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...

By coincidence, I was recently drinking Yunnan Green tea anyway. My favourite market-stall had been selling some. Yeah, it was cheap. And, despite the unpromising smell and ashen grey appearance, I was curious. I had not bought any of this stuff while in Yunnan itself. I remember seeing it piled high in the market there, dusty, no effort towards preservation. “That’s not the way to treat green tea”, I thought. Moreover, the Yunnan sellers themselves told us not to buy it! Buy the pu er, they said; this can only by...

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...

You’re not completely sure how you got home last night. You’re worried what you might have said to those friends you were with. You just cannot find that cash which you keep in your wallet for emergencies. Strainer cannot help you with any of these problems. You’re listless. Every movement requires double the effort. There’s a headache on the horizon. Now we’re talking. It’s about time this column got around to hangover strategies. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to see tea playing a role in the recommendations here. Sweat it out? Actually,...