The Year of Living Vicariously
From Mystic Tea Room
On February 26th, 2020, at the age of 72, with the Covid-19 pandemic breaking out all over, my husband and i went into a self-imposed quarantine or lockdown. We decided to order all of our food online, to run our various businesses from home, and to engage with people remotely until such time as a vaccine was developed for the virus. On the anniversary of that date, which also happens to be the birthday of my late mother-in-law, who died during the course of this year, i find myself still too young to be eligible for the vaccine, and i realize that may be here for months. No one has prioritized vaccinating people such as we are, home-based writers, metaphysical merchants, and entrepreneurs.
In this year of living vicariously, i find that i have spent quite a lot of time scanning and uploading postcards of vintage and contemporary tea rooms. Obviously i am missing something in my life and am trying to make up for it. I love the experience of being served tea and treat-foods in cunning little out-of-the-way tea rooms and patisseries with Victorian, Edwardian, Mission, or Craftsman style architecture and furnishings -- but i don't love it enough to die for it.
I began the Year of Living Vicariously by randomly uploading tea room and tea cup images o this site. I went into overdrive in Summer by promising to scan and upload one tea room postcard per day from each of the 50 states and every foreign country for which i could find a card. I made that deadline, and then rested on my laurels, scanning and uploading other subjects of the past, particularly fortune telling cards.
On January 1st, realizing that i would not be returning to my shop any time soon, i started a Patreon account, as you all well know. Today i have returned to tea rooms for a one-day Patreon upload blow-out.
Unlike my other Patreon pages, which are being held back for one year, these brand-new card-scans will be seen by the public, and the links in each card's caption on thi page will lead you to its full-size image on its "home page" at the Mystic Tea Room. However, this article, part of my series "From the Land of Tea," i reserve for my Patrons. It is your support that has made this scan-travaganza possible.
So ... what is it about tea rooms?
I don't usually editorialize about these vintage images. I let them speak for themselves as historic documents. But there are things that stad out, little oddities, flashes of charm and grace, quirky inexplicabilities. Let's take a look:
- The Bluebird Tea Room in Bettwys-y-oed, Wales is a classic early 20th century British tea room. Like so many of its lovely type, it has a fireplace, and the photographer centers the image on that feature. The display of old dishes or brass utensils is a feature of many such tea rooms, and here we have some large platters on the mantel and a cupboard of chinaware at right, and matched bone china cups and suacers on the tables.
- The Riverside Tea Room in Marbleton, Quebec depicts a doubly-vanished piece of history. In the first place, it is obviously a back-porch tea room. In the ssecond place, the village in which it existed is no more, being now just a neighborhood of the rather queerly-named village of Dudswell. So let us gave at the porch-as-tea-room. The out of focus foreground and the glare on the glass window mark this as an amateur snapshot, not the work of a professional photographer. The French door and window show us another room beyond the porch, and i think it is the family's kitchen, perhaps, where the food was prepared for guests. On the wainscot cap moulding we see a row of tender outdoor plants in tin cans. They are not house-plants, or they would have had cache-pots to add to their decorativeness. No, they are just the hgarder;s variagated Pelargonium and Coleus brought in for the winter.
