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My Christmas gift from you was a small, art deco teapot, creamer and sugar bowl. Delicate and angular, the colours have an oriental quality; something vaguely Japanese entwined in their understated floral pattern on a pale-yellow ground. There are reeds in the background— is that a frieze of thistles, or the seed pods of a flax, or exotic grasses? And what are those blue, yellow and orange marshland flowers? I know nothing about plants and flowers. I do know that tea brewed in this teapot tastes so much better than any other I’ve ever tasted that I want to experiment with rare single-region teas, I want to warm the pot, use freshly-filtered water, buy organic milk, raw sugar. What I pour from this teapot with its curiously angled lid, designed to lessen the danger of it falling out as it is tipped, is so dissimilar from the product of a supermarket teabag and the ritual of preparing it so removed from the chore of squeezing out flavour between mug and teaspoon that this feels almost holy. As I lower my head and stir this translucent, amber infusion over the altar of a table I am reminded of the way you made a temple out of love and taught me how to kneel in it. It makes me want to cherish this love like the temple of an art deco teapot within which nothing is taken for granted, a holy place where the extraordinary is seen in the commonplace and every day is a Christmas gift.
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