Tea Time

I have never been to a tea party.  My sister used to have her friends over and they would play with their dolls together and have them drink fake tea from little tiny cups, but I never had any interest in dolls.  Is it just the aristocrats, or is it all of the British people that are so proper holding their tea cups with their pinkies sticking out.  I drink a lot of ice tea and I don’t observe any fashionable etiquette while I am doing that.  Do the British have tea, or do tea, or take tea and what is the difference between afternoon tea and high tea?  If the queen invites me to high tea, am I supposed to bring along a few joints?  I would not want to have tea with the Queen of Hearts, for fear that she might not like something that I did and then declare, “Off with his head!”

I never fell down a rabbit hole and it is very unlikely that I would even fit through the entrance even if I was able to find one. I have heard the phrase mad as a hatter, but I am actually not sure what a Mad Hatter is, but my best guess would be that they make hats and act a bit crazy while doing their job.  It is pretty clear that a Dormouse is a nocturnal rodent that likes to hibernate, but the one that Lewis Carroll developed probably has narcolepsy, because he fell asleep a lot.  The European rabbit, lives in underground burrows, or rabbit holes, so it is not unexpected for Alice to meet a rabbit after falling into a rabbit hole.  I think that the March Hare has spent all winter underground and now that it is March he is out of his burrow hoping around all over the place. The March Hare is rather hare brained and he may be as mad as the Hatter, but all of these characters enjoy having tea at the March Hare’s house and celebrating Unbirthday’s.

There was a enormous table set out under a tree in front of the house, with a massive spread of tea things laid out, like plates and saucers, making the tea party look gloriously, outrageously decadent.  The March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it while the Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, which Alice thought was very uncomfortable for the Dormouse, but Alice thought that since it is asleep, it probably didn’t mind.  The conversations are hilarious as when the Hatter, the Dormouse and the March Hare saw Alice approach they cried out, “No room! No room!”, but Alice indignantly said, “There’s plenty of room!”, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

“Have some wine”, the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.  Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea and she remarked, “I don’t see any wine.”  I guess Alice was not a teetotaler (a person who never drinks alcohol) or she would have answered “No thank you”, as she is very polite and has impeccable manners.  When the March Hare says “There isn’t any”, Alice angrily corrects him by saying, “Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it.”

Written for 7/28/18 Linda G. Hill’s ‘Life in progress’ Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is “T, tea, tee”.