Afternoon Tea

The tray arrived with a flourish: a three-tiered stainless-steel stand adorned with food fancy enough for a king. On the top, we found thumbnail-sized brownie bars and sponge cakes. The middle plate held scones and clotted cream. The bottom bore the sandwiches – coronation chickpea, cucumber mint, and chargrilled courgettes with red onion marmalade and watercress. Crusts? Of course not. We weren’t savages.

This was my welcome to afternoon tea at the Royal Albert Hall, a 153-year-old ellipse of wrought iron, terracotta, and money rising next to Hyde Park in South Kensington, London.

I had traveled a long way from home, where my usual sandwiches were either pimento cheese or peanut butter and banana, crusts and all. Now, trying not to be noticed as a cultural fraud, I sipped my Darjeeling Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe tea and scolded myself for not bringing white gloves. This was serious froufrou snacking, complete with a cloth napkin.

That’s how it went for ten days of shadowing my British girlfriend across London, from Heathrow Airport to Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf.

For her, the trip marked a return home for the first time in two years, and she navigated her mega-city with native ease, amassing thousands of daily steps over miles of aged concrete and stone, down streets winding through centuries of history, and past the hordes of people roaming like ants in all directions at all hours. For me, a first-time visitor and novice traveler, I just had to make sure I kept her in my sight, lest I end up lost somewhere between Battersea and Greenwich. Or was it Chiswick and West Ham?

“Careful where you step,” she told me each of the 700 times I looked left and nearly walked into oncoming traffic coming on from the right. I saw countless taxis, double-decker buses, food-delivery bikes, and souped-up Audis, most of them just a second or two before they might have launched me into the emergency department at the National Health Service. “Traffic is different here, you see,” she added.

I saw. Not only did drivers use the wrong side of the road (or maybe we do it wrong here, as a centuries-old poke in the eye to King George III), but they also walked fast, talked fast, drank smashingly strong coffee, used pounds for dollars and kilos for pounds, observed random “bank holidays” to take off work, and paid attention to nothing else anytime somebody played a football game. (By football, I mean soccer. And by anytime, I mean all the time.)

“We can top up our oyster cards in the station,” Judy said. “Then we’ll take the Jubilee line to the Northern line.” The subway lines, I discovered, ran like veins through the London Underground, and that, I discovered, was also called the Tube, which, I discovered, was not to be confused with the London Overground or the Docklands Light Railway. I discovered, too, that the oyster cards had nothing to do with oysters. They were just fare cards, and topping them up meant adding money to the balance. “We can hop off at Leicester Square, and then it’s just a short stroll to Covent Garden. I hope it doesn’t rain.”

It did rain, and we strolled in it. In England, the sun shines in the narrow gaps between the cloud overhead and the one on the way. The easiest job in weather forecasting is in Great Britain: Chance of rain, so bring your brolly. Same tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.

We did catch a rain-free day on a trip south to Haywards Heath, West Sussex, where Judy’s brother and sister-in-law took us on a hike along the South Downs, which, as I should have suspected, was not down but up. We drove into the hills and walked along a ridge of spectacular green fields, past nonchalant cows and sweater-ready sheep. I looked for No Trespassing signs, but the Brits have thousands of miles of open country, common land. Here, the buffalo roam; there, everybody does.

Back in the car, we bounded down a twisty two-lane and cruised into the village of Ditchling for lunch at The Bull, a 500-year-old pub. The meal included a beetroot salad, beef liver, a chicken-and-leek-and-bacon pot pie, and, for vegetarian me, a ploughman’s sandwich: sourdough, cheddar, more cheddar, and yet more cheddar. By the time I’d finished, I wanted to plough into an afternoon nap.

The saying goes that travel broadens you, and indeed I was wider after our time in England. I felt like I’d gained a dozen pounds (or kilos), what with the cheese and the cappuccinos and the eggs on toast and, as the crowning course to the afternoon tea’s creamy scones and fancy sandwiches, a Stonehenge-sized slab of red velvet cake.

We benefit from going to other places, near and far, experiencing different people and their different food and their different way of talking and their different approach to the same thing we all have: a life, with all its rewards, hardships, and uncertainties. I’ve never traveled much, and that leaves me feeling at times like I’ve spent years sitting too close to a movie screen, all perspective lost to a ridiculously close view of my own circumstances. I needed this trip. I needed to be the one on the other side of the pond and the strange side of the street, experiencing a sliver of a world that doesn’t always run in my predictable, comfortable direction.

On the flight home from England, I dropped my glasses and stepped on them, bending the frame and pushing the lenses out of alignment. As I wandered off the plane and traipsed into the sunshine over America the beautiful, I didn’t see things quite the same, in more ways than one.

Tim Bass is a retired creative writing teacher and journalist. He lives in Wilmington. Mark Weber is a Wilmington-based artist and illustrates WILMA’s monthly Direct Male essay. weberillustration.com

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