The Pot Boy Spouts Off

THE TEA COSY

See the prior post for an introduction to one of the important issues of our time, having to do with proper headgear, general happiness, and decorum. Questions relating to this matter are answered here.

The Pot Boy Replies to Questions

annie said...
I don't have a tea cozy. :( Is there anything else I can use instead?

The Pot Boy: Sadly, no. After examining your very interesting and attractive pictures, I suggest that you of all people need a cozy/cosy in the house. You find yourself shivering amid all that shaved-off hair? Go for the cozy/cosy. Your elegant head feel all prickly and sharp with tiny pieces of hair? Drive that pate into the welcoming expanse of a cozy/cosy. Come in from a Savannah ice storm? Make a pot of tea; install cozy/cosy; take warmed cozy/cosy and shove onto head. Presto! Life is Georgia all over again.

zephyr said...
(OK here i am againwithout "blog speak" shorthand for"giggling happily while posting"anyway)i do not own a tea cozyhowever, the Easter Bunny gave me the most delightful chapeau yesterdaymade from a floral fabric that looks very much like it could be a tea cozydoes that count?because i think you have explained the slightly curious, yet welcome wave of silliness and general feeling of well being that i felt while modeling it around the house yesterday. i confess attributed the feeling to the lovely chocolate egg i was eating at the same time, but i'm now thinking it could very well have been my new tea-cozy-like chapeau. goshnow i'm wondering what marvels i might experience with an actual tea cozy...?oops...!maybe it was actually a tea cozy EB left in my basket...?

The Pot Boy: The unusual elevation of spirits suggests that this chapeau may have been made by an experienced maker of tea cosies/cozies (Will someone please solve this important question of spelling?) She (it is more likely a she than a he, I suspect, the great tradition of millinery having been primarily in the female line) may have inadvertently talked it into being a cosy/cozy. It is well known that milliners talk to their hats, a tendency immortalized in Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.

Keeper of the Snails said...
Dear Pot Boy,
As a long-time keeper of snails I am thinking of branching out and acquiring some peacocks. I was wondering if you have any valuable advice in this regard. Do you think peacocks would be more troublesome than snails, for instance, and do you have any tips for sprucing up peahens who in comparison always seem to be so very dowdy.

The Pot Boy: It will not matter if the peacocks are more troublesome than snails, because soon after they arrive you will have no more snails--hence the level of trouble will be about the same. You will then have to change your blog to "Keeper of the Peas" or "Keeper of Peacocks & Dowdy Peahens" or "Something of That Sort."

However, you may find the tiny screams of impaled snails to be exquisitely painful.

The peahen is certainly a plain little tea cup next to the grand and glimmering Aurene vase stuffed with Himalayan blue poppies that is the peacock. If it is the hen's spirits you are concerned about, I recommend starting the decorating with the ankles. Those little peahen heads are quite often bobbing about at the ankle level, and a few inexpensive ankle bracelets ought to jazz up self-respect and keep the peahen pleased with her loveliness.

Jan said...
I inherited several tea cosies when I cleared out an aunt's house; I gave them to Oxfam. Now I am regretting this.

The Pot Boy: I call this extraordinary generosity to Oxfam. I must drop them a line that an English tutor is in line for a medal (tea cosy rampant upon crossed eyes.)

Susangalique said...
Does the Pot Boy think its ok to write publicly about killing a cricket in the middle of the night? or does it make one sound like a murderous beast? I would as soon hear the beating of pots than a lone cricket.

The Pot Boy: Given your current status as hapless student being boiled in the oil of exams, I think we may forgive much. But the beating of pots is as music to a Pot Boy's ears!

zephyr said...
Dear Pot Boy, i am here to report that the floral topper left by EB in my basket on Sunday fits the 6 cup "Brown Betty" (tho ours is cobalt blue Betty) teapot of the house just fine. And, i must add, it is lined, making it quite cosy (and cozy), in my humble estimation. Also, some more information for you to consider as you meditate on this matter:the consensus of the household is, after i have modeled it about, that i should refrain from wearing EB's gift out and about around town. Further deliberation and experimentation reveals that it looks quite nice on the counter and table top...so, it seems to me that it could be seriously considered, even though it does not fit the exact domed profile of the ideal cosy. Perhaps there needs to be a period of time where its role is clearly defined, a prescribed period of actually cosy-ing the teapot before it can fulfill its cosy role?

The Pot Boy: This case grows curiouser and curiouser. I consider my first opinion to me a lucky hit, and I suggest that the "floral topper" is, indeed, of confused identity. This is rather like the trendy, longwinded academic topic of gender identity but more easily mastered. My suggestion is that you place said floral topper upon the cobalt blue Brown Betty at least once a day for a week, making sure the pot is quite hot and full of some classic tea (no herbal muck, no tea with "tinctures" of apricot and so on. (Brown Betty is quite fond of pouring out Earl Grey.)

The suggestion that the floral topper not be worn "out and about" is a quite a hint, isn't it?

Consider how very few people actually choose to wear a cosy/cozy (Somebody! Please! Spelling!) "out and about," and that of those, a good many end up in the looney bin. *

*The Office of Palace P. C. respectfully reminds the pot boy that "looney bin" is not on the acceptable list "out and about" in the world.**

**The Pot Boy respectfully tells The Officers of Palace P. C. to soak their heads in an over-sized Dansk teapot.***

***The Office of Palace P. C.: Tsk.

jarvenpa said...
Oh, gosh. Now I am wishing that I had my grandmother's Brown Betty teapot (it was a true Brown one, brought over from England by my grandfather after the war...the first world war, that would be). But I never ever have had a tea cozy. Nor, for that matter, have I hats, except one with purple fuzz crocheted for me by a friend. It looks something like a demented, wrongly colored flower and stands out from my head.Perhaps that will work?And does the Pot Boy do house calls? (or bookstore calls?). I notice the little dust mice are growing into large rabbit size clumps.

The Pot Boy: Alas, my specialty is large, encrusted pots. I am also willing to take on scullery maids.

I wish you had that Brown Betty. And I wish she could be properly clothed in a generous English chintz cosy/cozy. (Sigh. Which?) I trust that you do have a teapot. And since you live in a cabin torn open by a large bear, I believe that any teapot wild enough to reside in such a spot will be willing to wear a demented purple flower for a cosy/cozy. This attire appears to fall into the category of "camping out."

* * *

Thank you, dear visitors, for helping me fulfill by dream of being a Palace Advice Columnist. While I am devoted to the pots, there is more to life than pots. There are scullery maids, and there are other delights.

***
The photograph at top is courtesy of www.sxc.hu and Piotr Bizior of Poland. He took this picture of "tea gardens in India, Munnar, Kerala State." Click the image for a big view!
***

The Pot Boy Meditates on the Tea Cosy

Nobody has asked me for a smidge of advice in months—aside from the Alabamian Maid, who asked me for hat advice. Mine was sterling, as she would attest. This lack of interest from the lovelorn, the irate, and the generally upset is rather heartbreaking to a Pot Boy and would-be Palace Advice Columnist. So I shall offer some advice, gratis: for first-rate mental health, be sure to frequently slap a tea cosy on your head.

Wearing a tea cosy on the head is a harmless, pleasant little activity. I am surprised to find how many of my acquaintance have sported a tea cosy. It lends most a sort of Comic Bishop appearance. A scullery maid with the cosy set at a rakish angle is irresistible. Small children like to don a cosy, grab a poker, and strike a martial attitude.

There’s a Billy Connolly quote that deserves to be a pop-up, I see it so often: “Never trust a man who, when left alone with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.” Although a comedian, he must have some wisdom, because I find that there’s truth in that line. Is it his, or did he pilfer it from some statesman or oracle, I wonder?

It occurs to me that if Attorney Clendon—remember him?—had worn a tea cosy on his head while reading that Bilge Karasu novel, Night, he might not have vanished into the shadows. Perhaps he will, feeling about in the dark, find his fingers closing on a cosy. Perhaps it will serve as a sort of domestic life preserver and buoy him up.

Many claim that the cosy that is used as an occasional, spur-of-the-moment garment must be one of those hand-knitted or crocheted cosies that look like woollen hats. This is entirely false. The proper tea cosy attire is the traditional ‘dome’ cosy.

On my head is a grand dome cosy in orange, with blue and red polkadots. The interior is stained and ringed, and looks rather like cloth once stuffed in a mummy’s cranial cavity. In it I am grand and playful, ancient and boyish, wise and silly, an answerer of questions too deep for my understanding.

***
Update: How satisfying to immediately get a question about proper attire, and another on peahens! I look forward to more questions, and when I have a sufficiency, I shall scrub the pots in great meditative circles and then reply.

***

The Pot Boy Gets the Boot

The taxes are done!
Ring, ye dratted bells! The witch is dead!
Angels are whirling the crystal shells of the spheres--
The dead may rise shortly, and
the meek play baseball in the village square,
And the Glimmerglass Opera hover over Doubleday Field--
The ghost of Fenimore Cooper is dancing
on the pinnacle of Christ Church.

The Pot Boy has been booted in the rear
—I’d fire him, but he’s awfully keen on the scrubbing—
Not to mention good-looking and entertainingly vain.

The snow has melted early and engendered is the fleur!
(Yes, I am addicted to Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame,
as are Attorney Clendon and the scullery maids and the Pot Boy.
Probably why he wants to be an Advice Columnist.)

Favorite overheard response of the week—
Leading question by an adult: “Why were 352
(a bit swollen, that number, I hear)
people marching down Main St. the other day?”
My little N: “Because of the Crayon Carnival.”

Regarding the date--
Okay, so it’s not Friday yet. It will be…
And I’ll be too busy frolicking to post. So there!

Pot Boy questions--
He might come back for another round, maybe, mayhap...
If you have a doubt, a wonder, a niggling small question,
drop it by the March 25th post.

Photo credits—
This royalty free picture was taken by Edwin P
of the Netherlands—Noordwijk.
Source: http:/www.sxc.hu/
***

Ask the Pot Boy, contd.

blog queen said...

Hello Pot Boy,

I am the Blog Queen of the Grove Palace. I met the Queen of the palace at 2:00 am at a workshop. I was one of her lowly students. Wonderful lady she. Which of her estemed offspring are you? The eldest perchance? So Pot Boy, I have three questions for you. How does one manage to quit one’s job and become a full time writer? And, can one make a living writing?

...

So the Blog Queen …wants to ditch it all and do something else. Anything else. Actually if you need a scullery maid, let me know. The last question. What is the hierarchy of your palace?
9:11 AM, March 25, 2006


Dear Blog Queen,

The Pot Boy advises you to tread carefully; many unfortunate souls have lost their positions in the workaday world outside the Palace by indiscrete blogging—luckily you have committed misdirection by not saying that you live in South Dakota or Idaho or wherever it is. Right?

Just now, for example, I am running some small degree of danger. When the Beggar Queen finishes whistling with fury and blowing tax steam out her ears, she may come rampaging back to the palace and take a dislike to my friendly bloggibles. I saw her rush by yesterday, eyes spinning and hair on fire! Wonderful lady she may be, but who can maintain the eternally sweet temper when faced with the Miscellaneous Wildly Numbered Forms of the Federal Government?

I hate to tell you that the three offspring—you honor the Pot Boy!—of the Beggar Queen are profoundly unfamiliar with the sponges, the scrubbing brush, the implements of the Pot Boy trade. You have heard of untouchables? I have tried, but they are the unteachables! They might as well be planting their bottoms on velvet tuffets at Windsor Castle and waiting for someone to bring an egg cream on a silver tray. As for your impertinent but amusing questions about my identity, I am merely one of the Beggar Queen’s myriads—perhaps one of the more notable ones. In the Palace, a good-looking and intelligent (and somewhat vain) Pot Boy may be more powerful than a vizier or a king.

There is a very simple answer to how one quits the job and becomes a full-time writer: marry rich. You say that you like your current husband and are no 'Wife of Bath'? Well, you may console yourself with the sentiment that if you did live off your writing—as do an incredibly tiny number of writers—you would lose your freedom to write exactly what you want to write.

That’s called sour grapes.

But they’re true grapes, all the same. And they are the sort of grapes that are trampled and served up in wine glasses at the Palace at 2:00 a.m. In an effort to be trendy and ‘with’ the political times, some choose to call them “freedom grapes.”

Alas, thank you for your interest, but I’m afraid that all our scullery maid positions are occupied by attractive young women who do not appear at all likely to retire. I am sorry for your disappointment.

Hierarchy.

That’s a tough one. Since one or more palace doors open onto the internet, the place appears to be infinite. I’m always stumbling through an unexpected passageway, or discovering some entirely new person—a cross-eyed scribe, a thief, an Irish opera singer, a governess, a string of little brats pulling another child in a wagon, a chemist or alchemist, an Akhwesasne boy smuggling cigarettes between the billiards room and the third-best parlor, a boy painted with purple stripes, an old speechless man, etc. You’d think that the Beggar Queen had some sort of power over them all, and perhaps she does. But hierarchy? She’ll come down, hoick up her skirts, and warm her feet by the fire—laughing and telling stories to the scullery maids…

In the course of writing you, Blog Queen, I have discovered the wonders of spell check, a thing that I have little use for in the kitchen and environs. It wants, very badly, for me to change the line, “They might as well be planting their bottoms on velvet tuffets at Windsor Castle and waiting for someone to bring an egg cream on a silver tray.” Clearly this computer was not brought up on Little Miss Muffet. It would like the line to read, “They might as well be planting their bottoms on velvet buffets at Windsor Castle and waiting for someone to bring an egg cream on a silver tray.” Alternatively, it desires the royal bottoms to be applied to “velvet toughest” or “velvet taffetas” or “velvet toffees.”

Velvet toffees! What weirdnesses do I miss, lounging in the scullery with the maids?

Sincerely yours,
the Leviathan of Pot Boys



megan said...

Oh, most wise Pot Boy, I have a problem. My mind has gone completely and not even left a forwarding address. I watched part of a Star Wars movie with my brother, and now, think, I can't. I mean I can't think. What can I do to get out of this non-creative state?

Dear Megan,

Answer 1: Find a nice sturdy cloth, and a bit of steel wool, and a scrubbing brush with a long wand of a handle.

Go find some dirty, mucky, nasty pots and pans, some copper and some aluminum and some cast iron. Begin making mystic symbols on the pots with the appropriate instrument.

Let your mind drift on the floating bubbles in the sink.

Soon your parents will be extremely fond of you, if they are not already—no doubt they are, but clean dishes never hurt the maternal and paternal affections—and strange thoughts will come swirling into the empty spaces of your brain.

It works for me. I get very creative in the kitchen. But perhaps it’s the presence of all those quick, lithe scullery maids.

Answer 2: Just don’t get too fussy about being muse-struck. Remember Faulkner’s famous advice, “I write only when I'm inspired. Fortunately I'm inspired at 9 o'clock every morning." This, too, applies to Pot Boys and to the shining of pots.

But Megan, you are a clever girl. I like your deliberate stumble into “now, think, I can’t.” So your assertion of the non-creative is really just a flourish of the creative…

Respectfully yours,
the Pot Boy

Photo credit: royalty free image, "dragon castle" by kizkiz (Kieran Harvey of Australia) from www.sxc.hu/. Taken at Manly Beach. Castle by a sandman from Byron Bay!
***

Ask the Pot Boy

To the Esteemed Boy, Patron of Pots and Sheikh of Spatulas,

I find myself faced with a difficult problem. I myself am quite one for the kitchen--my appetite for Indian food is endless. My sister, Wren, despairs of my breath ever smelling of anything other than onions and yogurt, and tells me she is sick of eating lentils. What can I do to cure myself of this unfortunate habit? I simply can't make myself eat any other kind of food--it is so delicious! Please help me, or my sister will turn me out of the house.

--Taith Degao


Dear Mr. Degao,

A one for the kitchen—you are a kindred soul of mine! If you have seen our menu for New Year’s Eve, you may have noticed that some in the Palace are quite fond of Indian food. Perhaps that is precisely why you wrote…

I believe your problem may be a gustatory problem of less-than-subtle nature. Perhaps you may hold off on the lentils and breath-tinting onions—I do not see my way to denying you yogurt—and appease your unfortunate sister. Or perhaps this is a matter of your tarka (chhownk or baghaar, you may say.) Perhaps you are relying too often on the bullies among the spices and sprinkling kalonji or asafetida or fenugreek a little too freely about your kitchen.

On the other hand, your problem may be with the hot-tempered sibling. I know what it is like to have a sister of fire, my friend! Woman can be a demon. I have been frizzled in the fires of female indignation more than once, after a bout of ill-conceived romance. I have skewered--well, enough of me. Let us get back to the incendiary sister. I suspect that you may be leaning on the spices that kitchen-wise Indians recommend for heating up the body. There is no hotter spice than the cinnamon! I recommend a healthy dose of cumin, famous for cooling. Your sister, however graceful and pretty, may well be as hot and piping as a cinnamon tree! Since she appears apt to turn her beloved brother out of the house, I think it quite likely.

Since she may be accustomed to the flame, I recommend that you begin by leaving bowls of the addictive talu caju lying about the house. These spicy cashews will appease her fire-eating desires with cayenne and fresh-ground pepper, while you soothe her inner demon with roasted cumin seeds.

(Myself, I quite like a cinnamon girl. Did you say that she is pretty? Smart, funny, and clean as well? Perhaps I could distract her from this irritating focus on a brother... Write to me "in care of" the Beggar Queen's private address.)

Pax tecum, my pakora-loving friend--
the Pot Boy

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Photo credit: This is a royalty free picture by Marta Rostek of Poland,
obtained via www.sxc.hu.

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Other replies will soon be posted.

Have a question for the Pot Boy? Please deposit at http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2006/03/pot-boy-tells-all.html.
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The Pot Boy Tells All

The Pot Boy has captured the castle. The Beggar Queen is out, and mice will jig.

I have wanted to be more than a Pot Boy. In fact, I have a yen to be Palace Advice Columnist. Send me your questions, doubts, and uncertainties, and I will, with a whisk of my kitchen wand tipped with the old scrubbing brush, clean away the grime and oil and display an answer--the battered old silver of a pot shining like the moon.

Why not? If the Beggar Queen is also a Laundrywoman, why not the Pot Boy a P. A. C.? So bring me your dirty pots of grief, your pans jostling with questionmarks, your tired saucepans, your poor spatulas, your wire meshes yearning to spring free, etc.

I set myself up to answer questions on:
proper attire for festive events in the kitchen;
what you should do next;
arts and letters;
your good and bad fortune;
reticence and confession;
advice to the lovelorn;
the Beggar Queen and retinue;
dinner at the Palace;
the meaning of life;
priests, kings, fools, and wastrels;
what we sing in the kitchen while laboring at the fire;
the Great Chain of Being;
the best way to pare your nails;
the music of the Spheres;
joy, laughter, and grief;
the keeping of peacocks, etc.

In short, all.
Except politics.

* * * * * * *

Photo credit: Well, I'm not sure about this one. I might have saved it off a commerical site but failed to note where... If anybody knows the source, please tell me. But I think it's an American tin kitchen, not a German or French one. I like the way the bigger doll is about to play with the smaller one.

*******

Second thoughts about the wee matter of politics: Nevertheless, I'm very tempted to rant about exactly why Yale thought it wisdom to accept former Taliban spokesman Ramatullah Hashemi as a student but refused to take part in the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women...

P-BUEAG! Pot Boys United for the Education of Afghan girls!
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