Chapter 148
As I finalize, I remember it’ll be December. I have to say, it’s been a great year. Lush. Thanks everyone who’s been a part of it in any way. I appreciate the great and magical good fortune that showers upon my life here. Bless y’all & Merry Merries!
… back to my musings, out of the rut…
Reposed in body-sculpted bed-come-couch-lounge-living-platform-cushioned-haven, limned in sunlight, I take a deep, satisfying draught of tea. I recently reinvested in black tea to complement my red Rooibos obsession. It’s become a revisiting of traditions, dwelling in the rapture of a robust morning cuppa. I don’t think rapture is too strong a word. Occasionally I lose myself in the experience; first in intimacy of scent, flavour, heat. Sensation of china cup beneath skin, feel of a delicate rim against one’s lips. Soft caress of steam and subtle visceral expectation, followed by a burst of delight as flavours dash against the back of the tongue (where it all happens) and on into the myriad adventures of the digestive tract.
It’s a love song, this hail fellow, well met! greeting. Coming home to something so deeply ingrained in my psyche and physical past, conjures myriad memory mountains flooding me. The simple act of brewing and drinking a cup of tea from the northern Indian lowlands, it’s as warming as the sunshine streaming through windows illuminating hands and heart.
A good, strong cup of ‘English’ tea reminds me initially of two things: Sitting at the long pine table in our kitchen in the south of England, my hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea, a trail of goat ‘raisins’ around the kitchen that blended pretty well with the floor’s random texture and pattern. Somewhere there would have been a black dog, orange cat, white goats, a bunch of rodents and serpents, a multitude of feathered fiends, definitely not friends. I painted warning signs about our bantam cockerel who used to lurk in the hedge and leap out in pursuit of unsuspecting passers-by.
Another cuppa in a thick mug in a red brick tack-room. A tiny place edging someone’s vast estate in the southern shires. 3 or 4 horses, a regular mid-morning break between turning out, mucking out and whatever else I got up to there. My morning breaks were a strong cup of tea and a few Hobnobs. Graham the gardener would switch to heavy shorts on March 1st regardless of the weather. Robust knees that man possessed.
Earlier, on a sweep around the house at floor level – it’s often preferable to safely slide rather than risk inattention or fatigue on single-legged escapades – allowing fingertips to rest against a door corner, sensing a draught seeping between door and frame, a small chunk of weather stripping having disintegrated and not yet replaced.
In the wee hours, the moon’s brilliant smile beams, illuminating sleeplessness, memories: Rainy day games indoors in out-of-the-way places. White-washed stone cottages clutching hillsides of remote Scottish islands. Our blue-striped, shallow draughted, puffin-sailed dinghy, Scottish Loch adventures. Rain pattering a tiny blue tent small enough to now be considered a child’s toy. I’m not sure how a family of four camped in the Scottish Highlands in such a thing. Often we didn’t. After a solid week of desolate grey rain, our Scottish sojourn would be abandoned for the delights of home, near the rainiest place in the whole of the UK. What a choice.
Our holidays were full of board games like Draughts, named from old English dragan to drag/ draw/ pull. Anciently known as Alquerque. Archaeological fragments and images carved into temple walls, show play across the Middle East, Mediterranean basin, India and Ancient Egypt. We continue the trail of history…
Is it the tea or is it the sudden draught across my neck? I’m on a carriage seat looking over dark rumps of gleaming draught horses. A millisecond, another taste-bud fires, I am listening to my deranged friend’s exploits at university, where at the end of a famous bar crawl my hilarious chum attempted a yard of ale, a notoriously tricky draught.
An entertaining phenomenon, to be teetotal in a university of nine bars with 4,500 students. I spent many an entertaining evening on the other side of the bar, watching a progressively more inebriated crowd sway, listening and singing with my comical chum on the piano. He could take any popular song and play it instantly, not only play it, but also funk it up while creating hysterically funny alternative lyrics on the fly.
Silly Frank, our barman, had a party trick of laying an unopened Newcastle Brown Ale on its side, neck protruding past the edge of the bar. Squeezing the tips of his thumbs against the top neck/cap of the bottle, he’d lift it, horizontal. I don’t think I ever saw anyone else master it. Silly Frank was immortalized as Judge in an Alice In Wonderland mural I created. The summer I drafted that huge image, revelling in creativity, youth, freedom… days covered in paint, supping cups of tea, playing with my dog, hanging out with Bolton Wanderers FC on campus for summer training. Good times.
In the murky no-man’s-land of Canadian English, amalgamation and assimilation is everywhere… interchangeable spellings and meanings of words. In English English, the spelling draft had a specific meaning from draught. It’s happening right now, under our noses… time passes, changes, continues, words morph and slip sideways into new subtleties or fall out of use. How many different draughts are there above?
With curiosity,
Kat Dancer
bodymudra@gmail.com
403-931-3866 (h)
+1 415 525 2630 (c)
