It’s much easier to get maple syrup these days. Canadian president Justin Trudeau just announced the construction of a new pipeline to export it to the rest of the world (…or was that another liquid commodity?) Anyway, when I was a child, our family received a bottle of this treasured syrup. Before that day, we had only known the “simulated” stuff. We then waited months before opening this bottle of “the real thing”; no moment seemed important enough, no pancake perfect enough. And then we did open it, only to find...

The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word. For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder. This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...

Of course it’s not reasonable to expect commemoration or contemplation. The “Great War” was concluded more than a century ago. How can I expect “the eleventh day of the eleventh month” to resonate somewhere so far away from where the Armistice was signed?  Yes, China was the non-European nation which committed most men to that war, with real casualties and real costs. It’s a story that needs telling, one which may one day receive more airing. But those events are too far away to claim such as exclusive calendar slot in...

This frisbee-full of dried packed leaves cost me ¥260 . Buying a whole cake of tea (茶饼) is a bigger commitment than some buyers are willing to make. But, in the case of some varieties of tea, it’s the form factor which makers and sellers prefer to work with.  I’ve owned cakes before, of course. But this one is different, because it’s our first white tea cake.  That makes a difference because it can be consumed guilt free, with no sense of wrecking destiny; unlike pu er, there is no pretense about...