Moody people with a taste for black taffeta

What I am drinking right now: Trader Joe's Specialty Teas Jasmine Green Tea, brewed from a teabag in a cup of water heated in the staff room microwave.

What I would prefer to be drinking: some appropriately nondescript China black tea brewed properly with boiling water in an earthenware teapot and with a healthy shot of whisky and lemon.

It's not that the Jasmine Green is bad. In fact it's quite pleasant especially given the teabag and insufficient water. And it's not that I have a cold, exactly. It's that my sinuses are in that annoying just-slightly-stuffy-and-sore mode and some really hot and well-doctored tea would be nice right now.

Came across the following quote in the NY Times review of The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English, by Edith Milton. I am not, in general, a big fan of the Holocaust-survival-memoir genre, but this made me snicker. The book overall is well reviewed, so I may see about picking it up at a library and seeing if I like it.

' "My bad temper and my taste in fabric were the progeny of a long history of moody people with a taste for black taffeta. And if you are angry and yearn for dark, rustling textiles there is no point trying to stifle your irritation and claim to like pastel tweed," she writes. "I gave up for good any last lingering hope I may have held of becoming a mild-tempered English schoolgirl with a penchant for heather wool; and I took up instead a lifelong stab at trying to become myself." '

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