Thanks for all your helpful comments and suggestions about teapot aesthetics and gender! In the end I settled on a Denby teapot that looks a bit like this picture. I think it's a bit more original, and likely to be easier to clean, than a transparent Bodum one. Then I used lots of creative googling to find a website that would sell it to me for a reasonable price and accept my foreign bank card. Conclusion: yay, I have a Christmas present for my Beau.

Even more yayful, though, is that teapot karma has returned to me with amazing speed. I went to a Progressive committee meeting this evening, and it was as usual both enjoyable and productive. Now, the thing is that I had invited the chairman of the committee to my teaparty last week (though she couldn't make it in the end), as she's become a personal friend and gets on well with cartesiandaemon. So she knew that my 30^th birthday was coming up, and decided to club together with the committee to buy me a present. And guess what they chose? A teapot for the eccentric British tea addict!

It's really pretty, too, it's a unique artist-made one with a spout shaped like a sort of Viking bird's head. Apparently the potter assured EBH that it's a real teapot that will take hot tea and pour properly. Squee!