I went to this talk with some friends, and by far the highlight of the trip was drinking some champagne out of antique crystal flutes that one of my friends had brought. Best picnic ever.
The house was very stunning, and certainly leaves one with the image of what Britain and Scotland use to be like. The paint was still quite fresh and the aroma perforated the entire house. While the house did have several interesting tea artifacts, the speaker certainly knew what he was doing.
He brought in numerous samples, and to me this was the high-light of the talk. I have a much lesser desire when it comes to the tea-implements than to the tea, and I will confess that I didn't learn anything regarding tea from the talk. That being said, he did suggest several more books that I am interested in reading.
I had just finished reading a book on tea, called Tea; Addiction, Exploitation and Empire, by Roy Moxham, and it seemed that our speaker could have gotten most of his information from this book. I highly recommend it,
Lastly came the downer. We (the 12 of us or so in total at the talk) filed into the cafe where we drank on rather pitiful tea cups. While i'm sure they aren't that pitiful, and in reality are quite lovely, but you try to drink out of boring tea cups when you had just been handling tea cups from the 1800's. I thought so.
Anyway by far the biggest disgrace was the fact that they served us Twinning Tea Bag tea. I think the tea speaker was a bit embarrassed by this, as Dumfries House should be, but we had just been handling some tea upstairs. I doubt I was the only one that wanted to make a dash for the stash upstairs.
Further more Dumfries House, you have much to learn in the scone baking department. That is all.
