnar fnar) on the top to be used first, I just chucked the new teabags in until it was full. I made a piece of toast with unsweetened peanut butter (bear with me; this could be important) and let the tea brew. Finally I went and sat down not on the sofa with my book to eat toast and drink tea. Peace. Kids gone to school; Husband still sleeping.

Just a minute… this tea… doesn’t taste quite right. My new tea (240 teabags) had a distinct fishy odour. That isn’t to say they smelt suspicious, but rather there was a definite kit-e-kat aroma.

I couldn’t drink it.

I went to wake Husband. He took the news very seriously. Is it tuna? Or salmon? We wondered if our courier brought fish back in the same suitcase. I said ‘it’s cat food flavour.’ He said that he thought it could be mixed with chicken … sometimes the cat food companies blend chicken with tuna.

I thought I’d better try again: fresh cup, fresh water, fresh teabag and good sniff at the milk.

It was fine. Normal. Did the peanut butter distort my taste buds?

Dear PG Tips, clearly it wasn’t your teabags. Please don’t get cross with my picture … it was just a cheap joke to make my blog friends laugh. Thank you. (I love PG Tips – particularly when they aren’t fish flavoured.)

Tagged by Leigh

Lovely Leigh has tagged me with this meme. The requirements for receiving it are as follows:

List ten honest things about yourself (try to make it interesting, even if you have to dig deep!) Hmmm, I’ve had a problem with this.

1. Pass the award on to ten other bloggers

Okay, here are the ten things:

1. I must have tea. I can do classy tea drinking but mostly, on a day to day basis, I just want workman’s tea. My daily dose of five to eight cups a day, needs to be PG Tips.


2. I am rarely … no, never… to be found without a lip salve in my pocket… and my handbag; and one by my bed. I might possibly give one to Husband too, to put in his pocket just in case. I have always been strict; a purist… Lip salve had to be ‘original.’ You wouldn’t catch me with a flavour until a few months ago when I really let myself go… and bought a milk and honey one. See, I’m not set in my ways.


3. I am kind, tolerant and thoughtful. I am always ready to empathise with people. I need time to get to know people and won’t be ‘me’ until I’m properly relaxed. I’m a ‘grower’ so if you make judgements quickly and don’t reassess, we won’t make it. I am astonished and saddened when people are unkind. Dislike who I am when you know me, but don’t judge me until then.


4. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to write or to acknowledge to myself I wanted to write. As I’ve dabbled my family have been telling me for years … decades even, that I should but I didn’t know whose dream it was.


5. I am capable and confident – we’ve moved our family to Thailand after all – but I won’t remember what time it starts, where we agreed to meet or which cinema it’s on at. Rarely, I’ll even forget that we agreed to meet.


6. I am not very sociable. I am not the life and soul type. I’d rather be with a small group of people than at a large party. If I’m being loud then I’m relaxed with you (or I’ve had too much gin.)


7. I am a pathological worrier.


8. I need lots of sleep.


9. I need to read.


10. I’m not interesting enough to find ten things to say about myself.

If you'd like to do the meme, consider yourself tagged.

T is for ...

I love a meme and this one is from Marmite & Tea. If you want to do it you need to leave a comment for me saying so, and then I give you a letter. Marmite & Tea has given me the letter T and the meme is my list of ten things I love beginning with T.

So, in no particular order…

T is for Tea: PG Tips is my favourite but I’ve had phases for Yorkshire Tea as well. Although I love a good strong builder’s tea, I can be quite classy too, partaking of green tea (oolong is my favourite) when the mood takes me.

T is for Thailand: I am part way through my fourth year here and I never thought I’d have the chance to live as an expat in another country. It was my first time in Asia and is my first experience living in a city. I think it is the most exciting thing ever to happen to me.

T is for TBR pile: I couldn’t live without books and my To Be Read pile needs to be well supplied. I always have a book on the go…

T is for Tootsie: I LOVE the film Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman who auditions as ‘Dorothy’ to get a part in a soap opera to prove to his agent he is employable. I can’t begin to guess how many times I’ve seen the film. I was going to try and tell you my favourite scenes, but there are just too many.

T is for Two children: I have two hands and two knees and when I got one of each gender, I thought it was perfect.

T is for Typography: I needed to take a year off between school and university because I didn’t know what subject I wanted to do. My Dad had a colleague who suggested a secretarial course that one of her nieces had done and I am eternally grateful to my Dad for sending me. I love being able to type. I love that I am fast and accurate and I don’t have to think what I am doing.

T is for Teetotal I wish: I do like a drink but the older I get the more ill I become. I stopped drinking red wine at University because I’d get a migraine before the first glass was finished. Now it’s any alcohol. Sometimes I’m stupid and over-indulge anyway, claiming I don’t care, but I do and it makes me so ill for so many days, I no longer think it’s worth it.

T is for Too much worrying: ‘Nuff said, really. I wish I didn’t.

T is for Trees in autumn: It’s my favourite season and I really miss the colours and weather in England.

T is for The Beast: which is the nickname of Husband.

Nursery Rhymes

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To fill her tea caddy with bags,
When she got there
The tea packet was bare
So poor little JJ had none.




















Aaaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

More Tea Talk

I could get really obsessed with the visitor stat counter thing. My latest fav thing is looking at the search words to see how surfers have found my blog.

After recounting the story a few weeks ago of the headless rabbit in Younger Niece’s wardrobe, I was amused horrified … it was interesting to see that a search for ‘headless rabbit, witchcraft’ had caused someone to stumble upon tea stains. I bet that was a disappointment to them. But really, who searches stuff like that?

Today on my search list was ‘pg tips bangkok where’ so I clicked on that search link and at page 23 of Google’s list of hits I still hadn’t found tea stains. Where was I? How many pages did they trawl through to find me?

Anyway, I’ve decided that it isn’t good enough: how can I call myself tea stains and barely a mention of PG Tips? So to answer anyone interested in the purchase of PG Tips in Bangkok …

You can buy them here in Central but I’ve only seen them in boxes of 40 (which might not last me much more than a week!) And they cost 16p a teabag and at that price I can’t afford my tea habit.

When visitors and guests come I ask them to bring as big a quantity as they can carry. Lovely Sister in law brought two GARGANTUAN catering bags which made me very happy … until I noticed they were … NOOOOOO … single cup strength … for wimps. For a while I used two teabags in one mug, until a friend declared my cups of tea ‘disgusting.’

Lovely Caroline sent me a box of teabags, but I was mortified by how much it costs to send a box of teabags to Bangkok so that’s not the way to keep up a supply without bankrupting friends and family.

I didn’t bring any back from my recent trip because my suitcase was full of books and ‘Soft and Gentle’ which is another story altogether, and now my rations are running low. I’m not sure that they will last until I leave for the UK in July so my dealer Husband has found a carrier coming in June. An email has been issued requesting and detailing the procurement of the correct teabags:

• PG Tips
• Not One Cups
• No leaves
• Pyramid bags
• No poncy tea claiming pretensions: just PG Tips