A World of Tea…

A good cup of tea – definitely part of my daily routine. My morning usually starts with a coffee, quickly followed with several cups of tea. Green, white, fruit infusions, wacky flavours, flowering teas – I try all sorts. In fact, trying a new tea is an exciting thing for me. I tend not to stick to the same flavour throughout the day, delicate blends winning for the morning shift and heavier, more unusual combinations taking me through the afternoon.

This week I was sent some blue tea flowers from a start up company called Boho Chai. They’re on Facebook and Twitter so are easy to track down. This is the world’s first blue tea, is completely organic and is said to have many health benefits. Grown in Thailand, this Butterfly Pea flower is absolutely, undeniably blue. Wonderfully, unusually, weirdly blue.

I sampled the signature tea, Bluechai, hot first, with nothing added, to see what its raw taste was like. As the name would suggest there is something a little pea-like in there. It is a smooth tea. Drinkable. Definitely something exotic in its taste as well as in its rarity. I think it could take some people time to get used to drinking a tea this vivid and I do wonder if the taste isn’t an acquired one.

When adding lemon, the acid turns the colour to purple or even pink if you really lemon-it-up. I tried it hot and lemony then tested an iced version. A lovely tipple for a sunny afternoon and a great conversation starter. The colour change is really quite spectacular to see. I can honestly say I have never had a tea quite like it before.

I would certainly recommend giving it a try if you are like me and enjoy sampling things you have not come across before. I think the winner has to be a warm cup of Bluechai with honey and lemon added – the honey to cut across the tartness of the lemon, and the lemon to pep up the taste as well as effecting that beautiful hue shift.

Not a review, per se, but I did enjoy seeing something in action that I have never seen before, and that is certainly worth a blog. A tea to try!

Elloise Hopkins.

Colour Me Calm…

It seems that I can’t walk past a book shelf, newsagent, stationery store, train station, or anywhere, at the moment, than I encounter gleaming packets of brand new felt pens and colouring pencils accompanying stacks of adult colouring books.

Colour therapy. Colour for stress relief. This seems to be the latest in self-help and as ever I found myself dubious about whether this activity could actually have a calming effect. Its only initial appeal to me was a nostalgic longing for Crayola colours and crisp black lines on a fresh colouring book to stay between.

I was given Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom (clearly at this stage in life I am exhibiting an outwards appearance of anything but calm!) and immediately took to the Internet, taking great joy in ordering colouring pencils that included gold and silver – money well spent having now tested them.

So next time I had an idle moment (and by idle I mean those rare moments when I am neither working, reading nor writing and am sitting watching a film or tv) I got into colouring poise and carefully opened my colouring pencils in readiness.

I flicked through the beautiful pages of the book and agonised over where to start, a lack of confidence in myself to do the pictures justice holding me back. Then the rational part of my took over (how much damage could I do, really???) and I dove straight into a full page of an elephant. In pastels and golds I coloured him and it was all going swimmingly until my hand wavered and I strayed over the line ruining the symmetry of the image that had been.

Yes, that terrible perfectionist within me struggles even now with those traces of human behaviour that make me less than perfect. I stare at the pages for an age trying to work out where the best place for this and that colour to go, and where to add colour and where to let the crisp white and black of the printed page dominate. I berate myself when I stray over the lines and frown when I realise that one shade lighter would have worked better for that feather.

I can see the appeal of this craze, and yes, overall, I would have to say I have enjoyed the few colouring therapy sessions I have undertaken. But there is a constant struggle within myself between colour me calm and colour me perfect. I hope that as time goes on I learn to let go the need to make every image ‘right’ and manage to just enjoy losing myself for a time in this simple art.

Elloise Hopkins.