This day, 18 April, 1955, the Afro–Asian Conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia. With a total of 29 Asian and African countries participating, Zhou Enlai spoke of...
I wrote last month about glossy teas; teas with a polished appearance, mostly from Japan. I also mentioned a pea-green variety from Sichuan’s Emei mountain range called Bamboo Leaf Tea .
Now, let’s be honest. Sichuan is less famous for growing tea than it is for pandas, bamboo and spicy snacks. Were Sichuan and tea are ever connected in people’s minds, it is the tea houses and the tea-drinking culture that stand out rather than native varieties of leaf.
Possibly that is just how Sichuan people like it. Local tea...
Take a trip to a tea plantation. Nanjing is surrounded by mountains where tea grows. You’ll bump into one soon enough if your eyes are open to it. If you already know one, go to that one.
Steal a handful of leaves. Not many. Just a handful. The farmer won’t see you. Don’t worry.
If he does, just blame me.
Now, if you put those leaves into your mouth, they will taste like “leaves”. And that’s pretty much all they will taste of. Infuse them in hot water and the liquor will...
I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. There they both were. And it was my wife who’d put them there.
Strewth. It wasn’t even that one of these dishes was left-overs from the previous day; no, she had consciously cooked both of them, set them there for the family to actually eat.
Okay, it was a long time ago that she’d delivered the warning. Maybe she’s forgotten it by now. Or maybe I’m the one who misremembered. Anyway, here goes.
Fish is not to be paired with sweet potato. Harmless individually, these two...
The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.
It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists.
There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.
Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.
Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...
