Category: Reviews

Down Dog yoga app: a flexible practice aid

Yoga is a great complement to karate training. The combination of strengthening, stretching out and resetting your body, plus the focus on posture and alignment, makes for great hojo undo. But the time and the expense can be difficult to manage – and I’ve got a hectic schedule anyway. 

I discovered the Down Dog yoga app last year, after looking at few alternatives. It’s a nice, clear interface, and you can choose both which model demonstrates the poses (though only two are available at the moment) and the voice that reads out the instructions (the one that sounds like Dame Judi Dench as M is my favourite). There’s music, but I switch that off as it interferes with my focus – which is often compromised anyway by deliveries, obstructive furniture and having to scoop the cat up from the end of my mat every so often. You can set the parameters for each session by picking a ‘type’ (including standard choices like hatha and vinyasa, as well as ‘Wake Up Yoga’ and Pilates), a level, how much instruction you get and how long you spend in each bit of the practice (like warm up and savasana). The ‘Boost’ and ‘Secondary Boost’ features, which let you choose emphases for your practice (like neck stretches or back strength), is useful when I particularly need to stretch out my dodgy hip and my push-up solidified shoulders. A real teacher’s input is probably important if you want to make significant progress, though: I thought my stiff hips were stopping me achieving half lotus, and the virtual teacher happily supplied fixes for that, but my human teacher pointed to my stiff quads.

Once you’re into your practice, you can give poses the thumbs up or thumbs down – choose the former and you’ll get more of them in future sessions; choose the latter and they’ll be excluded from your practice. While that seems like a good move for dealing with injuries or poses that are out of reach for you, it’s probably not what a real teacher would do. A practice that’s just made up of a succession of things you like or find comfortable may stretch a few muscles but will not truly develop your body and mind in the comprehensive way a yoga practice intends. A real teacher would usually adapt the pose to something you can achieve, help you into the pose you think you can’t do or give you a preparatory exercise. 

The ‘full instruction’ setting gives a lot less guidance than I’d expect – but that’s not a problem if you’re using it alongside at least occasional sessions with a real teacher. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the app doesn’t have the capacity to check you’re doing the poses properly, so there might be a significant risk of injury – or at least no progress – if you don’t have a fair bit of yoga experience. This is probably what’s said in the lengthy disclaimer you get shown when you start using the app, though I didn’t read it and I doubt anyone else will. 

The only advantages of the app over real classes are the price – £58.99 a year (or more if you pay monthly) – and that you can choose the length of your practices to within five minutes, and do them whenever you like. But this is a false comparison: the app isn’t a replacement for a real teacher, but it is a really useful and incredibly convenient practice aid – a more sophisticated version of the posters and cards I used to use. It adds enough variety to help you avoid getting stuck in a rut with your own practice when you can’t get to classes, and helps to maintain your progress.

Joy Tea: Pukka teas

Joy Tea is part of a range of Pukka teas and a general wellbeing fad for providing emotional sustenance through herbal teas, usually with a self-care undertone. While taste and smell are always evocative, I’d hesitate to agree that herbal tea could meet my emotional needs in the same way that a stiff black coffee can turf me out of bed in the mornings. As Nina Stibbe says, ‘Coffee is not a drink… it’s not a drink like tea is a drink. Coffee is a drug. It’s just like having a cigarette or pill…’* Look, I enjoy herbal tea, really I do, but to suggest that at least the supermarket-level retail version has any psychoactive properties seems to be stretching it a bit. 

Image: https://www.pukkaherbs.com/uk/en/products/joy-tea

I picked up this particular variety while shopping for the final ingredients for Christmas dinner at a huge Tesco Extra, one of life’s less joyful experiences. My other half was hell bent on finding some ready-made stewed red cabbage, and I wasn’t sure that red cabbage was actually a proper part of Christmas dinner, so I started to flag quite quickly after seeking it out in the vegetable section, the ready meal section and eventually the freezer section. The endless patience required for the red cabbage quest plus the need to choose between a massive number of essentially the same beans meant we were starting to get fractious when we got to the tea aisle, so the choice of wellness option seemed obvious, as did grabbing something fast and fighting our way to the checkout as quickly as we could. 

Once brewed, Joy Tea is a golden caramel colour and smells somewhere between dusty potpourri and the orange creams neither of us like in a box of chocolates. But the flavour is a lot more exciting. Many herbal teas tend to be a bit bland, flavour wise, or they smell of bath oil and taste of nothing. This one tastes like high-end neroli perfume smells – both floral and fruity, both fresh and warm – with a thickness that makes it feel quite substantial. Joy is still a bit of a stretch, but this tea genuinely brings some sunny cheer into a cold afternoon, and it’s warming enough for a blustery day. I just wish it would stop reminding me of shopping for red cabbage.

* In Went to London, Took the Dog

Album review: Mogwai – The Bad Fire

Album review in Joyzine.

Book review: A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry

Book review in Joyzine.

Café Ole – a working brew

Café Ole plays jolly, sunny, house-ish music with chiming piano, in contrast to the overcast day and heavy roadworks outside. Intermittent drilling adds to the soundtrack. There’s a large counter that juts half way out into the café, with an enormous coffee machine and an impressive selection of cakes, and the interior is bright, warm and welcoming after the gloom outside. An old man sits in the window, dozing, his head nodding towards his knees. Every so often it dips too low and he pulls it up sharply, then starts dozing again. 

Check out the mug

There are plenty of people here, but there’s only conversation from one table because the rest of us are on our own, most with laptops and one with a headset too. Some only have tea on their tables, maybe a good sign. Agile waiting staff dodge and weave between the tables. There’s another writer, busily scribbling on A4 sheets, leaning on a magazine, the author stopping every so often to consider the roadworks and the HGVs lurching awkwardly into sideroads to avoid them.

My tea arrives in a lovely big round mug, with the bag steeping nicely and a spoon on the side, plus a very generous jug of oat milk. There’s no tag on the bag, but the brew looks rich and promising. I’m not blown away, but the tea is warm and satisfying, and the cup is delightful to hold.

It’s a lovely place to sit, and a pleasant place to work – it looks like quite a few locals have clocked that. There’s also a luscious looking menu as well as the cakes, and the lunch crowd are starting to trickle in. I might pop back later on, with my laptop. 

Graveney & Meadow tea – twenty out of ten for tea

Graveney & Meadow hasn’t been open for long this morning, but it already seems to have woken up. It’s dark inside, and it isn’t brightened by the retro décor or the fairy lights that hang from the ceiling. People are wheeling in buggies with toddlers trotting along beside them or wide-eyed babies, goggling at new surroundings, clutched on one hip. Snatches of squeeze box drift out of the corner where the buggies are lined up, drawing commentary. Toddler requests for lunch are declined, but plates stacked high with muffins and hash browns, with fluffy parmesan on top, are making me hungry too.

The bar man explains that he needs to take some food to people, so he’ll bring my tea over. I don’t mind waiting – my chair is really comfortable. Actually, all the chairs here look like they’d be good for extended sitting. It’s a nice change from the move-on-quickly-please hard chairs in so many places. The tea arrives shortly afterwards, neatly laid out on a tray. The cup is nice and thick, the oat milk is slightly frothy, and the teapot is of the metal, Tardis variety1 – so what looks like a one-cup serving should comfortably yield two full cups, hopefully without scalding the hands. 

Some excellent tea

It’s bag tea, without an identifying tag. I’ve left it to brew for a while, so when I pour it out – successfully, it’s not a true Tardis pot – it’s nice and thick. It’s a solid brew, with plenty of body, richly malty and slightly astringent. And it’s perfect. Twenty out of ten. I bet that’s why all the parents are here – it takes a brew of that stature to get the show on the road again after an exhausting morning of fielding toddlers.

I can just about hear gently ambient music above clattering cutlery and bubbling conversation, then the squeeze box kicks in again, this time with singing, plus the bar man banging coffee out of the machine’s filter. A doddering toddler keeps wandering to the main door and trying to push it. It’s too heavy to give access to the street, but nearly all the clientele look up every time there’s an attempt, just to make sure. 

Watching all this, I’ve managed to spill tea down my second favourite scarf. Although it makes me fit in nicely with most of the other people here, I’m going to head home and sort it out. Back for more twenty-out-of-ten tea soon. 

  1. Ben Elton’s The Man From Auntie, at 2:32, though it’s really worth watching the whole thing – it has aged very well. ↩︎

Night Riviera

I feel as if I’m on a ferry, not a train. The head end of my bed seems to roll backwards every so often as the train lurches round bends.

When the knock at the door comes, The Wife is already up and ready to retrieve the morning dose of the Sacred Liquid. Getting hold of it means navigating the suitcase that wouldn’t fit under the bottom bunk and which now takes up the entire tiny floorspace, then retrieving the tray from the steward while stopping the door from slamming the tray back into the corridor.

It doesn’t look promising. There are two paper cups of hot water, two plastic-wrapped pastries and two packets of biscuits, plus tea paraphernalia including bags in sachets, sugar, milk and those long wooden stirrers that pierce the bag and result in gritty tea, if you’re not extremely careful. I had banked on being given generic non-dairy milk in one of the plastic pots with the foil lids that contain very little liquid, but which can project their contents a surprising distance. Instead, there are sachets of actual milk.

While I hum and ha about whether to have black tea or add the milk, The Wife brews hers up. The bag is in a foil sachet with a Union Jack. ‘Tregothnan’, it says. ‘THE TEA GROWN IN ENGLAND.’ I’m hesitant, but The Wife has already got stuck into hers, and reports that it’s great.

‘I like the packaging,’ she says. ‘Bold and memorable. Very excellent colour very quickly, the water temperature was spot on, though I could have done with a bit more water in there because I could have done with a bigger tea in a bigger cup. I feel like a bigger cup would have done more justice to the tea bag because I felt like I could only dip the tea bag before taking it out. It was a quality teabag that had strength. I was happy with one milk sachet. Usually I only use a quarter of a sachet because the tea’s so weak. I liked that it came on a tray, it was a little moment of Agatha Christie.’ It went down far too quickly, she laments, and she could have done with another three or four cups.

I score a sip of hers to decide on the milk question. She’s right – it’s excellent, and she makes me an identical one. The paper cup is much better than a plastic one; I have no idea why. The Wife perches on the bottom bunk, bent awkwardly and without sufficient headroom to sit up and enjoy the ambrosial brew, while I sit back on the top bunk with my cup, watching the scenery, braving cold blasts of air conditioning and trying not to spill any when the train pitches and rolls. Like The Wife’s tea, mine is over too soon and we return the tray to the steward with grateful compliments, because this lovely welcoming drink was far more than we expected.

We and our awkward luggage stumble down the corridor, on to the platform and into the lounge, where there is more of the same and the quantity deficit is repaired. We are ready to do the day.

Costa Coffee, Balham

Traffic grinds along; clattering busses and groaning motorbikes. The first schoolkids have started to walk past, some neat in new uniforms and some with saggy blazers and untucked shirts. There’s a general increase in pedestrian traffic, all wandering past the tables not quite lined up outside the coffee shop. It’s in a big street in a relatively wealthy area, yet has the transitory feel of a mainline station on a Sunday evening, when the trains are sparse or cancelled. The raggedy outside of the café, with its tumbleweed litter and scrolling loners, contrasts to the bright and neat interior with its chatty staff.

A lady with neon pink hair and double denim wanders up to me. ‘Have you got another pound?’ she asks.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘I’ll have to have some water before I go,’ she continues, patting her stomach. ‘I might go to the bank tomorrow. I’ve seen some leggings that I like.’

I smile, I have no idea what to say. Eventually, I settle on ‘I hope that goes okay’. She turns round and heads into the café.

A couple sit next to me, plonking down one espresso between them, then quickly evaporate. Children congregate in huddles at the bus stop and smaller knots outside the supermarket, emerging with plastic-wrapped snacks. The mint tea I ordered is now thoroughly steeped, and is destined to be more so since our conversationalist has now been replaced by an over-friendly wasp, whose attentions continue for some considerable

(wasp)

The tea is served as a bag in a tall glass mug with a fiddly handle accompanied by a pot of hot water that looks small, but makes a few cups. If this were at home, a co-habitee might make remarks about creating unnecessary washing up or

(wasp)

It’s particularly interested in my handbag, though there’s no sugar and it’s

(wasp)

The tea is kind of indeterminate. It has a mint flavour, but it’s like the mint flavour that comes with toothpaste or chewing gum, a sort of breath freshener and cooler rather than something that involves food or drink. There’s a lot of it, which is fine by me, but eventually the air starts to get chilly. The kids have long gone home, the fellow scrollers have moved on and even the wasp has packed up for the day, so I’m off too.

Having a Brew

Today is an in between day. Drizzling, but half-heartedly. Not actually cold, but you’ll need a coat. It isn’t the kind of weather that requires the kind of dark, thick, muscular brew that gets an army marching, but nor is it a pale Earl Grey day. Brew Tea’s 1940s-style packaging suggests marching tea, but then hints at more complexity, with florid descriptions of flavour and even suggestions for food pairings. Intriguing.

Brew Tea package

The tea arrives stylishly in a slogan-decorated box which, when dismantled, yields a lovely stripy present: gift wrapped Assam and English Breakfast. It’s a lovely idea for an actual gift, but perhaps more packaging than I’d like for our standard consumption, which could probably keep said army hydrated, if not necessarily marching.

There were two cards inside the box: a recycling guide and a ‘What to do while you brew’ card, with a game on it. The recycling guide is handy: it says that though the bag is compostable, it can ‘take a while to compost at home’. I’ve used compostable plastic-look packaging before – and found that it wasn’t. The Wife ended up having to fish it out of the compost bin while trying not to get a handful of worms or slimy peelings. I had an incident with a slug.

I brew the English Breakfast in my favourite teapot. The leaves obligingly expand on application of the water and the smell is just what we’re looking for – somewhere between warm oven and autumn walk. I pour it out – mine with oat milk, and The Wife’s with standard full-fat dairy. It looks a bit pale to me, maybe even a bit watery. Did I put enough leaves in the pot? Never mind; we can always brew a stronger one later. Here goes.

‘Quite a sturdy colour,’ The Wife says, on receiving her cup (a bone china number with a Quentin Blake illustration). There’s a pause while she spills some and dabs at her jeans. ‘Quite a welcoming tea smell,’ she continues. ‘Slightly overmilked’ (she can do her second cup herself, then). I’m quite impressed with mine. It doesn’t look as strong as our usual stuff, but it’s actually nicely malty, quite flavourful and has a pleasant astringency.

The Wife sips again. ‘Very subtle taste.’ Another sip, more dabbing, a quick trip into the kitchen for a cloth. ‘It’s the kind of tea you can drink gallons of without feeling over tea’d.’ She heads off to assemble her second cup, avoiding ‘overmilking’. ‘It’s one of those teas you feel like if you have a quick cuppa, you’ve had some light refreshment – rather than a strong brew where you feel like you need a biscuit with it.’

My father is quite specific on the subject of tea and biscuits, opining that a ‘naked drink’ is a horror on a par with ‘insubstantial marmalade’ (the stuff with thin peel, he explains, that you get in environmental time bomb containers, in hotels). He reliably produces Tunnock’s Teacakes, Abernethy biscuits or similar on all tea occasions.

On that note, I draw The Wife’s attention to the box, which suggests pairing this drink with food. It tells us that ‘A really good milk chocolate brings out the sweeter caramel notes.’ I rifle through the cupboards. The only milk chocolate I can find is St Petersburg souvenir chocolate, a fetching purple box of pieces individually wrapped in jolly illustrations of the city. We have to abandon this quite quickly, since the chocolate had, in The Wife’s words, ‘had its chips’ and we had perhaps carelessly allowed it to melt and reform on our journey home from the friend who supplied it. ‘Was there really no other chocolate in the cupboard?’ she says, with a furrowed brow. She finishes her cup and heads to the shops.