So I’m a red risk all of a sudden. It’s a shock for someone who’s conjured only green codes from so many apps this past quarter-of-a-decade. My red code will be a shock for some reading this, too.  Perhaps, blissfully green for as long as such colours existed, you just experienced a twinge in your buttocks, before remembering that, no, printed paper cannot transmit pathogens from some guy in Shanghai, and nor can an LCD screen. Mindful of the two negative results after my near-exposure and before my colour-slander, it’s not concerning me...

Does tea itself contribute stress?The answer here is: surely, yes.If so, then what’s the remedy?Why, clearly, it’s a cup of tea. Hard-liquor drinkers sometimes make that face; the one that isn’t just pleasure. Children must see this wincing face when watching, say, Westerns, and wonder why grown men would voluntarily drink something so painful-tasting, again and again.  Perhaps children intuit the social aspect of the deal; the difficult drink must be imbibed because the situation demands it.  Perhaps children recognise the celluloid sour mash as a necessary medicine. Children surely know the...

Chinese food was the ultimate treat for me. You may sneer at those British-Cantonese restaurant dishes which so excited me: spare ribs, crispy noodles, crispy beef with carrots, etc. I am unrepentant. In our family, we each ordered one dish. Mine was always Lemon Chicken. Sure, the take-away version usually comes in a gloopy sauce with the same lemon-ness as “lemon-fresh” bathroom cleaner. But fresh lemon (word order is important here) is always used in the best restaurants. And, thanks to BritishChinese food evangelist Ken Hom, it’s a dish...

Now the baking days are behind us, we can say it’s been another hot summer, with one tiny difference;  Things have heated up in the cold tea sector. For a long time, there was only Suntory (三得利) with its iconic pair of Oolong SKUs: WITH-sugar (red characters) and WITHOUT (blue). These black/brown bottles have a following (of fans and imitators) to rival Laoganma (老干召) sauce.  Traditionally, the remainder of the “tea” bottles on the c-store shelf were of the lemon-tea or the milk-tea type, all stashed with sugar, of course.  Actually, those teas...