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

The Little Water Guild Rides Again!

Although you are not only privy, but Originator of the Good News, I feel, dear Lady Ursula, it is time for the world to know that the Supreme Chapter of the Little Water Guild will indeed Ride Again, Captain Skylad at its keyboard, thanks to your sparkling suggestion about a reunion! The time approaches to start planning the nineties garb and 'tude, the Chique Dorque Look and the songs of the Clinton era. We are going to, in the words of the prophet Cher, turn back time! Take back the nineties! Raise the toasts! Channel the tunnel! View the Netscape from its bygone times of promise!

I might have to reach out to my ghostwriters, evaB, to compose a speech or two for you know I can only blog! So what an exciting social season approaches: not just do we do the strawberries and cream this summer but also run the gamut of spirits next May. I truly don't know what to wear or what to say yet! Except that my throat swells with the trill of it! Go Thai Bowl!

Time Flutters On

Time flutters on, My DEAR Lady Ursula, and so do lace handkerchiefs that are at long last dry! Mine have been hard at work, sopping up the tears that brimmed, swelled and welled whenever I approached your sweet sweet sweet delicious heart candied verse and cake online. Truly, I could not even type for over a month for the dabbing of the hankie! I was so touched by the sentiment I HAD to let darling Ethan take the time off to practice his skills of seduction on another worthy lady, so rusty he was becoming with yours truly. I was so pleased to get your card I would have nothing to do with him! At all!

Now that the hankerchiefs have been laundered, starched, pressed and set aside, I am ready to take up my daily ramble into yet another tomorrow lined with the trees of another fledgling spring. And no mean spring either, for soon we will meet at the fair grounds of England.

But this dispatch of yours I will ever hold near to my heart, as a membrance of our sublime wiring.

Happy Birthday Lady Crumpet

White lace gloves and
chocolate kisses
close your eyes
and make 3 wishes

I wish
I wish upon a star
that we would not
have moved so far

Oceans and miles
make us so tired
but how would we've coped
if we hadn't been wired?

Although silent spaces
can't hold a candle
to the connection our minds
made in parking places

Still, I treasure our friendship
dear Lady Crumpet
despite the distance
you're a girl with such gumption

And now this painful poem
must really end
I detest verse that rhymes
but love you my virtual friend

Happy birthday dear Crumpet
I hope it's a stunner
Happy day, old friend
may 1000 wishes rain upon you

Monkey's Paw

Quoth the Raven 2
Originally uploaded by evita2005.

Dear Lady Ursula, let me tell you of a quaint stroll that took me to a Shoppe of Odd Repute. There I was, walking down the street on a sunny winters day when my eye fell on a tiny, asif toy playing card on the ground, a two inch by one inch seven of spades as if slapped down by the fine fingers of a vagrant fairy. Except that when I picked up the card, there were nine spades on this seven of spades and I was much struck by the configuration, clearly at odds with the designation: the spades seemed to be sprayed all over the card, with no attention to symmetry at all . As I walked further, pondering the wee card I was pinching in my fingers, my attention was drawn to a bookstore display with an array of books so divergent, bearing titles so anomalous, they lured the eye like a crew of dissolute mountebanks.

Seasoned book rubbed the spine of book, photo album, comic book, an orphanage of peculiar titles and interests:

o Plastics and You
o Concrete Poetry
o The Art and Science of Embalming
o Fencing Comprehensive
o Lesbians in Germany 1890-1920
o Wife Preservers Cartoons
o Pandemonium II
o Orchids
o Conjurers Psychological Secrets
o Captive Husbandry and Propagation of Boa Constrictors
o How to Raise and Train Pigeons
o A Children’s Handbook of Grass: The Official Handbook of Pot Uses
o White Gloves and Party Manners Workbook
o Your First Puppy
o Sex Objects

To the other side of the door perched a raven, a red ribbon smartly adorning his neck, atop a vintage typewriter on whom the spectral hand of Poe had tapped out the immortal lament of eternal regret:

Quoth the Raven, Nevermore!

Behind the raven, full figured women without clothes romped, shanks aflapping, like shameless Graces on a vintage erotica photograph.

Inside sat he, grey-eyed, in black velour jacket, unsmiling, tapping the keyboard among his kingdom of books arcane beautiful absurd and macabre. Vintage Smith-Corona typewriters gloried over the tables set with books on Erect Men and Undulating Women or Camp Recreations and Pageants and insects rested inanimately on the walls, in full wingspan flight yet trapped in lucite, aptly disquieting. An entire collection of De Sade's work weighed down one of the shelves but he also had a handsome 1915 Mrs. Beeton with vividly colorful illustrations--this one he keeps under lock and key.

I did leave him some of my money, of course, spending it on a compendium of manners The Young Man's Companion or Friendly Advisor to Educational Knowledge Worldly Counsel and Gentlemanly Deportment based on sage works compiled in 1866. Also, I must pick up a copy of the slender yet purposeful workbook, White Gloves and Party Manners, which instructs the young ladies in commendable behavior. Certainly, no girl should want for decorous reminders on poise, posture and hair sheen: I DON'T PLOP DOWN--I SIT DOWN GRACEFULLY--I PRACTICE BY SITTING IN FRONT OF A FULL LENGTH MIRROR, THAT WAY I SEE HOW I LOOK TO OTHERS. I WILL BRUSH MY HAIR: 75 STROKES: PROMISE! How many a poise could have been sustained and how fewer belly buttons bared were this kind of book distributed to the young skanks of today, dear Lady Ursula!

At which moment, having handed him, who continued to be calmly unstirred, the money for my purchases, I noted that over his head, protruding at an angle from the hinge in the cabinet in which he stored titles of unique renown, was a card, a true five of spades, to wit. I thereupon spoke to him about the card I found asking if he had left it in the street. He showed a flicker of interest and asked to see it and I showed it to him, telling him it had led me to his museum of titles. He continued not to smile though I think he found that to his satisfaction, then took the wee card from me and affixed it to the cabinet, not far from the true one, as if to join his collection of misaligned artefacts.

If I came here tomorrow and I did not see your shop, I would not be surprised, I said, at parting.

But I would still be here, he replied.

Whereupon I left, clutching my well-acquired books of manners as one does a glove, about the donning of which I read with delight tonight to my new manservant, Antonio.