Gypsy Creams

Jamie on 20 May 2011 @ 4pm

Actually, this is a very good idea, much missed now. My Fair Trade tea does say where it comes from, but the stuff I have in for my mum doesn’t even hint at where it came from: “packed in the UK from tea imported by Twinings”. Helpful!

I suppose, like the Lion Mark on eggs, it was seen as something we didn’t want any more (without asking us). The Lion Mark on eggs came back after 30 years, so maybe it’s time for the Ceylon Lion to make a reappearance?

David L on 21 May 2011 @ 3pm

POONAKANDY THAT’S RUDE.

Martin Fenton on 25 May 2011 @ 11pm

You can, of course, still get Ceylon tea. I’m convinced that the lion branding continued for some years after the country became Sri Lanka (which was in 1972. I was born in 1976 and, unless it was a particularly old box lying around in my Nan’s pantry – which seems unlikely given her prodigious consumption of loose-leaf tea – I remember the lion from my early childhood. I can’t remember the brand, but it was something “exotic” to a child only used to PG Tips in bags.)

She also kept a stock of the aforementioned Tips in, for us heathens. She claimed she could taste the paper used in the bags. After she died (when I was 9), I was given several hundred of the collectors’ cards given away with PG Tips, dealing with a diverse variety of subjects from zoology to geography. I remember becoming faintly obsessed with the Matterhorn. The cards were kept loose in an old biscuit tin – she never bothered to put them into an album as intended. I think now what a strange thing it was for her to collect in her declining years, the cards being tiny and my Nan being almost completely blind by that time. But then she was years ahead of her game when it came to what we now call “recycling.” She’s the one that taught my Auntie Sheila the value of carefully unwrapping presents and then ironing the giftwrap for re-use. (This is, believe it or not, extremely true, and we’ve only managed to convince Sheila not to do it in the last few years following decades of scorn and derision.)

But I digress. Ah, nostalgia. I think I’ll pour myself another glass of wine now and continue to think of “The Good Old Days.” Then I might have a little cry as I think of what a complex individual Leonard Sachs apparently was.

Martin Fenton on 25 May 2011 @ 11pm

Perhaps I should have Googled this before banging on about it above. The lion “symbol of quality” is, in fact, still used on packs of pure Ceylon tea. See here:
http://www.ceylon-tea-portal.com/