Nuts To You

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I promised you a story about inebriation. I'll put it in context. Thanks to the (sometimes) generous research culture at Central Saint Martin’s, I was co-curator of an exhibition at the Lighthouse in Glasgow in 2000. It’s a complex of design galleries housed in a Charles Rennie Mackintosh newspaper building. Digressing, the glass panels by the lifts and encasing staircase, are sandblasted with designs of gingko leaves, as in that once popular health supplement Gingko Biloba. When I lived in Kyoto there were streets, certainly in the Northern districts in which I dwelt, lined with these magnificent, primeval trees.

In autumn their interestingly shaped, asymmetrical, two-lobed leaves turned a shimmering pale gold and the trees dropped their rotting fruit which would be pounced upon by the ferociously active (I witnessed vicious games of croquet) retired folk. Desperate? Hardly. Inside the fetid pulp lay the kernel, within which hides the green,  delicious ginnan. Perhaps the dwindling senses of these seniors could tolerate the olfactory assault, else they were sufficient devoted to these traditional, seasonal treats that it was of no consequence.

The real excitement, for me was that the gorgeous, primeval gingko leaf is one of the symbols of the Urasenke tradition of the Chanoyu: the serendipity was exhilarating.

And the inebriation? C.R. Mackintosh is well-known for his Glasgow tearooms, such as Willow Tea Rooms, significant within the 19th century Temperance Movement. In a poem by James Hamilton Muir (a composite pseudonym) in Glasgow in 1901 we find “Glasgow is a very Tokio for tearooms”. Apparently the young chaps who spent their leisure hours in these tearooms, playing billiards and drinking copious amounts of tea were just as troublesome as if they had been in the pub. Grand stuff, tea. Aye.

Alex runs East Teas in Borough Market on Fridays and Saturdays. Email epoch@eastteas.com.