Tea with the Queen

Inspired by my tag in my last post, I remembered how much a great wish of mine it is to have tea with the Queen of Britain. Why, you ask? When you could be bedding the (in)famous Robbie Williams, sharing the stage with the White Stripes, partying it up with Paris/Lindsay/Kimberley/Nicole, reading out history-changing speeches from Capitol Hill? Why would you rather choose to have a comparatively mundane cuppa with the monarch of a once-great empire?

A number of reasons, really:

1) You love Earl Grey tea. You REALLY love Earl Grey tea.

2) You love being in the company of those who also really love Earl Grey. Although I’ve not personally asked the Queen about her feelings for England’s best export (and neither have I seen it documented anywhere) she simply HAS TO love Earl Grey tea. It’s in her contract somewhere, I’m pretty sure. I hope she won’t blanch at the sight of me drinking it like a pleb, though… (Shock! Horror! A dash of sugar plus milk!)

3) Buckingham Palace is not that far from Twinings’ head office so there is a greater chance you will bump into someone influential from Twinings (perhaps even coincidentally a joint guest at our little tea party) who you can brown-nose to the point of earning yourself a lifetime supply of free Earl Grey (alright, throw in a few crates of Darjeeling and Irish Breakfast too, please)

4) Another random punter you might bump into is Prince William, that delicious little blue-blood who’s just begging for a bit of corruption to his untarnished image. Yummy! (and famous and wealthy and smart – quite a catch, I should think)

5) Nice silverware and fine bone china lying about for prestidigitators such as myself to nick – I’m not the immoral kind of person who’d swipe these to sell for a fortune on eBay, mind you, I just like the occasional memento.

6) The opportunity to talk hoity-toity with someone who (literally) speaks the Queen’s English. We’d be all:

TWA: Dear Elizabeth! This scone transcends all scones that ever preceded it! How utterly scrumptious!

QEII: *blushing* Why thank you, kind TWA. I am most humbled to be in your presence. (okay, that one’s a stretch)

TWA: Oh, don’t be silly, Lizzie, there is no other place on this planet that I could even comprehend of being right now… say, could I have another cuppa?

QEII: Certainly dear. Hubert, Maximillion? Where the devil have they got to? The help is not quite what it used to be, you understand.

TWA: *exaggerated sigh* Ah, yes, the help. No matter, I’ll go pour for the both of us. [and zap! prestidigitation! Cake fork up the left hand sleeve, sugar spoon up the right)]

QEII: Yes, you simply can’t trust them these days…

TWA: *brief grimace at the stab of remorse running through my left knee* Well, uh, yes. Now tell me all about your thoughts on pension reform in pseudocapitalist former colonial outposts…

[let’s hope some Twinings guy reads this huge product endorsement and sends me that lifetime supply, and let’s hope too that the Queen doesn’t read this. She doesn’t blog, does she?]

On the matter of tea parties, a while ago I mentioned that I was reading Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, which goes into great detail on every possible topic that could be discussed relating to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I plan to tell you about the immense geekiness of some of our fellow Earth inhabitants and the anal-ytical lengths they will go to to interpret fantastical things in literature. But that’s for next time. I will leave you with the Mad Hatter’s famous unanswered riddle from the mad tea-party of Chapter 7: why is a raven like a writing-desk? Of course, the annotated book attempts to answer the riddle, but I’ll give you a sleepless night or five to ponder it…