Dregs?
Dregs? What’s left after you’ve drunk your tea.
Dregs seemed to be my unpreferred beverage of choice. Christmas 2011 failed to gift me any cheer or income from what was hailed as a ‘best-seller’ (forty poems about tea). A booklet-cum-guidebook about local tearooms followed and was out of date within two days of publication.
Possible second and third literary infusions were too weak to pour.
By 2015 I wondered if perhaps the dregs themselves held the gift? Deciding to shift from poetry to the trending genre of the day (misery memoir) I began charting the downs and downs of my tea-loving escapades as a Z-list ‘celebritea’ and writer. ‘Legs from the Dregs ~ Tales and Fails of a Tea Poet’ was the result. It rewarded me with rejection slips.
You have been spared…
In hindsight – always unhelpful – it’s clear the fails were judged on my finances. A late developing writer, I now know money is never an appropriate measuring stick.
Back then, my economic status was confirmed by my generous fiancé as he bailed me out yet again…
‘You’re poor as a church mouse.’
Hmm… the phrase always irritated. Church mice never seemed poor to me. No doubt they enjoyed a regular diet of holy wafers, indulged during the feast of Harvest Festival, and were probably fed morsels from clergy who knew their home was open to the smallest of worshippers.
But we seldom look outside our own species for comparison… And comparison is usually married to expectation. Mine was stratospherically high.
In a remarkably serendipitous way, my introduction to the novice loose leaf tea drinker – largely in rhyme - had been taken up by Quiller Press. And on publication of ‘Distinguished Leaves ~ poems for tea-lovers’ in September 2011, The National Trust had added the Beatrix Potter inspired little book as a welcome addition to their ‘gift table’. I assumed the profits would be quite sufficient to live on.
Adding to my innocent delight, the book was also bought in non-returnable thousands by a company whose heart-warming strategy was selling via a catalogue distributed to factories and offices. I failed to note the discount they negotiated with my publisher.
‘Distinguished Leaves’ was their first (and possibly last) poetry book, sitting on a page alongside Jamie Oliver’s latest recipes. Returning a miniscule profit to Quiller, and a virtually invisible one to the book’s author seemed inconsequential at the time. But the gold of gratitude provides its own, if different, kind of sustenance. And the leaves had a good flavour – my primary wish for ‘Distinguished Leaves’ was that it be accessible and affordable.
But not affordable enough to keep my static mobile home on the Herefordshire ground it had occupied since winning my publishing contract… More than fifteen years later ‘Legs from the Dregs’ has morphed into something less misery and more miraculous. We return to the common ground that we and our non-human kin occupy.