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...

Our eldest daughter destroyed a whole kettle. I won’t be totally surprised if this daughter does, too. It is always a busy device in any kitchen of ours. But it’s surely the first year of a new human life which kills a kettle. Nevermind the pre-boiling needed for the milk formula; it’s that sterilising of absolutely everything. 8 years ago, we had one fizzle out on us. Fair enough, we thought. And, for a short while, we made do with boiling water on the stove. In the UK, with a measly supply...

I love games consoles. I own more than I care to admit. But (Marie Kondo, since you’re asking) every one of them sparks joy. The console is a well-named invention, providing solace that sometimes even tea can’t provide. I’m not the only one; retro gaming is as much of a draw for my generation as steam trains for my father’s. An industry surrounds console nostalgia, with restorations, re-releases, emulation and excavation. But in focusing so much on the games console, the home experience of games, the nostalgia is neglecting another great...

The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word. For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder. This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...