Train to London

EVEN AFTER the Beeching Axe fell in the 1960s, Great Britain still has plenty of trains. Trouble is, the lines are owned by a variety of companies that don’t necessarily coordinate scheduling among themselves, running often elderly equipment over often unkempt track lines.

Nevertheless, I devised a timetable that should have gotten my wife and me around the UK during our fortnight there. We had six connections to pursue. Southampton Central (SOU) to Seaford (Sussex) (SEF) required only one change, with a fifteen-minute window between trains. Seaford to Moreton-in-Marsh (MIM) in the Cotswolds was more involved, with one train-change to put us in London, a brief tube trip, then two more changes of train, the last of which with a nine-minute transfer window.

You get the gist, but let me get this out of my system. Moreton-in-Marsh to Manchester Victoria (MCV) demanded three train-changes, with ten- to 25-minute transfer windows. Manchester Victoria to Edinburgh (EDB) required one change, but Edinburgh to London Euston (EUS) was a single six-hour journey. Ditto the trip from London to Southampton: one train, but a tube trip to London Waterloo to start that one off. And all of this for a grand total of about £1,000.

The online reservations system was frustratingly inconsistent about the seats it offered, with off-peak, first class off-peak, first class anytime, and first-class advance among the mix, without noting why any one was available and others weren’t. Added to that was our luggage – two bags apiece, and that was packing lightly – as well as my transport chair, which folded into its own very bulky package. Would we be able to fit it all, never mind lug it from station to station? And the plan presupposed that trains would be on time, of course, and when I mentioned this to the people we met at our various stops, they laughed hollowly and approved the plan we eventually enacted: car service. I don’t even know how much that eventually cost us, as Susan got those credit-card bills, but it was well over a thousand pounds. And, as she agrees, it was worth it.

A Mid-Winter Sport Carnival

Guest Blogger Dept.: Looking for ways to combat the winter blahs? Robert Benchley offers an inspiring portrait of what the more adventurous folk among us are getting up to.

                                                                                                  

LONG ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR, we sportsmen find ourselves rather up against it for something to do to keep the circulation pounding even sluggishly along. Golf, tennis, and paddling about on water-wings are out of season, and somehow bear-hunting has lost its flavor. Bear-hunting has never been the same since the supply of bears ran out. There really is nothing much to do except sit behind the stove in the club-house and whittle. And even then you are likely to cut your thumb.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

In an attempt to solve this mid-winter problem for red-blooded men, a postal ballot has been taken to see what others of our sort are doing during the long evenings to keep themselves fit for the coming open season. Some of the replies are strictly confidential and cannot be reprinted here. You would certainly be surprised if you knew. Send a dollar and a plain, self-addressed envelope and maybe we can make an exception in your case. The address is Box 25, Bostwick, Kansas.

Following, however, are some excerpts from letters concerning which the writers have no pride:

“I keep in training during the winter months,” writes one man, “by playing parchesi with my little boy. The procedure of this only fairly interesting game is as follows:

All Hands on Decca

From the Recordings Vault Dept.: I’m guessing that it was the Gershwin pieces, which included arrangements of the Three Preludes, that impelled Heifetz to jump from RCA Victor to Decca in 1945 in order to record a host of short violin pieces. I also suspect he was trying to win some kind of financial concession from RCA, to which he returned after that Petrillo strike mentioned below. The Decca sides also were included in the first Complete Heifetz set; by the time the second appeared, RCA (by then a Sony acquisition) had lost the rights, which went to Deutsche Grammophon, on which label a set of the Deccas appeared. They’ve also been issued in Europe and elsewhere by Naxos as part of a two-disc set that also includes Heifetz’s V-Disc recordings.

                                                                                           

ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES OF THE early 1940s was the nearly complete loss of the transition from swing to be-bop. A recording ban instituted by the musicians union’s own Hitler, James Petrillo, stopped such progress dead for many, many months.

One of the first labels to agree to the union’s demands was Decca, and violinist Jascha Heifetz, otherwise a lifelong RCA Victor artist, waxed a number of sides with them, many of which have been unavailable for almost 20 years (some for more than 40).

It’s a collection that duplicates his later, stereo output only a little, and wins in performance comparison. And who can resist the curiosity of the two sides he cut in 1946 with Bing Crosby, as if to attempt a latter-day Fritz Kreisler-John McCormack union?

Heifetz, a longtime Gershwin fan, transcribed selections from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” for violin and piano shortly before recording them in 1945. The arrangements are reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century showpieces Heifetz grew up with, but the playing has the gutsy intensity of one well aware of the lyrics. Although the recordings never sounded very good to begin with and suffered more distortion en route to compact disc, Heifetz plays with a passion that doesn’t come through in his 1965 re-recording of the Gershwin.

Six Concertos for Several Instruments

THERE WAS A CUSTOM that may still persist of welcoming a new year with a concert featuring all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. I never attended one of those, offering as a weak excuse the fact that I was often working on New Year’s Eve (see previous post). But I like the idea, and often replicated it in my living room, choosing one or another of the many recordings I have of those pieces, sometimes mixing them up to enjoy the exciting contrast between the earlier and later recordings, the latter usually by historically informed performance groups. Here’s a playlist if you want to try it yourself. You can probably find all of these on YouTube:

* Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F - Busch Chamber Players (1935)
    As old-fashioned a version as can be. This is the first recording of the piece. That’s Dennis Brain’s father on horn, John Barbirolli’s wife on oboe.
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F - Orchestra Mozart, Claudio Abbado (2007)
    A small ensemble with original-instrument specialists (see below).
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G - English Chamber Orchestra, Raymond Leppard (1974)
    A big sound with an intimate-style interpretation, and an unusually extended middle movement.
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in D - Concentus Musicus Wien, Nicholas Harnoncourt (1964)
    The ensemble and conductor that really started the HIP movement - but by now
    sounding comparatively restrained.
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D - Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini (2005)
    Alessandrini, an early-music specialist, is also on harpsichord.    
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in Bb - Chamber Orchestra, Fritz Reiner (1949)
    Back to the big, pre-HIP sound, but from a conductor who loved Bach.

2023 Skidoo!

Fast Away the Old Year Passes Dept.: Exactly no-one ever has asked me about this, but that won’t stop me from holding forth on a beloved subject, to wit: How I put together a cabaret-show program.

Malcolm Kogut and I will be performing together again a couple of nights from now, making our seventh fairly annual appearance under the auspices of Steamer No. 10 Theatre in Albany, NY. (We skipped 2020 – who didn’t? – and livestreamed 2021 from my house.)

Donald Swann & Michael Flanders

Once again it will be mix of not-often-heard comic and unusual songs, my justification being that I choose numbers with which the audience is unfamiliar so they won’t know if I’m singing it wrong.

My main requirement for a program is variety. Tempo, style, subject matter – it should all be a mixture with a degree of unpredictability about it. I’ve sat through too many performances during which every successive song lopes along at exactly the same speed, each of them (typically) some kind of lament. Singer-songwriters can be the worst offenders. I’ll confess that I’m not as familiar with the popular-music world as my contemporaries (not to mention those who are younger, which covers pretty much everybody in the world), so I don’t have the recognition factor to sell me a song.

Where Did You Get That Hat?

Personal Narrative Dept., Encored: As we’ll be visiting London shortly (in a blog post, that is), here’s a repost of something I essayed a decade ago. And the photo below was taken about fifty years (and twice forty pounds) ago, not long after I graduated from high school. It reminds me that the hat therein pictured – a classic bowler – still sits in my closet, in its original box, hand carried from London. Not surprisingly, there’s a story attached . . .

                                                                                            

THE BOWLER HAT, or derby, or billycock hat, dates from the mid-19th century, and the best story attached to its legend of origin is that a design was sought to avoid losing one’s hat to an ill-placed tree branch while on horseback. The bowler’s popularity in England was matched in the U.S. as it became the topper of choice for cowboys and other personalities of the American west.

The author relaxing
between puffs.

I made my second visit to London in mid-February 1973. I was a high-school senior. The visit, like one I made the year before, was for the purpose of play-seeing. Most of the students also were involved in the school’s plays, which meant they weren’t averse to partying. You may think that the sports crowd would have a lock on high-spirited carryings-on. You would be wrong.

Trouble was, I have a layer of reserve that’s like an igneous crust. What I wanted to do on this trip was declare my passion to any or all of the several young women with us who’d captured my heart. What I did instead was indulge in oddball sightseeing.

This meant avoiding the Tower of London in favor of finding the Thames-side walkway where a scene from “A Clockwork Orange” had been filmed, and visiting the Houses of Parliament only because that’s where the finale of “The Ruling Class” takes place.

On the Fringe of Edinburgh

AS THE CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND, Edinburgh is home to the country’s houses of government and its highest courts. It’s also where you find Edinburgh Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and the historic churches of St. Giles, Greyfriars, and the Canongate. Not to mention the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, and the Scottish National Gallery. It’s centerpiece of higher learning is the University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582. The city is so steeped in antiquity that has a section called New Town that turns out to have been built in the 18th and 19th centuries. But it also has the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I wish someone had warned me about this.

There are actually two festivals with a certain amount of spread: the Edinburgh International Festival, which presents the more high-culture offerings, like opera and ballet (although there’s much else), and the Fringe, which takes over the town in August to give well over 3,000 different shows in nearly 300 venues.

And we showed up just as the Fringe was getting underway. Actually, I wasn’t quite so innocent of it. I’d learned through Facebook that my friend Amy Engelhardt, former member of “The Bobs” and a keen actor-singer-songwriter, was presenting a solo show there, so we had tickets even before leaving New York. But let’s enjoy our arrival day, which was Sunday, August 6.

Once again, we booked a limo to drag luggage, transport chair, and, of course, us from Manchester to Edinburgh, and our driver introduced himself as Francesco, a native of Spain who had settled some time ago in Scotland. Once again, we wrestled with the etiquette of how much we should annoy the driver with our chatter. The problem solved itself as we drove.

In the Dorian Mode

From the Recording Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece I wrote 35 years ago about a record company while it was in its infancy. A CD company, to be technically correct, but it’s hard to shake old jargon from your heels. I was so impressed with Dorian and its recordings that I convinced them to hire me to write some liner notes, many of which have been reproduced elsewhere on this blog (just search “Dorian” if you’re curious). Dorian had a 16-year run, ultimately succumbing to financial troubles that left them a million dollars in the hole. They declared bankruptcy, and their assets were sold to Virginia-based Sono Luminus, which now markets many of the CDs and has added new ones under the Dorian imprimatur, but without any sense of the wonderful graphic design that graced the original catalogue. I got in touch with them to see about some royalties for the liner notes of mine that they’re using, but they refused to return my calls. There. That’s off my chest!

                                                                                                

CRAIG DORY PLACES SIX COMPACT DISCS upon his desk with the care of a man dealing a high-stakes poker hand. “The artwork arrived today,” he says. “This is our first look at the finished product.” It’s the culmination of over two years of working and waiting, and Dory is as radiant as a new father.

On the other side of his desk sits partner Brian Levine, placing jackets into the jewel boxes of a dozen or so more copies of the discs. Both men are big, bearded fellows in flannels and jeans. They fit nobody’s image of the world’s newest, and possibly best, entrepreneurs of recorded classical music.

Nevertheless, that’s Dorian Recordings’ specialty. The operation is located at State and Second Streets in Troy for proximity to the acoustically marvelous Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, where most of the discs will be recorded. The offices are in a quiet building that mixes doctors and other professionals with long-time residents.

Dory and Levine like it that way. Both came from small towns – Dory in Iowa, Levine in the Toronto suburbs – and appreciate Troy’s small-town feel.

Miller’s Dale for Tidewell

THE TWELVE STONE DWELLING-PLACES known as Ravensdale Cottages were built in 1823 as two rows of six facing one another across a small terrace. They sit in a sheltered valley with a picturesque view of the tree-lined slopes that flank this gorge. To reach them, you drive along an impossibly skinny cartlane until you despair of seeing civilization; then you park as the cottages come into view. But you have to walk to the brink of the terrace to get a full dose of the charm of the place.

Ravensdale Cottages

They’re now holiday retreats, or possibly domiciles for the truly anti-social. True, you’re cheek-to-jowl with adjacent neighbors, but it strikes me as a place where you can count on being ignored or otherwise left alone. Our friend Moz has a connection here: a good friend of his spends summer in one of the cottages. His attempts to reach the fellow by phone were fruitless, but (as we learned) cell service there is variable. And so our long drive through the Peak District brought us here, Mohammed again skillfully piloting us. Moz phoned again; no answer. We parked in a small lot near the terrace and walked to the houses. Not surprisingly, there was no response when Moz knocked on the door. We were left simply to enjoy the peaceful surrounding on a pleasant summer day, looking at the craggy cliffside that drops from the Derbyshire Dales National Nature Reserve, dreaming of the comfortable retreat any one of these cottages would provide.

Myths of Thanksgiving - An Encore!

 From the Vault Dept.: This originally ran in Metroland, and I posted it to this blog about a decade ago. I think it’s time for a reprise.

                                                                                          

BACK IN THE UNENLIGHTENED ’60s, we elementary-school wretches celebrated the run-up to Thanksgiving by collecting dying leaves, cutting endless amounts of corn ears and turkey tails out of colorful cardboard, and most annoying of all, holding some manner of classroom pageant complete with hastily made approximations of the received image of Pilgrim haberdashery.

"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth"
Painting by Jennie Brownscombe, 1914

You would have thought, to see this spectacle, that the 17th-century Pilgrims threw an annual party to which they invited their Indian neighbors, reflecting the general goodwill that prevailed and endured among the races. At the expense of many a turkey.

Like leftover turnips, such misbegotten ideas accumulate until someone mercifully gets rid of them, so let’s clean up a few of them. I’m indebted, not surprisingly, to the Internet, where Plimoth Plantation and snopes.com contributed info. Not to mention The Thanksgiving Book by Jerome Agel and Jason Shulman (Smithmark Publishers, 1987).

Thanksgiving Menu & Music Fiesta!

Thanksgiving comes but once a year, but it sure takes up a lot of space in the fridge and on counters and stove. Here's today's menu, and you'll find a slide show menus past - dating back to 1990 - here.

Dance the Atlantic

IT ISN’T LONG after we struggle upright and walk on shaky legs that we wish we could fly. We see birds in flight; we’ve yet to believe in gravity. Soon enough we learn our earthbound limits and do our flying in dreams.

The dancers on board: Daniel McCormick,
Francesca Velicu, Ivana Bueno, Eric Snyder,
Julia Conway, Miguel Angel Maidana

But there is one special type of person who can fly. You see it on stage in “Swan Lake,” in “Le Corsaire,” in “Sleeping Beauty” as the principal dancers lift off, soaring into the space humans aren’t supposed to occupy. But they’re up there, for dazzlingly long periods of time, their bodies portraits of a grace that hides the incredible athleticism of their art.

“I grew up in Bucarest,” says Francesca Velicu, Junior Soloist with the English National Ballet. “I started dancing when I was four. Eventually I danced with the Bolshoi before moving to the English National Ballet.” She’s speaking on Tuesday morning from the stage of the Royal Court Theatre, an entertainment venue on board the Queen Mary 2, and she’s part of the “Dance the Atlantic” theme of this particular voyage. Entertainment director Amanda Reid has gathered four dancers and Ballet Master Antonio Castilla to describe the dancer’s life. Velicu may be the one who summed it up best: “Ballet is not meant for the human body.”

The NYC Ballet in Rehearsal - 1984

From the Dance Vault Dept.: I began my journalism career writing about everything in the arts that appealed to me, including dance. Here’s one of my first such pieces, when I was given an interview with then-New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Heather Watts, one of the true stars of that universe. (Next week I’ll publish my most recent ballet-oriented piece.)

                                                                                               

THE MUSIC IS QUICKLY RECOGNIZABLE as Bach’s Double Concerto: The two violin
soloists stand in the pit, one of them is introducing the first theme with the orchestra. The stage at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center looks enormous, the deep blue of the backdrop matching the color of the surrounding twilight. Eight women, in two groups of four, are onstage. They are dressed in white, their costumes reminiscent of tennis outfits. 

Heather Watts and Peter Martins

With the first solo violin passage, another woman dances on, then another as the second violin begins a contrapuntal statement. That enormous stage is suddenly filled with movement, and two of the special qua1ities of the New York City Ballet are evidenced: talent and presence. They don’t merely occupy the stage: they overwhelm it. This is “Concerto Barocco,” one of NYCB founder George Balanchine’s signature ballets.

It’s a startling contrast to their rehearsal earlier in the day. The music came from an upright piano stage right, and there were no costumes, lights or scenery. The proscenium was ringed with dancers, colorfully dressed in the practice uniforms of tights,, leotards, leg-warmers and such, each dancer with a large handbag nearby. While they watched the rehearsal, some worked on their ballet shoes, some stretched. Nobody talked. Ballet Master Peter Martins sat on a metal stool. He wore blue jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves pushed up. Beside him, in green tights and leotard, with a white sweater tied around her waist, stood Ballet Mistress Rosemary Dunleavy. She and Martins whispered ideas. She strode hack and forth along the stage, watching, nodding.

Manchester, Part Two

I BOUGHT A KOBO E-READER for this trip and promised to buy no books. We have made trips to England in the past where I ended up shipping home a couple of cartons of acquisitions at great expense, but this was before you could easily find such things on an e-site. But then I bought Eric Schlosser’s “Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market” at the Hidcote bookshop and Moz passed along three books – two of them by mystery writer Andrea Camilleri, featuring his eccentric Inspector Salvo Montalbano (but what literary detective isn’t eccentirc these days?), alongside Alastair Cooke’s “Letters from America,” so I figured what the hell and walked to Paramount Books our second day in Manchester while Susan lay immobilized in our hotel room, felled by a hookah-adjacent headache.

Lobby of the Manchester Indigo

Paramount is what a shop of used books should be, with organized sections in each of the rooms alongside cascades of the yet-to-be-shelved. During the height of my bookshop-browsing days, when Manhattan’s South Fourth Avenue sported a zigzag of worthy emporia, I was collecting fiction. Now I’m more interested in vintage theater and music books, with nothing particular in mind. I hoped that this would be an occasion to engage a bookseller in conversation, bridging our divergent origins with a shared interest, but nothing doing. The elderly fellow working the sales counter offered not even a greeting, never mind some chat.

Sir Charles Cochran was a British theatrical producer, best know for presenting a number of Noël Coward’s best-known plays as well as musicals by Cole Porter and jerome Kern; he also managed the Albert Hall for a dozen years. On the shelf was his 1941 reminiscence titled “Cock-a-Doodle-Do.” I weighed it in my hands. I riffled through it. It was tempting. Had the shop felt friendlier, I would have bought it. I recall a price of £15. As with any appealing book left behind and any uneated dessert, the thought of it haunted me. Back home, I found a copy online for under ten dollars, with the un-noticed bonus that it was autographed by Cochran. It proved to be a dull recitation of dates and name-drops.

Fried and True

From the Food Vault Dept.: While we’re on the subject of fish and chips, here’s a look back at a wonderful restaurant in Bennington, Vermont, that I reviewed in 2011. At that point, Kevin Wright had been running his shop for three years; in 2018, wishing to pursue other interests, he sold the place to Nathan Johnson, a Vermont native and regular customer, who has been operating Lil’ Britain ever since. Needless to say, the prices quoted below have changed.

                                                                                       

LONDON’S FIRST FISH-AND-CHIPS SHOP opened in 1860, unless an 1863-dated Lancashire shop came first. But the glory of deep-frying potatoes (the chips portion) was noted at least two centuries earlier, possibly as a substitute for fish during freezes: it seems that the Belgians carved their potato slices into fish shapes.

The popularity of battering and frying slabs of cod or haddock took off during the Industrial Revolution, spurred by the boom in North Sea fisheries and the ease with which fresh seafood could be transported.

Well-traveled Yanks can attest to the appeal of a true British chippy. It’s remarkable for being prosaic, a taken-for-granted part of the UK landscape that never successfully migrated to these shores.

Unless you count the brief popularity of the chain to which Merv Griffen sidekick Arthur Treacher lent his name, its terrible food probably doing much to ensure that the hamburger remained the fast food king.

Manchester: Part One

THIS PART OF OUR JOURNEY actually begins in 1972. Allow me to quote myself: I was a high-school junior in suburban Connecticut, freshly infatuated with the stage, so it was only natural that I would join my fellow theater-arts students on a week-long show-going excursion to London that February. A mere $300 bought airfare, hotel room, and tickets.

The first show we saw was a musical version of “The Canterbury Tales.” I didn’t like it very much. Next was “Never the Twain,” a quirky mash-up of works by Kipling and Brecht, which was far more appealing, but by then I realized that some of my favorite actors were performing on the West End, and I forsook the rest of the scheduled offerings in favor of such fare – beginning with Alec Guinness in John Mortimer’s “A Voyage Round My Father,” which I wrote about here in 2012.

Three years later, I received this email message:

I was crawling around, looking up a show I was once in, when I came across yr blog, where you write about a trip to London in Feb 1972, and a theatre-binge you went on. Hah - I'd been in Canterbury Tales in 1970, which you thought crap, and was in Never the Twain, a Brecht-Kipling conflation you thought more interesting.

Rachel McDermott and Dancing Grain

In Memoriam Dept.: For quite a few years I wrote for the website knowwhereyourfoodcomesfrom.com, founded and eagerly maintained by Frank Barrie, a retired administrative law judge for the NYS Division of Tax Appeals. He was as passionate about the arts as he was about good food, and we’d often see each other at various concerts and plays. Below is the last piece I wrote for him. By the time I submitted it, I learned that he had died suddenly on October 1, just a week after he posted his last piece to the website.

                                                                                             

TRAVEL NORTH ON ROUTE 9 from Saratoga Springs NY and you’ll see the city’s urban characteristics fall away, revealing the rural aspects of the county. By the time you reach Dancing Grain Farm Brewery, which is in the town of Gansevoort or Moreau, depending on the map, it’s farm country. But the brewery’s parking lot is full of cars and you see people lined up to taste the beer or settled on the deck to enjoy it. This is Rachel McDermott’s dream come true but, like anything to do with farming, the easygoing nature of the place hides the tremendous amount of work that’s behind it.

“I didn’t buy a farm in order to brew,” she explains. “I built a brewery in order to farm.” But there’s a more complicated backstory to her mission, because she grew up here, on this farm, then left to become an investment banker. Her father, Jim Czub, and his brother Robert leased what eventually became over 2500 acres in the Moreau area, growing corn, soybeans, and hay. As land values increased in Saratoga County, they lost access to more and more of that land, eventually purchasing what has become the 308-acre brewery property in 2016.

The Manchester Man

Guest Blogger Dept.: Before we travel to Manchester, I offer a vintage taste of the town. These are the opening pages of The Manchester Man, a novel published in 1876 by Isabella Banks. In the tradition of what was once termed lady novelists, it appeared in three volumes, issued using her married name, Mrs. G. Linnaeus Banks. And who can resist a writer who parts her name on the side? The story chronicles the life of the fictional Jabez Clegg, alongside whom we see many significant historical events, such as the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the disastrous launch of the cargo ship Emma, which capsized and cost some 47 passengers their lives. Although the book is not very well known today, you can celebrate it by visiting the pub named Jabez Clegg in central Manchester. We meet the infant Jabez when his cradle is carried along the flooding river Irk in 1799.

                                                                                       

Old Market Street

WHEN Pliny lost his life, and Herculaneum was buried, Manchester was born. Whilst lava and ashes blotted from sight and memory fair and luxurious Roman cities close to the Capitol, the Roman soldiery of Titus, under their general Agricola, laid the foundations of a distant city which now competes with the great cities of the world. Where now rise forests of tall chimneys, and the hum of whirling spindles, spread the dense woods of Arden; and from the clearing in their midst rose the Roman castrum of Mamutium, which has left its name of Castle Field as a memorial to us. 

But where their summer camp is said to have been pitched, on the airy rock at the confluence of the rivers Irk and Irwell, sacred church and peaceful college have stood for centuries, and only antiquaries can point to Roman possession, or even to the baronial hall which the Saxon lord perched there for security.

Afternoon Tea, Part Two

HISTORY INSISTS that the Duchess of Bedford, on a visit to the Duke of Rutland in 1840, grew uncomfortable peckish as she awaited supper. It wouldn’t be served until at least 8 PM. She asked for a snack. It consisted of tea and some feathery sandwiches. Friends joined her, both for the refreshment and a chance to catch up on the news.

Thus was born afternoon tea, or “low tea,” as it’s sometimes termed, owing to the low tables (now, inappropriately, called “coffee tables”) on which it was served. Which also distinguishes it from “high tea,” which is a meal unto itself, a tradition born during the Industrial Revolution, when workers returned home ravenous. High tea is dinner; low tea is scones and cucumber sandwiches.

The latter is the ritual practiced each afternoon at 3:30 on board the Queen Mary when the ship isn’t easing in or out of port. A large ballroom, the Queen’s Room, is the main service area, but such can be the overflow that the Britannia Restaurant may be pressed into service.

Afternoon Tea, Part One

From the Vault Dept.: Inspired by my voluble chronicle of my recent travels, here’s a throwback piece. It’s chronicles a delightful stop on a trip to London my wife and I took 36 years ago. The prices mentioned below are, of course, now only a nostalgic dream.

                                                                                                

THAT ELUSIVE FOURTH MEAL OF THE DAY, afternoon tea! What is its appeal and how should it be practiced? For an answer, my wife and I traveled to London with a vision of all traffic stopping and all shops closing down at 4 PM to enable visitors and residents to indulge in this custom.

It's not that dramatic. In fact, we came upon our high tea quite by accident, while visiting the place that's as much of a tourist attraction as it is a department store: Harrods, in the wealthy suburb of Knightsbridge.

A Rolls-Royce was parked outside. Behind it sat a Mercedes-Benz 560SL. Several other no doubt pedigreed, hyphenated cars followed. The doorman sported more buttons than an elevator in a high-rise.

Inside was a mixture of British restraint and American let's-sell-'em fervor (the sale was to begin in a week: “There's only one Harrods. There's only one sale”' is the tagline).

This is the Crossgates Mall of central London, assuming you stripped Crossgates of its more useless stores and jacked the prices at the rest. Admittedly, that eliminates over half the mall, but you get the idea. Lots of stuff, full retail price.