Time For Tea: Tea the Twenty-Seventh

Another novelty is the tea-party, an extraordinary meal in that,

being offered to persons that have already dined well,

it supposes neither appetite nor thirst,

and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment.

Jean Brillat-Savarin -The Physiology of Taste

The Eastbury Hotel, Long Street, Sherborne, Dorset - Saturday 14th December 2013

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Tea Takers

Sarah Ryan

Paul Ryan

Olivia Ryan

Roger An Grows

Jo Ellis

Paul Ellis

Rachel Greaves

Rosie Monaghan

Amelia Monaghan

Verity Monaghan

Maggie Nightingale

John Willetts

Lu Worrall

Sophie Worrall

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Another long anticipated tea, in a special place with a group of very important people.

Reaching the Dorset sign on the road from Wincanton to Sherborne is always a powerful symbol of coming home and so it was with enormous joy that we made the pilgrimage west to take tea in a place that will always mean home for us in some way.

Randomly applying for teaching jobs, as a postgraduate student who needed to pay off a loan, I ended up with my first post in Somerset. To be honest, before planning the drive to my interview, I wouldn't have been able to locate Somerset on a map (it's just one of those counties in 'the south', after all). I was phenomenally lucky - a fantastic early experience of teaching in a wonderful place, has led in the longer term to a range of surprising opportunities and more immediately to years living in a very lovely area. Paul, a year after my appointment at King's Bruton, then got his job at Sherborne School and our life in the South West was properly established. Sherborne was a first home after we were married and then the place to which we brought home our tiny person (born just across the border with Somerset, in Yeovil). Sherborne and its environs is the place where we became grown-ups, the place where we became a family, and to which we have indelible links of friendship and experience. The requirement for a tea here was then imperative.

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An 18th Century town house, converted into an hotel in the early 1900s, The Eastbury is the town's most elegant and renowned hostelry. It seemed very much the place to go and was certainly a very attractive and harmonious setting for tea the twenty-seventh. As we were a relatively sizable party were given the library to ourselves. An agreeable and well-appointed room with its green striped walls and heavy red velvet curtains, adding and appropriately festive air, it was certainly a charming location, although it was a little surreal that the only time that Paul and I had been in there before (independently of each other, I might add) it had been for school planning away days, and so held interesting memories of discussions of maths and strategic development for us, respectively.

There is much to commend about the tea - the scones were excellent, and both they and the sandwiches were generous and fresh. Tea and coffee was readily supplied and replenished by our designated waitress who hovered discreetly by the door, to ensure that we were continuously provided with the necessary comestibles. Rather disappointingly, though, the 'full afternoon tea' did not include cakes, and the general presentation, whilst adequate, rather lacked the finesse I would have expected of the establishment. All in all though the quality of what was provided, in the very pleasant surroundings, was good and the joy of the company we were in ensured that it was a really fabulous occasion.

Lu passes the sandwiches

Maggie dispenses, or possible receives, tea - either way, she seems quite happy about it, which is more that you can say for John and Roger...

The younger ladies enjoyed a table to themselves.

Always nice to have tea in a library too, although some of the literature on the shelves was not at all to Mr Ryan's taste...

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The company at tea were a mixture of former colleagues, co-parishioners and fellow choir members (and their entourages) - with interesting intersections that could have inspired the first tea constituency Venn diagram of the odyssey, had I felt so inclined. They are all friends who are very important to us, despite the inconvenience of our living in Sussex and Yorkshire meaning that we now see them only on rare occasions. Jo very pleasingly said that when we are in Sherborne, it seems as if we are still there all the time - it is lovely to be able to slip back into friendships like these and to reaffirm how much they matter.

A significant number of those at tea are or were members of Sherborne Chamber Choir, and the importance of that particular institution in our lives cannot be underestimated; music, friends and fabulous experiences (the 1999 photo below was taken on the SCC tour to Paris - happy days...). We still miss it horribly... Nothing is likely to compare.

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Twenty-Seventh Tea - Twenty-Seventh Year

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Sherborne is an extremely beautiful market town, with an abundance of beautiful historical buildings, including its medieval abbey and almshouses, two castles, (both inhabited at some point by Walter Raleigh), not to mention the eponymous school. The golden Ham stone of the traditional buildings is glorious, and the beautifully haphazard conglomeration of buildings that cluster around the narrow roads, are idyllically English. It isn't easy, even when you are there all the time, to take this for granted, and when we come back to visit, it strikes us again and again how lucky we have been to have lived in the middle of all of this.