When tea leaves in a cup could predict your romantic future Support for new farmers

DOES anyone use tea leaves to brew their favourite cuppa these days? It’s a question I put in this column many years ago. Teabags are the in thing – they’re quick to deliver, easy to discard and you don’t even need a pot to brew them in.

Drop a teabag in your cup, add hot water, leave for a minute or two, stir, remove and your tea is ready to be savoured.

It wasn’t like that not so long ago, and perhaps some purists still prefer leaves.

My mother had a friend whose party trick was to “read” what leaves were left at the bottom of a cup were telling her, and after a few moments of studying the pattern she would tell your fortune and what the future had in store.

It was good innocent fun. I remember she would swill a bit of tea around the bottom of the cup, tip out the liquid and then gaze intently into the bottom.

I was leaving for overseas soon after one of these light-hearted sessions and she told me how I was going to meet a dark-haired colleen on a beach in Ireland, and she would be walking a dog.

It sounded such fun, but sadly in my two-and-a-half years in England and Wales I never did get to Ireland, either then or later.

I wonder what that “heartbroken” Irish lass (she’d hardly be that now) did with her life.

In actual fact, I did meet a girl on a beach in Ibiza, what today is known as Spain’s Party Island.

She was American, not Irish, didn’t have a dog, but I still fell in love with her. We had a wonderful, carefree two weeks together and finally our ways had to part as she headed off to study at a university in Germany and I was about to take up a job on a newspaper in Wales.

She gave me a piece of paper with her address on it, but as I did not have anywhere in Wales to stay at that time I could not tell her what my address would be and her details would be the only means of contacting each other.

Somewhere between saying goodbye and settling in to my new job, I lost that piece of paper.

I sent letters to several universities where I thought she might be. Each of them was returned with a “not known at this address” scrawled across the envelope and I finally had to give up, move on and try to forget her. Hitching up with an Irish colleen or an American girl named Judy was not to be.

Instead, after finishing 14 months in Wales and a further six months working on The Times newspaper in London, on the way home I met a very nice South African from Natal on the Union Castle ship, Edinburgh Castle.

I didn’t lose her address, we kept in touch, saw each other when we could, and the rest is history – we’ve lived happily ever after.

She was the Mrs Chiel-to-be and two days before our first baby was born, we got a new puppy.

Talking about tea, the subject of the scum floating on the top of your cuppa has never bothered me, but it clearly did many others. So way back in the 1990s chemists at the Imperial College of Technology, Science and Medicine in London started investigating, and came up with answers.

That scum is mostly calcium carbonate formed by chemical reactions between hard water and tea. The addition of acid decreases the amount of scum while an alkali increases it. Lemon reduces it, while milk, which is alkaline, makes it worse. Scum develops only in water containing calcium or magnesium and bicarbonate ions. This is “hard” water.

The longer a teabag is left in a cup, the more scum forms. Scum also forms quicker if the tea is kept warm. The tea itself can also be blamed because of the fermentation process used to convert green tea to black tea.

So now you know. Next time you make yourself tea with tea leaves, don’t strain them away, let some of the leaves into your cup and when you’ve downed the liquid and there are a few leaves left at the bottom, look inside and let your imagination run riot.

Or ask someone else with a bit of imaginative thinking to analyse what they see. You never know what it might lead to. — THE article “Why land reform fails emerging SA farmers” (DD, December 7) refers. The contribution of the study group on land restitution focusing on a Macleantown project is welcome news and draws our attention once more to the role of agriculture in our fight against poverty.

However, the article begins with a stipulation that the post-land distribution phase has been a failure and this is largely due to a lack of support from government. A look at the support systems for emerging farmers, however, makes this stipulation questionable. There seem to be quite a few organised support systems providing active leadership in resolving the problems of small-scale farmers.

The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries held a National Cooperatives Indaba in 2012 dedicated to creating a model that would enable smallholder farmers to establish sustainable cooperatives. This was open to small-scale farmers who wished to have input. The papers presented are worth reading.

In 2014 the National Youth Development Agency held an Agriculture Youth Indaba to provide support for unemployed youth who wished to engage in agribusiness enterprises. This is significant because we come from a tradition of looking at agriculture as menial work, not as a business enterprise capable of earning income.

In May 2016 private business held its Annual Green Youth Indaba to support youth interested in the Green Economy. The National African Farmers Union (Nafu) and the African Farmers Association (Afasa), both participants at the Department of Agriculture indaba also offer support and information to farmers.

The problem therefore, may not be the absence of information and support, but the absence of community leadership, resulting in an information gap which is typical of our rural communities. This creates the anomaly of a country awash with useful information, but the information rarely making it to the communities that need it at rural local level.

Active community leadership can change this in two ways. First is establishing village institutions around identified problem areas. The goals of these institutions are to bridge the gap between the village’s lack of information and the available information that can help it achieve its objectives. If the village identifies a lack of skills training as a problem, then there should be a village institution to provide leadership on skills development and act as a vehicle for assessing and planning on all issues related to skills training.

It becomes the new leadership on skills development for the village. It should be structured with regular meetings and institutional memory. It should send delegates to the various indabas held by other stakeholders in agriculture to upgrade the village information bank on skills development.

The institution is developmental and does not meet only if there is a crisis. Symbolically it becomes imbhokodo (a grindstone), that resilient tool we use to put food on the table.

The second role for community leadership is to establish links between the village and all stakeholders that can provide solutions to identified local problems and invite them to conduct local workshops. Absence of leadership may be the reason why, for example, the village has not contacted the NYDA in nearby East London or the Department of Agriculture to provide workshops for the village on agricultural skills.

It may also be why the problem of “infighting” has not led to the deployment of trained social workers to hold group encounters in the community.

The perception that the implementation phase of land reform is a failure may be an overstatement. This phase of all projects always has problems because desk planning is being merged with the reality on the ground, which in itself may be a moving target. Bumps on the road do not mean failure. Just adjustment. The bottom line is there is a solution to the problems raised by this study and we can make it all work if we try. — Wongaletu Vanda, via e-mail