Oh I am on the roll, Lady Ursula: cranberry vodka, cranberrry juice, triple sec and I shall name her The Crimson Queen. Oh, the Jubilee brings out the best in one, does it not? Handy, handy Ethan!

A Flotilla of Tinis

Dear Lady Ursula,

Smitten as I am by the notion of  a thousand ships gliding in the glorious wake of HM's barge, I propose the nth of a flotilla of toasts to summer. As you can see, I have finally halved and juiced the grapefruit you left behind, and Ethan has shaken me up a comely beverage that is as yet unnamed. Shall I call it The High Tea Pinky? You be the judge!

Delightfully Timely

Dear Lady Ursula

I thank you for your courteous and heartfelt correspondence even as I try to scribe while both fragranced hands are courting beverages: on the one hand, a lychee tini, in memory of lychees that remained in the aftermath of our Tini sessions; on the other hand, a luscious strawberry smoothie made with the yoghurt procured by your exhortation to avoid reductive percentages. Well, I never! I will never use any numbered yoghurt, 1 or 2 percent ever again having tasted how luxe the flavours embodied by this smoothie even as it is  virginal. Verily, my standards have been elevated like cleavage by a firmly conforming bustier! That strawberry smoothie is creaminess itself!

Wherever did you find that fantastic website and associated timepiece? To say it is a delight is as trivial as to say that firemen put out fires. It is eXtraordinary! Who are the folk who orchestrate such a fine science and what does it mean to generate and document such a span of connections? Just as I thought that nothing on the web surprises, here is an excellence of ingenuity that one could scarcely imagine that delectable. I am in awe: it is sooo Special. What a trove of the past! It expired in 2007 but I am sure there will be a reboot in shall i say it...good time? :)  Praise be the youths of that project!! and you to pass it on to me.

I too am asigh over the distances between the teas and tinis of past and those of the future, but I am of good faith that time's winged chariot will cover that ground sooner rather than later.

And also, I have now eliminated three people as contenders to the station of Lady Percy and my perplexity increases. Who is that rare lady to elude our memories? I am  miffed more than a mitten. Just the same I remain hopeful. The other day I remembered the last name of a student whose last name I had been trying to remember and perhaps the gate of memory will swing open again!

As you may know, I and the Lady Connor (aka Carroll) am off to Chicago tomorrow to observe the birthday of Queen Victoria but it seems inevitable to me that there should be some devotions to the Queen of Disco whose huffing, puffing, and soulful singing brought many a maiden to ladyhood, would you not agree?

I do hope the help is pulling its weight in the cleaning of the mansion in preparation for the arrival for the Lady Dowager with all her intercontinental hustle and bustle. Leave no dust mouse uncaught, advise your servants, for they multiply like sins! And plan her entertainment well, so as to wear her out with joyous animation!

A parting volley of strawberries your way, Lady Ursula, as we sorrow the fall of Andy Murray to  a Gasquet. And may you be as well over the weekend while I myself parry the wiles of NATO.

Time is a Great Mistress

Dear Lady Crumpet,

The revival of our forgotten letters has made me dizzy beyond compare! It is like rediscovering a secret garden that you once spent many happy hours in as a child. To celebrate, this evening I sit at my table and drink a virgin mango/apple drink and toast to you. Still, I can't help being a little sad thinking of my time in The Northern Lands in your company and that of the good Lady Connor, she of the brown hair and gentle disposition. Oh but I miss those rejuvenating spirits we shared many an evening. Those tonics that delight and make a lady's troubles so much easier to bear. I particularly hold in fondness that concoction that claimed to raise the dead and that other that made me swoon so much, I almost fell out of my corset. I will not soon forget our time together, Lady Crumpet and will carry the memory of my visit to your wonderful home in my heart. It is also saved on digital media, which as you know forgets nothing. 

As for the Lady Percy and her manners, I do hope that you will soon find he as her identity is vexing me greatly. I cannot bear to think we have forgotten someone that a few years ago was so present in memory. 

Well, it is rather late now and I must go and join Lord Minor, who bid me adieu several hours ago. Being on a time not of London, it is rather difficult. as you can imagine. I hope in the next few days to be more myself again, as these things wear on a lady, especially when I do not have all my faculties intact. For example, tonight in passing, a man called out to ask me if I knew the time and for shame, I had to confess that I did not know. 

Not that we have rediscovered it anew, I hope we will endeavour to keep this correspondence alive, if only to have the chance to look upon it again in delight in another five years time.

Before I depart, let me share with you this link I found in the Museum of Lost Interactions. Fascinating, I assure you, as is this lovely timepiece below. Be well my dear Lady Crumpet. And please send my greetings to your new drink steward the Fireman!

The petals of yesterday

Dear Lady Ursula!

Barely a day has passed since your departure and I feel the days have crumbed into as if petals. Yes, petals strewn over the lawn that I must collect and conjure into the tulips of A Tale of Our Teas. Did I say Teas? Oh, no. I meant Tinis! Tinis, my dear Lady Ursula, tinis!

I hover over this idea of capturing the essence of your visit as scissors do over torn pages of the OED to be sheared and shuffled into a storyboard. As memory floats does over petals. Those fallen ones, curling into a pallor, fading fast unless we scoop them up and coax them into a floral prosthesis. Those petals so wan like words scattered, unclaimed...need I say...unspoken? Like language. Language with words. A hush of words.  Or maybe spoken but silently, like the whisper of a blogger into the ear of a gentle listener? O process, process! do not fail me now!

For such is story-telling is it not? It is not unlike the tremulous reclustering of petals into the blooms from which they have collapsed away.  Each petal an afterghost of a merriment, a telling, now a retelling I with to capture. For the reader. O reader, I call to you over the hills of time? Can you hear me? More importantly, can you listen without hearing? How shall I reconvene mere petals into a calyx  of days so delightful with a dear confidante? I shudder. I draw my long tasselled shawl around me. I quiver like a word about to meet its mark. And then I sigh and sigh and sigh. And sigh. Where is Ethan? And then I remember. He has been replaced. By a fireman. Who is now on duty. Elsewhere.

So then I pour the tea myself and sip it and drink it and stare long and hard into the accumulation of tea leaves at the bottom of the empty cup. Will they tell the story? Will they tell the memory of your telling visit which left an indelibility in my guest book? Will they?

Or shall I have to tell it?

I trust your return to the Isles of the Diamond Jubilee has met with your favour. I, for my part, am still in pursuit of the Lady Percy, who will not yet show her face. But I will find you Percy, I will hunt you down and corner you in some distant parlor and serve you your porridge! You have been put on notice!

I wave to you Lady Ursula, from afar, with fragranced gloves!

Lady Crumpet