The final tea in the box is simply called Advent, and frankly I am a little nervous that it will be heavily spiced and nasty. One thing we can be sure of after this month of tea is that tea should NOT be mucked about with, in the adding of unnecessary whole cloves or indeed making it taste of cola.

You can see why I might be worried: two lots of ginger. Orange. And both are discernible flavours in the brew, neither in a subtle way, and yet it is a pleasantly drinkable, albeit unashamedly novelty tea. Noveltea. Luckily I am a huge fan of ginger, and I’m rather enjoying this in a one-off sort of way.

I saved the festive mug for Christmas Eve. It has no interesting back story whatsoever; turns out I only have 23 mugs that I can find something to say about. I almost feel I should ditch the remaining unstoried mugs from the crate in the garage; what have they done to deserve their storage space? And even if I was to go back to face-to-face evening classes, I’d be inclined to invite people to bring their own mugs.

It only remains for me to thank you for tolerating my wittering about tea and trying to amuse you with the excessive number of meaningful mugs owned by a family of three, one of whom rarely drinks hot drinks, and one of whom uses the exact same mug every single time. And of course to wish you some sort of festive joy, peace on earth and so on, who am I kidding? As for the Happy New Year part of things, I am pretty sure the 31st December is an arbitrary point in time, rather than a tipping point from a bad set of 366 days to a good set of 365, so good luck with that. Just make sure you’ve got enough tea.