Picnic Tea

It never fails to amaze me that after living in London for six years the language can still stump me. Recently my sister was visiting from Vancouver and I arranged for us to spend an evening with family friends in England who we had known over 20 years ago while they were spending a year abroad in Canada.

The day of our meeting I was coordinating with my friend J as to when and where to meet when I received a text message from her saying we would be meeting at her brother’s house for “picnic tea” at 6:30pm. I was perplexed. I mean, I am clearly familiar with picnics and have been drinking tea for most of my life but I had no idea what “picnic tea” is.

I asked my sister for her opinion but aside from chuckling over this strange-sounding term, she was as perplexed as I. Were we having tea outdoors? Would we be nibbling on a few tiny cakes and scones with jam? What about dinner? After all, we’d be meeting at 6:30 in the evening. To avoid disappointment, my sister and I decided to go to meet them for tea but politely abscond after a few hours to get dinner on our own on our way back home.

As it turned out, “picnic tea” involved a table full of food including gourmet pizza, a selection of hors d’oeuvres, cold meat and cheese, vegetables and dip washed down by copious amounts of wine and sparkling wine. We were even offered fruit, chocolate squares for dessert, and coffee. Who knew? In fact, when I think back to the evening, we were served virtually everything…except tea.

Yet a brief bit of sleuthing reveals that our picnic tea was not typical. According to one blog entry I discovered, picnic tea is really no more than having tea outdoors, preferably served with a few sweets. And doing a simple web search I even found several online retailers selling picnic tea sets – wicker hampers filled with teacups, saucers, teapot, spoons and even cloth serviettes – for those days when a simple English picnic tea is in order.

So, it seems picnic tea really is just what it says on the box. But this is a box that may still come with surprises.