You’re familiar with the rule by now. Do not carry your own liquids allowed into the airport departure lounge.  … except that I was drinking an awesome green tea I’d brought with me from China. And no one was asking me to surrender my cup. How long, I wondered, could I keep this up?  Right up to the boarding gate, it turns out.    Actually, it’s quite the comfort to have tea, especially green, in one’s hand while being herded through an airport. But why haven’t any of the other liquids in my...

Alcohol makes you mellow and unconstrained. And then it makes you boisterous and shouty. Caffeine banishes fatigue from the limbs and the brow, then makes you arrogant and shouty. Such are the devils we know.   There’s a huge variety of delivery methods to these legal, reality distorters; some fast, some slow, some calorific, some less so. And it’s the flavours and occasions which influence how we choose to take them; chocolate or yerba matte, sake or champagne.  Urban legend suggests that lining up licquors in the right order may prevent...

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...

We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.  It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.  We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).  This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there. When we moved again, it came...