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...

I’ve used this column in the past to vent my criticism of the tea sold in China’s supermarkets. Today’s Strainer marks no retreat. There are usually two locations for tea in the supermarket. There’s the loose tea; often located next to the pickles, stored in a similar way. Those glass jars, containing leaves of indeterminate age, are not the fitting place for happy tea; light is every bit as ravaging for green tea as heat or oxygen. And those unimaginative selections of tea, usually Long Jing , invariably smell as...

Let me state that The Nanjinger has not paid for me to be here. Nanjing is far too far away and the expenses for such a glamorous patch could easily spiral beyond control. I write from Juan Les Pines on the French Riviera. You can almost skip a stone to Cannes in the west and Monaco to the East. Every town along here has significance to the grand tour, the lost generation or the jet set, but also to a contented local populace. This is still more French than...

Des Esseintes is a man with sick fancies. He is the dissipated aristocrat at the centre of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel, “À Rebours” . He is the collector of house plants which somehow look fake but aren’t. He owns a tortoise shell encrusted with gem stones. He didn’t want the tortoise to die from contamination. But so be it. Together with figures like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, he represents the Fin-de-Siecle End-of-19th-Century spirit of jaded pleasure seeking.  Something of this appealed to me as a young man confronting a new century of...