There’s an English word that begins with “b”. It literally means “female dog”. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. The word has retained its full force during the many years since I first learnt it, while other “b” words, such as “bloody”, have lost theirs. Secularism and permissiveness have prevailed. But even as the old lexicon of oaths and obscenities fades into quaintness, there is actually a whole group of curses that retain the capacity to shock. These are the terms that will lose a broadcaster his/her job; the terms that imply/constitute...

Strainer is a Nanjing column. It is no accident that a tea enthusiast would choose the southern part of Jiangsu as a place to drink tea. Ours is a fine tea-growing and tea-consuming region, to say nothing of the tea-pot-making tradition in Jiangsu. But this month finds Strainerʼs author back in Wales, the smallest of the nations in Great Britain. We all have to go home occasionally. Iʼm trying to fight jet lag by drinking from some appalling tea bag with a slice of fresh lemon. The best (Chinese,...

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...

Well, I just don’t think it happened like that. It relies on too many coincidences. It can’t be the true origin of tea-drinking, surely. For the emperor, Shen Nong (神農), to have received a stray, falling leaf of camellia sinensis in his cup of boiling water relies on that tea plant being very tall, or the weather very windy. It’s the height thing. And why do these apocryphal breakthroughs always happen to bigwigs like emperors, not to ordinary folk and earnest experimenters? Doesn’t wash with me. But if the Emperor’s cup was the...