Our times are such that it seldom grants an hour which may, without a morsel of guilt, be spent sipping tea. To delicately balance a slice of cake, as light as air, between manicured fingers and nibble at its edges while recounting what Mrs X from the Club said to Mrs Y the other day. It smacks not just of anachronism but also a feminine archetype that, though alive and well in several parts of the world in many mutated forms, still heckles the sensibilities of modern feminists as stereotypes that should be brushed under the carpet before the liberals walk in. We live in various stages of denial, don’t we all?

And then to begin. There was tea for one and one for tea, late last year, one chilly autumn afternoon, in the very English town of York, built by the Romans. This is how it came about: The clipped accents of traditional England that arose, stern and almost disapproving, from the elderly participants of one of those bus tours of historic sites in the countryside contrasted gaily with the new-to-college squads that still had school shopping to do at GAP and Boots and elsewhere. One could sit in a toasty café in The Shambles, the cobbled street flanked by overhanging timber-framed buildings, some surviving from the 14th century, and out of the way of hasty shopping tourists, to make informal notes on human behaviour in that moment.

And so one does, in a weathered leather traveller’s notebook. A notebook chosen well is as important as the adventure itself, one has learnt to remember.

York is, as a friend called it, charming but twee, the American in him sounding as British as it gets. I have arrived from the Pennines that mid-morning, and in about three hours, covered all there was to see and do in York. Just an afternoon and I have finished walking the town. I fret, for I have another two-and-a-half days here. I would rather be back in London. Something about that city, like every damned cliché, worms itself into your heart and vamooses away with a pound of it. But I am in someplace twee now.

And so I walk, once this way and once the other, backtracking, going in circles, passing by the same shops and open markets. I peep into objects of touristy desire and read titles off jackets of thick books I can never carry home. I stop to admire things and cakes on display, and pass by old people and people several generations young. I long for the easy warmth that the indoors would bring, for a glorious summer is reluctantly giving way to autumn just then; you can nearly see them passing the baton, one to the other, where the Micklegate Bar meets rush-hour traffic. Yet I am happier, any day, outside, on foot, filing away sights, smells and sounds like a glutton.

Half of day two and some half-dozen rounds of the town later, it is only half past three and, like they say on that island, everything stops for tea. I cannot recollect now what my lunch was, I haven’t included it in my notes. Maybe it was something commonplace like a salad or a sandwich, but it has filled me up, if I still remember this tale right. But it is the last day of my fortnight’s worth of holiday, and what better way to tie the ends of this England experience than with the indulgence of afternoon tea?

My loyalties lie unwaveringly with coffee. My coffee country in the hills, much ironically carrying an epithet — Scotland of India — that links it to the land I am now walking, has my whole heart. No Darjeeling could ever match the fragrance of those white jewel-like flowers that erupt to birth mournfully red cherries. They will, at some point, become the coffee that runs in my blood. On a postcard I buy for 50 pence, Verlaine’s words: “The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart a languorous monotone.”

Anything warm now, though, tea will do just fine, thank you very much. Betty’s Café Tea Rooms is brimming with people, in all the four-and-quarter times I have passed before its full-glass windows. I decide to be a tardy tourist in private instead and, on a whim, walk past a larger-than-life teddy bear and teddy bear shop and climb the narrow flight of stairs to what, in my mind, has decided to remain a yellow-tinged room. Lunch was a wee bit ago but I order the afternoon tea at Stonegate Teddy Bear Tea Room. At 13.95 quid — as the locals call their money — it is among the more expensive snacks I’ve budgeted for. The pound is low and fear of the outsider is high, in those weeks just after Brexit.

***

Around the 1840s, Anna Russell, the seventh duchess of Bedford, began to ask for tea and snacks at about 4pm in her boudoir because she would feel hungry between breakfast and dinner. Those were the austere times of two square meals a day. Soon, invitations for “tea and a walking the fields” began to reach her well-heeled friends. Tea soon moved to the drawing rooms and, when weather permitted, to the lawns and gardens of country homes. Pausing for tea became a fashionable social event, and by the 1880s, upper-class women turned up to these in the season’s must-have gowns, gloves and hats. While men did partake in the leisurely tradition, it remained largely a feminine activity. The picture of domesticity, of delicateness and the fragile, of the fashionable and the flimsy — qualities that were inevitable in the Victorian woman of a certain stature — hallmarked the afternoon tea.

My tea room overlooks the Shambles Street, and I make notes on how the tradition brings to my mind a very British lady, in her chiffon and pearls, stringing along her perfectly clipped sentences to companions as she discusses her new neighbours. Years of reading Victorian literature pours into what will likely be my Proustian madeleine moment. The foreign land of the past. And there I am in my scruffy traveller clothes — a cheap pair of jeans, a tee, a sweater that is now loose at the sleeves, my trusty old jacket that has kept me warm in remote villages in the Himalayas to Northeast India and here and elsewhere. And old shoes from another lifetime that I will discard, shedding the last of old skin, outside a metro station in London. There isn’t anything ultra-feminine or quaint about me.

The culture of tea rooms, by the next century, had become more commonplace. Lyons Tea Rooms optimised the English sentiment and identity of the time — gallantry, sophistication and wholly civilised. In the eyes of half of the world it could have been imperialistic, snobbish and operating on slavery. Nippies, waitresses in iconic uniforms, so named for the way they nipped about serving at great speed, became national icons. Empowered, independent and, yet, compulsorily pretty women who had to be unmarried to don the uniform. By the 1920s, use of their imagery and other attractive females to sell products was established in the advertising world. Alongside was the stereotype of the tea lady, whose sole job was to sell beverages and snacks in offices, as the popular gossip who leaked important trade secrets. Narratives of the female go round and round in circles, no mystique there.

***

The tea I order has by now arrived in a pale white pot and three tiers of open sandwiches, dainty little cakes, slices of Victorian sponge, strawberries, a pot of jam, macaroons and more clotted cream than I ever want to see again. The Italian waitress is from a village tinier than York, and here for better wages and the chance to practise English, I overhear her telling a couple at the next table. They turn to admire my tea, as do I, before I endeavour to finish it. So much cream! I couldn’t possibly. Clumps of it get left over. The rest of it is too sweet for me, but finish it, I do.

I read later that afternoon teas are holiday or anniversary indulgences these days, another relic that is nudged now and then to fluff the air of tradition and nostalgia around. I also read about young women baking cupcakes and donning pearls and chiffons in rebellion against ‘modern’ womanhood, taking back domesticity and embracing the gossip.

Me? I walk some more, to burn off the tea, wondering what everyone is doing back home while I return to the cobbled streets.

Deepa Bhasthiis a writer and the editor of ‘The Forager’, an online journal of food politics

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