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...

The English language wouldn’t be as careless as this. Sure, 汤 (tang) is “soup” but this character also gets used for fruit juices, as in 酸梅汤 (suan mei tang); sour plum juice.  There’s also 茶 (cha); tea, which means “processed-Camellia-Sinensis-leaves” and “drinks-infused-with-those-leaves”, right?  Well, not quite, because there are other roles for this character, too.  There are those Chinese drinks using the leaves (and flowers) of other plants. In Beijing’s impromptu Temple Fairs, I have drunk a 茶汤 (cha tang); tea soup, which is a glutinous, sugary, sesame-flavoured thing much better than it...

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...

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...