I have no less than two close relatives named Paschal.

Mallory PLEASE marry me

Mallory please will you marry me

Have you seen the cringely named "Ethnic" aisles in places like Tesco? They have a lot of Irish stuff going on in the big shops. to the point that asking relatives going to Ireland to bring back Tatos has become unneccessary :/

Hail thee, Lady who knows her shit. I live in England and sometimes even here you can't find a good cup of tea. But at least e.g. when a new café opened up in my town I heard three different reports of how they'd served tea with the tea bag ON THE SIDE - it was alarming and presumably they've cleaned up their act a bit since.
Also, everybody accepts tea bags here - insisting on loose-leaf tea for every cup is slightly on the wrong side of faffiness and care. But the bags are good :) I'm studying at Cambridge Uni and in one of the colleges I saw this guy with a jumper draped over his shoulders walking across the courtyard with a full cup - like a round teacup that goes with a saucer - held out in front of him. My first reaction was yuck what kind of twat even looks like that but now when I look back I just really admire his dedication to tea. I've been late to lectures because of making a good cup of tea (it's so hard to get the balance of milk, sugar and brewing time right that not every cup is excellent, even when you make several a day every day for ten years) and having to finish it before leaving.

Basically I lived in Italy last year and understand this struggle on many levels (the Italians I knew weren't into tea, and the bags in supermarkets contained gram for gram about half as much tea, so I could never make a good strong brew).

TEA.

i wrote a love poem for her on my fridge in french this could go nowhere

I NEED TO TELL MY BEST FRIEND I LOVE HER

"[rant rant rant rant rant.] and yet people seem to be chuckling"
crrrringE!!!

I think you just subtly but importantly Changed My Life, Nicole - or I did, but thanks to you! You had me at "progressive librarians in sexy glasses" and I have never done an internet exercise thing before thatv actually worked and didn't leave me fearing for my lower back which has a discy problem but which my doctor's advice for is "stay active" (hmm :/), even though as a 20-y/o I feel like I should be able to do ALL the internet exercisey things, y'know? But this was actually the first that I read and thought "this person sounds like she has common sense and understands me, i.e. someone who would struggle to define "plank" or "squat" outside of lumber and housing contexts. So THANK YOU! I sweated in places I didn't think it was possible to sweat from. And I did it in my sexy cat-eye glasses! <3

Wow! I have never read any Sayers (but will now toute de suite), I loved reading this as an essay in and of itself though.Especially this line, which brought a tear to my eye (kind of tragically):
"And being in love and in the closet at sixteen only adds the vertiginous sense that there is nothing, really, but self and desire, in infinite recursion."
I fell in love at 16. We broke up not long ago after 4 heady years together, and that is exactly what it felt like, at the beginning. At the time we fell in love, I should have been grieving for my dying granddad, I should have been preparing myself for uni applications. But I recently re-read my diary from that period and that's all there was to my world at that time: self and desire, in infinite and exhausting recursion. You put it so beautifully. Thank you.