Tea in England (Travel from Home #3)

My Harry Potter group hosts a tea every year. This year, we shared tea virtually via Zoom on board the Hogwarts Express on the way to Hogwarts at the beginning of September. I took the opportunity to incorporate that into a personal fake trip to England.

Tea Time

It was difficult for me to choose just a few things to do for a fake visit to England. Binging Taskmaster television episodes have been one of my bright points of the pandemic, for example. So I was glad to give myself a weekend to be able to cover several choices. I did enjoy a few Taskmaster episodes in addition to everything else.

My Choices

Books: I started reading Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, which I’ve been hearing about for more than a year. It uses a trope I like (enemies to fake friends to real friends to lovers), and I’m happy to report that I definitely love the book. For a book club later this month, I’m also reading Dodger by Terry Pratchett and rereading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for another meetup discussion. So there were no shortage of books set in England for me to enjoy.

Meal & Sweets: I had a lovely tea all to myself. I made cucumber sandwiches for the first time (they weren’t bad), strawberries, raspberry scones, and lemon curd. I'm a sucker for lemon curd. I had five cups of loose leaf tea (Adagio fandom blend teas of Hufflepuff and Simon Snow to go with the scones) as well as some English Breakfast tea from Twinings.

Music: The first musical group that came to mind was, honestly, The Spice Girls. But once I gave it a little more thought, there’s just so many I love, from The Beetles to Ed Sheeran. I decided that the best way to incorporate the music into my day was to choose music to work out to. I really enjoy Kyra Pro’s dance workouts, and I’d done her Queen workout before. So I put together a playlist of workouts done to Queen songs starting with hers. Some are workouts more my fitness style than others, and there isn’t a lot of range in the song choices, unfortunately. Queen is maybe my favorite band ever, so it would have been nice to have had many more of their songs. So I also added one of my favorite Queen songs to dance to at the end to make myself happy with some freestyle dance like no one’s watching.

Movies: There were so many to choose from that I ended up going with three different ones! Earlier in the week, I rewatched Goodbye Christopher Robin with the commentary track on (I’ve been meaning to do that for a year now). It was wonderful getting more insight about how they depicted Milne and his son over the years. Following the tea event with my Harry Potter group, I sat down with one more cup of tea to watch Tolkien. I really enjoyed it! Of course the movie couldn’t cover every aspect of his life and writing inspiration, but I loved what they chose to convey. During the weekend, I also took the opportunity to finally watch Disney’s Christopher Robin for the first time (I bought it when it came out and still had never seen it). I had a few issues with it, some of which was why I held off watching for so long (*cough*Ewan*cough*). But overall I did enjoy it much more than I expected to. I'm glad I own it, because I will certainly watch it again some time.