(well, second, really. The rewrite pushed it from a slight 6k to a solid 7k words. With thanks to fabulous betas Victor Fernando Campo and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, who didn’t blink at the quick turnaround time and provided very valuable insight on what wasn’t working so well with it)

I settled on “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” as the title; and here’s a snippet:

Green tea: green tea is made from steamed or lightly dried tea leaves. The brew is light, with a pleasant, grassy taste. Do not over-steep it, lest it become bitter.

#

After the funeral, Quang Tu walked back to his compartment, and sat down alone, staring sightlessly at the slow ballet of bots cleaning the small room–the metal walls pristine already, with every trace of Mother’s presence or of her numerous mourners scrubbed away. He’d shut down the communal network–couldn’t bear to see the potted summaries of Mother’s life, the endlessly looping vids of the funeral procession, the hundred thousand bystanders gathered at the grave site to say goodbye, vultures feasting on the flesh of the grieving–they hadn’t known her, they hadn’t cared–and all their offerings of flowers were worth as much as the insurances of the Embroidered Guard.

Yes, it has tea!

(picture: Tea leaves steeping in a zhong čaj by Wikimol, used under a CC-BY-SA2.5, via Wikimedia Commons)

Remember the tea thing I was wondering about? (basically, why my Japanese sencha from London tasted way better than any loose-leaf green tea I’d ever had)

cecile-c came over last weekend (we had a lovely Vietnamese meal in the XIIIe, and an intense gaming session of Battlestar Galactica); and in between struggling to survive the game without being betrayed by the dastardly Cylons, we studied the tea thing. She thinks (and I agree) that it doesn’t have much to do with sencha. Rather, the key point is that said tea is packaged in tea-bags (to be more accurate, in a tea bag, and then sealed in a foil-backed tear-away bag). As Cécile said, green tea is extremely fragile, and can lose its flavour within months of being harvested and dried [1]–however, by the time it gets to France, said green tea will often be months old, which leads to the simple and inescapable conclusion that, well, it’s not going to taste very good at this stage…

I don’t think the tea I brought back from London is necessarily uber-fresh (though it might be, since it was a direct export from Japan via plane, meant for the consumption of Japanese expatriates). However, remember our packaging? With a double layer of paper and then foil? This is probably better for its conservation than merely jamming it into jars that might not be full (ie contain large amounts of air), and might not be sealed hermetically.

This is not reassuring news, as it means I either should find another tea provider with ultra-fresh arrivals, or that I need to buy ecologically wasteful tea bags…

[1]Indeed, one of the reasons why black tea was so popular in Great Britain in Victorian times was that its flavour would survive the months it took to bring it from Asia to Europe, whereas green tea wouldn’t.

And it’s tea purchasing time :=)

I try to keep a balance between the different types of tea, but a quick glance at the tea boxes showed that I’m running low on white tea and on flavoured black tea (thanks to Mum’s trip to Vietnam last year, I have enough green tea to withstand a siege. And it’s a good one, too).

And this is where I’m dragging Matthieu:
L’Empire des Thés (awesome shop in the Chinese district which has a bewildering choice–including good blends and neat perfumed teas).