Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #22

Hello there! There’s a lot of tea-related content this week so let’s begin with this dreamy whole-peony tea I drank last week. A friend gave me a peony tea-ball for Christmas and I decided it was time to treat myself…

I will try really hard not to talk about the weather this week except to say it continues to be frigid and I lit the fire again this morning.

F and I have been focusing on making our tiny backyard a little slice of urban green refuge for the summer. I bought the above park bench off a local father and son team who make them to fund the son’s activities so it felt lovely to both have a solid new garden seat and support a young entrepreneur.

Then (anti-thesis of keeping it local) we went to Bunnings just to buy boring useful things and impulse-bought a birdbath. Our old birdbath was a rusting early C20th cream can with a large terracotta plate on it. Here is our new one. It seemed a pretty good price given they often go for multiple hundreds and I love the colour.

We aren’t big spenders at all so both of these impulsive purchases make for big news around here.

We have a lot of tui in our backyard and I’ve been enjoying watching them with their spring ‘crazies’: swooping, diving, mating, scrapping on the wing. It’s been all go.

Here’s some things which caught my eye recently:

A tasty way to use up any bolting silverbeet

Lots of my silverbeet is threatening to bolt so we’ve been eating more silverbeet than usual lately. It’s not the tastiest just sautéed on it’s own but I’ve been resolutely serving it in this simple way because I loathe waste and also, it’s good for us.

Eating it like this I’m taken back to my childhood where boiled silverbeet was a common side to our meat+three veg dinners.

This recent recipe, Silverbeet Feta Filo Pie, from NZ food writer Nicola Galloway is a much tastier way to eat quite a bit of silverbeet. It calls for 500g of silverbeet.

(Besides, almost everything tastes good wrapped in filo.)

Nicola suggests serving ‘the warm pie with a simple spring salad or roasted vegetables, and a dollop of natural yoghurt.’ Yum!

Affordable Art: ‘Big and Small Fight For Them All’

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know about my fondness for frogs.

This week’s affordable art ($50) is a lovely t-shirt design from Waikato’s ‘Go Eco’ Environment Centre. It depicts a native frog and the slogan ‘Big and Small: Fight for them All’. What a beautiful message.

Go Eco says: ‘This t-shirt has been inspired by our smallest and quietest endemic pepeketua – the Archey’s Frog. These tiny, nocturnal creatures are among the world’s oldest surviving frog species, with their lineage dating back over 200 million years!  They are critically endangered, but still facing threats from mining interests – highlighting the importance of fighting for all creatures – Big and Small.’

Does a t-shirt count as art? Of course it does! It’s art that you wear on the billboard of your chest.

Song: Ruti ‘If I Could Choose It Would Be You’

This is a memorising song by a fresh young artist.

The song begins subtly and sounds like it will be another pleasant enough guitar-based folk song but at around 1min 20 seconds she changes pitch and starts to sing very high and it elevates the song so much and becomes so very sweet and transporting. Plus I’m a sucker for songs in 3/4 time.

I reckon it’s bound to become a classic love song.

(I add one song to the ongoing playlist every time I write a digest. Listen to the whole playlist here.)

Poem: ‘Coping Poem’ by Sam Duckor-Jones

Sam’s work is always wry and sad and complex and nuanced.

In this poem, a woman accidentally uses a naff contemporary catchphrase, ‘lean in’, and then two friends lean in to leaning in…

‘They were huddled at a small uncomplicated table
They were literally leaning in
Oh god, she said

Lean in! he said, let’s just lean in
Let’s go ahead & lean in
& then keep on leaning in, he continued, til we’re all completely prone’

He wrote this ‘coping poem’ back in 2022 but I feel like we need it more than ever right now. It’s sad and funny and makes me also want to lie down too.

Read the whole poem on The Spinoff’s Friday Poem page.

A watch: Where have all the Bob Ross paintings gone?

Have you ever encountered the phenomena of Bob Ross? the afro-haired TV art teacher with the soothing voice and oddly compelling, if slightly generic, creative process?

Friends of ours used to put Bob Ross on the tv to calm their children down during the 4pm-6pm ‘twilight zone’. His calm voice and soothing vibe of his art lessons used to bring the dinner time crazies down a notch or two.

Bob Ross died back in 1995 but is more popular than ever…possibly because we all need more slow-moving and calming things to watch. He was also very funny (but only ever in a wholesome way.) Was he art any good? I don’t think so. To me it looks like the kind of thing I stroll past in op shops all the time…but the phenomena of Bob Ross is not really about the art.

Here’s an amusing short film (10mins) by the New York Times addressing the questions ‘Where are all the Bob Ross paintings’?

In the process, we get a glimpse at what happens at bobross.com and while they do sell ‘Bob Ross’ art supplies…what mainly happens is a lot of very wholesome fan support. Trust me, this is worth your attention even if you never heard of Bob Ross before today:

Random Things I Love: Community Hall Teapots

I have a bit of a ‘thing’ for community hall tea pots and crockery. Any community hall I go into I always go to the kitchen and have a nosey at their tea making apparatus. I especially love the gigantic ones that are so big they need two handles.

I bring it up because next week I am doing an author talk in a little hall and I’m sharing foraged and home made herbal tea and …I have to take my own teapots! Whaaat? I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end of giant community hall tea pots!

Here’s some photographs I have taken in community hall kitchens over the years:

(Above: in case you ever wondered how much a catering sized teapot cost > now you know. I found this pic when looking for hall teapot photos I’d taken over the years. I can’t remember if I was actually toying with buying one (why though?) or if I was just delighted to spot one in a kitchen shop.)

An excellent read: An existential guide to making friends

(Above: we used to have a blackboard on a door in the kitchen. The door is now gone which means the blackboard is also gone but I stand by this message.)

Wizard of Wellington Rosie shared this excellent article by ‘The Shadowed Archive’ on how to make and retain friends.

It’s warm, spirited writing and made me remember how friendly the world can be…with the right attitude.

I especially loved this:

‘Let the phone be a bridge, not a house.

DM to schedule the walk. Send the photo of the dog. Do not live inside the thread like a tapeworm. The group chat is a mulch heap: throw scraps in, grow pumpkins out here.’

It’s long…do read the whole thing… the ending is especially poignant with thoughts about friendship endings.

The best thing I found at the op-shop this year

Finally, while I’m riffing on tea pots, last month I found this tiny teapot at the opshop for $1.

It’s made from a gum nut, has an acorn top for a lid, a copper wire handle and spot and a verdigris copper heart on it. It’s way more darling in real life but here’s a not great photograph:

Whoever made it: I love you.

Until next time, do your best and each day, be sure to have some rest.

x Helen