Tea Terrors

I’ve got some new scoop on Miranda and Jennifer, and their recent return to the village. Sherrilyn has confirmed our suspicions that they’re here to reboot the teashop, but apparently without a known source for their star ingredient. Apparently, all the podiatrists in the region have gotten wind of precisely what the sisters have been doing with the bags of toenail clippings they’ve been collecting from the clinics, and are now refusing to participate in the scheme.

That means Miranda and Jennifer must either find a new source for nail clippings, or else think of a new ‘secret’ ingredient. Honestly, I’m not convinced that toenails have any beneficial properties when consumed orally, even if they have been finely powdered and cured in a jar with a single moon-charged bay leaf. So I’m holding out hope that they’ll switch to elderflowers or something.

Unfortunately for everyone, their track record isn’t promising. Before they got onto toenails in tea, they were using old compression socks to flavour honey. This was common knowledge among the local wyrd folk and we all avoided the shop like the plague, but the townsfolk were completely oblivious and saw it as a delicacy, praising its ‘earthy’ and ‘curious’ flavour.

We couldn’t tell them. It would have led to yet another shunning, and the last time that happened there were pitchforks involved. It can get pretty messy. So we just let it be and hoped it would go away, which it eventually did when all the podiatrists around Cheltenham stopped supplying the sisters with used compression socks.

At the time, I thought that was because the podiatrists had figured out what the socks were being used for. I assumed they were keeping mum about it so as not to be seen as complicit in the deed. But then they moved right onto supplying toenails clippings, so I guess there must have been some other reason they stopped with the socks.

We can only hope that Miranda and Jennifer have discovered what you can do with flowers and herbs since we last saw them.