Olde England

Mrs M's grand-parents left Birmingham in 1939, fearful of the unknown terror of airial bombardment, and opened their new tailors shop in Sheep St, Stratford-upon-Avon on 1 September, as the blitzkrieg rolled over Poland. Though long gone from the family, the shop was still a "gentlemen's outfitters" until a few years ago. Today it is a novelty sweet-shop

Just around the corner, in the High St, is this, the Hathaway Tea Rooms, A Stratford institution to which Mrs M remembers being taken on childhood visits to those grand-parents. The place has always been self-consciously and assertively "Traditional", initcap included, winding up the Elizabethan heritage to 11. The building dates to 1610; the timber frames are the real thing - no mock-Tudor here; the floors are tilted randomly at alarming angles - a trip to the toilet feels like a walk across the deck of a Hebridean ferry with a blow on

The building opened as a tea room in 1931. In its heyday it was silver teaspoons, bone china and black & white uniforms. Covid sunk it in 2020 and, for a while, it was closed and to let; I don't know when it re-opened. I'm a bit fearful for it still. This is the scene today: new year's eve Saturday lunch-time with the sales on. The new year is always a cash flow crisis for a hospitality business; I hope they have managed to build up a a war chest

Our soup was hot, tasty and plentiful; the bread was the real thing; the chocolate fudge cake was huge and spectacular, with fresh raspberries, coulis, merangue, and several cardiac arrests of cream. The service was slow and haphazzard; the lack of system, training or supervision was laid bare, but everyone we dealt with was smiling and charming. It would have been possible to be irritated by the disorder, we had a lot to do, but we took a step back and looked at them. All the people we were dealing with were children - not students, but school children - doing their best, learning the ropes, smiling and resilient. This probably says something about the state of our economy, the effect of the pandemic, the inflation crisis, the impact of severence from Europe. Murky waters to address at 1am on new year's day

To the Hathaway and anyone who reads this: all good wishes for 2023