Tea Therapy

  

I started drinking tea when I was about ten and have now been enjoying it for over forty years, other rivals have come along like Guinness and Lattes, but they have failed to overtake my love of a good cuppa. I ran the SubVerse Poetry Tea Room from 2000 to 2005 which was inspired by my love of surrender, tea and poetry. Above and below are some of the tea related art I have created over the years.

The Star Heart Cafe

I have loved spending time alone in cafes since the 1990s. Pubs have taken over a little in the past few years, but the call of cafes is never far away. I have run two imaginary cafes in my life. The first was The SubVerse Poetry Tea Room which ran for five years from 2000 to 2005. The second is The Star Heart Cafe which is both my blog and my craft stall which both started in 2013. There is generally something civilised about a cafe, hopefully something comforting; it's social but not intimate. Hopefully you can just relax, be yourself and not get bothered too much by anything or anyone.

Lucy Vale

 

I was writing Lucy Vale over ten years ago, in 2006, just before I started work on ALF Creations @ the Star Heart Cafe and embarked on various social media projects. For years I couldn't work on my story, I felt it was a big mess and I was busy being a working mother, I had a lot of grief to deal with and I was also nursing a big broken heart. Then on her ten year anniversary I felt once more able to engage with Lucy and came up with a year long plan for her dream diary adventures which I am still working on.

  

Aspects of Tea

There is something special about a cup of tea. Whenever I sit down to read, write, reflect, plan or just have a really good think, I like to have a nice cup of tea handy to enhance the experience. I think that has been why contemplating 'Aspects of tea' has been a big creative idea in my life and has carried on from the SubVerse Poetry Tea Room to the Star Heart Cafe. Some of my tea related memorabilia can be found on my Pinterest Board 'Aspects of tea' and also via a musical montage on YouTube, 'Aspects of tea' is accompanied by me playing Gnossiennes 1 and 3 by Satie on my electirc piano.

Tea pots and tea cosies

In 2016, when Amy was doing her GCSE exams, I was feeling so stressed out that I felt I needed to work on a simple, but useful knitting project to help calm my nerves. At the same time we also needed a tea cosy.

I found a really simple tea cosy pattern on the internet involving knitting two large squares and sewing and tying them together into the appropriate tea cosy shape. I was pleased with the results, both the tea cosies and Amy’s GCSEs.

 

Tea and Poetry

'Tea and Poetry' was a specific SubVerse passivity; an extremely mild alternative to an activity. It was an interesting idea based on the notion that certain flavours of tea were well suited to certain flavours of poetry. These are the combinations I came up with.

 

Secret London Part Four (Blog Post 100)

A few places to visit had accumulated on my Secret London list and I chose a couple more from my book plus a couple from my own knowledge that I thought it would be good to have a look at. To start off mum and I met at Waterloo and after a trip on the Jubilee line arrived at St. John's Wood.

  

After a walk down 'the made famous by the Beatles' Abbey Road we came to The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate

I've been wanting to visit this impressive housing estate for a few years. It's used a lot in films, as it is so unusual and eye-catching. Mum and I walked all the way through it admiring the symmetrical concrete forms and intricate well-designed shapes; taking photos of the striking angular houses and apartments.

We then took two short train rides from Swiss Cottage to Hoxton for The Geffrye Museum.

The museum is a bit like a real life version of the BBC 'Back in Time' series of programmes. It starts with displays of drawing rooms from the 1600s, moves on to rooms in the 18th and 19th centuries and then in the modern extension you can see displays of 20th century lounges. I definitely recognise some of this furniture from the decades I have lived through in my own life. I have visited this museum a number of times and it is definitely one of my favourites.

 

The main purpose of our trip was to try out the Geffrye Museum Cafe. It was very pleasant with elegant surroundings. I had a substantial ploughman's lunch and mum had a very tasty looking vegetarian hash.

From the Geffrye Museum we then took a bus down to the river to visit The Twinings Tea Museum.

I am a big tea fan and Twinings make fine tea, so I think I was expecting more from this experience than I actually received. There is not much to the museum, it is mostly a shop and is very narrow. The tea and what there is of its history were interesting but it was all a bit brief, so we quickly moved on.

The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting more popular sights in London, the Thames, Hungerford Bridge and the Royal Festival Hall. Over a coffee mum and I compiled a Secret London Top Ten list and I am now mulling over a follow up to our four Secret London day trips.

The Chapel Cafe

In the Good Mothers Club my heroine, Alice Plummer, stumbles across the Chapel Cafe, while there she meets other troubled mothers with whom she shares dark secrets and disturbing tales. this is a description of her first venture into the establishment.

'It certainly was worth the walk. The Chapel Café was my dream coffee shop; it boasted a polished wooden floor, tall and colourful stained glass windows featuring motifs of a heart, an anchor and a cross, thick round wooden tables, red velvet cushioned armchairs and the kind of intricate carved wood and stone features you would hope to find in an old church. I walked up to the coffee counter to order a drink; there was no queue and only the minimal conversational murmur coming from the other customers. Looking around further I noticed something else unusual about the café, it was a gadget free zone: no laptops, no mobiles, not even a kindle or an ipod. I took my mobile phone out of my pocket, switched it off and put it back into my bag.

‘Um, regular, no, medium, latte please,’ I heard myself saying, I obviously intended to stay for a while.

‘You’re here for the Good Mothers Club,’ the barista was a young, intense man dressed in black and white. He had fine, strong features and clear eyes that seemed to stare into the heart of me.

‘Am I?’ I asked.

‘They’re at the back.’ The barista nodded to the back of the chapel, to a slightly raised area, I guessed that that was where the altar used to be. There stood an oval table, around which sat an array of brightly coloured women. At the head of the table sat a pretty, young woman in pale grey with a white headdress, a nun. She smiled at me with such a warm generous smile that I smiled back.

With my freshly made Latte in my hand I headed over to the table of women, taking in more details of the other customers as I went. There was an unkempt young man in an Edward Munch ‘The Scream’ t-shirt, a group of business men in suits, teenage Goths, an older couple, an elegant 1950s style starlet, a couple of disheveled high school students and a group of international tourists, from various remote corners of the world.

There were two vacant spaces at the table, one next to the nun and one opposite her. I made my way past a woman in blue, who was having an intense conversation with the woman in red who sat by her side, in order to sit in the vacant seat nearest the nun.

‘Hello, come to make up the numbers,’ smiled an attractive, bubbly woman, dressed in a big, bold, mauve dress, as I sat down opposite her, ‘You’re just in time, the meeting starts at six.’

I glanced at my watch, six o’clock, and then I looked at the nun, she began speaking and the small conversations that were taking place around the table died down.'