The English Tea Ceremony

Last weekend Sam (thefunkydrummer) and I finally finished putting together JETfuel, which is the magazine distributed to the hundred or so JETs in Fukui prefecture. Sam and I took up the position of editors last month, so this was our first issue together, and I think I can speak for both of us when I say that it was a damn sight harder to put it all together than we thought it would be.

Actually getting people to write stuff for the magazine was surprisingly easy (in fact we had to add in another four pages because we had so much stuff), but formatting the beast turned into a bit of an Olympian task. Both of us have spent the past week glued to our computer screens, jiggling around text boxes and fiddling with fonts until the cows came home, and then on Friday night we were up into the wee small hours trying to compile all the articles together, checking for errors, deciding page layout yada yada yada.

Anyway, we're both pretty pleased with the result, and I've had some positive feedback, so hopefully it's all worth it. At the moment we're trying to find a way to put the whole thing online, but that's unlikely to happen before the next issue in September (although some of the old issues are online here). In the meantime though, I thought I'd post an article I wrote called "The English Tea Ceremony". I've been getting a bit annoyed at the amount of press that the Japanese tea ceremony gets over here, so I thought I'd restore the balance with a celebration of a very English tradition.