Strainer

Give Us Our Daily Bread; The Bare Essentials Baked to Perfection

You are reading this in English. I can therefore assume that, unless you have some aversion to carbs, you have found your solution to the problem of bread.Personally, I have a bread maker from Midea which cost less than...

The Canny Leaf Steeped in Tradition; Or… Tea for 12 Hour Shifts

Let’s say that it halves with each cycle. Each consecutive steeping produces half the flavour of the last. With each pouring, the drink more closely resembles water. Eventually, water is all that this drink will have become. The exponential...

Anxi Tea Tours; And Abbés 4 Anxiety

When I lived in Beijing, students hoping to study abroad would travel half a day to a certain shrine, praying to receive an “offer”. They were practicing hieroglossia. That’s because they deemed the shrine’s name; 卧佛寺 similar enough to...

Teenage Kicks for a Rotten Old [Green] Fart

It’s teenagers who enjoy it the most. It’s there in so many of the snacks they eat. It is a horrifying rottenness. They love it. They are wrong to love it. Of course, many of these snacks of rottenness contain...

Strainer Aging Gracefully; Don’t Chuck it Out Without Trying

Some 2 years ago, with the passing of Elizabeth II, I speculated in these pages that the late Queen would become, principally, the woman crowned in 1953, young and beautiful. I suspect that was an image she herself was...

It Takes Tea to Tango; The Sweet Potato Time Bomb

I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. There they both were. And it was my wife who’d put them there. Strewth. It wasn’t even that one of these dishes was left-overs from the previous day; no, she had consciously cooked both...

Some Sun, Few Tories; Saying Goodbye to a Teenager

Suntory’s bottled “Black Oolong Tea” is an institution, as well loved in China as in its native Japan. And here it is, refrigerated and available for purchase, in the UK. Always the stingy skinflint, I resent paying three times the...

Belt-Tightening Beckons; Before the Penny Pinching

I need to cut back. We’ve overspent this month. When I look back, I don’t know whether it’s the newly-printed poster board on my wall which I’ll point to as “peak-splurge”. Maybe it will be the sailing sun-hat from the French...

Latest News

Baby on Board in High Speed Train Emergency Delivered by Urologist into Nanjing

Mid-journey between Shanghai and Nanjing, a routine high-speed train service turned into an improvised delivery room, when a lady...

Iranians in China become more Visible than Countable

These things often start, not with a statistic, but with a voice; Persian heard in a lift, a WeChat...

Why Chinese Men Can’t Quit; Smoking, Face and the State

China has 300 million smokers, nearly a third of the world's total. The imbalance between the sexes is stark:...

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