Out for Tea with the Teaists

Yesterday afternoon, I went to tea with the Teaists in the cafe at the Wallace Collection, my all-time favourite London museum; it's stuffed with Majolica plates (such beautiful colours!) rococo paintings, ornate gold clocks, Hilliard miniatures, bizarre silver armour with bird-encrusted helmets, you imagine it, it's there! The thing I like best is a little brooch in the shape of a leaping hare.
Anyway... I digress...
The Teaists are a group of burlesque performers and artists who meet up regularly for tea in posh places, and this was the first time I had been invited. It was terribly exciting and I found them very friendly and welcoming. It was Lawrence's birthday; he was dressed in Edwardian splendour, and sat surrounded by hes and shes all beautifully turned out and made up. Jamie and Jacob had invited me and we sat under the glass roof, sipping Earl Grey tea and basking in the glow of the pink walls. A feature of the afternoon was the absolutely appalling service; it took two hours for tea to arrive (imagine that!) (how????). But meanwhile we chatted; I sat opposite Dickon Edwards, who is a performer and flaneur, and it turned out he is also a Monochrome Set fan and played with Bid in Scarlet's well for a while. We all had the same diaries and notebooks with little checkered pages. I found the four-leafed clover that I was given in Ross-shire and told how the person who gave it to me didn't seem to have much luck; it was decided that he must be a conduit to other people's luck, rather than having any himself. I chatted about kind bus-drivers to Sebastian, who is studying at Oxford. Later, some of the assembled Teaists went to Selfridges to look for a wig, and others went to Primark.
Jamie, Jacob and I went to the Office Sale Shop and browsed there for more than an hour, trying on about 40 pairs of shoes between us. I regret to say we all came away with rather a lot of eccentric shoes, having discovered that the chap behind the till gave us bigger and bigger discounts the more we chatted to him. I had an irritating carton of pomegranate juice that was leaking and getting stickier by the second, so eventually we walked down to Covent Garden and cooked dinner. Jamie copied a new Irrepressibles track to take along to Sin,the club they were going along to later; Jacob showed me how he lowered their bin bags down to pavement level using a rope and a hook from their upper window, potentially knocking a cyclist off his bike in the process.
It had been a lovely day, and I retired home to my suburb feeling urbanly contented and replete with footwear.