I think the hardest moments come for everyone, at least a couple of times in life. Those experiences that shove you flat against the wall; the right hook to the liver slipping past your guard, finding its way through even when your fists are up. They’re the moments when you wonder what will happen between one breath and the next, what you’ll do once the diaphragm spasms are no longer dictated by events, when you start asking yourself whether the calm that follows the adrenaline might be even more terrifying than the disaster itself.
When the ringing of the phone fractures the silence of the night, and the insects stop circling the glow of the television screen; when they tell you your best friend has been in an accident, the metal folded around his smile; your father hasn’t been well, his heart too large struggles to carry the weight of his mercy this time; your mother lying there, clutching the bed rails like the edge of a storm-torn shore, still not ready for her final dance.
You come home after wandering the streets all night, thinking pain itself is keeping you upright, attacking the asphalt with that flaw of mercy life occasionally grants you. But the cold has caught up with you now; the whisky still makes you brave, though the drunkenness has started to release the heat from your body. Until that phone call, you thought you’d never cry again, that nothing could still catch you off guard. But now the ground feels like it’s giving way beneath your feet, and all you can do is cling to the memory of the words you wish you’d said back when things were good.
Now, I know the tea world is full of bullshit, customer-bait garbage and sensory discourse that sounds as though it were conceived in the aftermath of some cocktail of alcohol and psychiatric medication. But maybe, sometimes, believing that certain teas can at least help you keep your head up, help you stop bleeding as though they were some kind of haemostatic balm, isn’t that absurd after all.
This tea, Ruby Tuesday, has been for me more than once that damned ice pack pressed against the cheekbone, the delorazepam leaving your mouth slightly sweet before your head sinks into the pillow, yet without making the next morning feel as though you’ve woken up in another dimension.
Bhime is an incredible wild cultivar, and here it unfolds in notes of cocoa, dark chocolate, rosewood and rhubarb. Its broad complexity unravels breathlessly like a night at the Chelsea Hotel after too much mezcal and too much John Coltrane. Then comes a trace of quince jam, as though lifted from a Caravaggio still life, stained with cinnamon and wet earth, mineral in the way certain Tarkovsky shots make the world seem on the verge of rotting into something sublime. Then the candied mandarin lights everything up, leaving behind a bittersweet, feverish, nicotine-stained trail.
On the palate it is sweet, fruity, enveloping to the point of excess, absurdly persistent. It is exactly the kind of medicine that gets you back on your feet in the morning, carrying the same promise of salvation and destruction, taken just to help you force your way through the chaos that your life has become. A temporary prescription for those who always wake too late, gasping in a state of semi-hypoxia amid the stale smell of a body abandoned to itself, mingled with the acrid scent of ash.
Wild Harvested 
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