By Nimue Brown

You will of course want to have afternoon tea. It is one of the hallmarks of a civillised society and absolutely essential. I shall guide you through this process.

Firstly you will require a table and chairs. If you have to make do in this regard, focus your attention on a good tablecloth. This will disguise many things, including unseemly table legs, stray tentacles and anything you are obliged to hide under the table. Good crockery is an asset, but I fear you will struggle to get anything to match. You may cheer up your table with some nice flowers. Be sure to find out in advance of your tea party whether the flowers are poisonous, venomous, hallucinogenic or inclined to attack in other ways.

It is possible to make decent herbal teas from a number of plants that grow on the island. I know, this is a horrifying assertion. There can of course be no milk or cream in such a tea, but if you’ve seen what comes out of the small cows, or for that matter the donkeys, you might consider this a blessing. Donkey milk is an acquired taste.

Further difficulties arise should you wish to serve cake, buttered toast, or biscuits with your tea. Almost no wheat is grown on the island. What grains we have cannot be relied upon and I am told that the interesting moulds that grow on them add to both the flavour and your chances of seeing something wholly unexpected. It is, I am afraid to say, very difficult to make cake out of seaweed. It is possible to make a sort-of biscuit thing that will not make you outright weep with disappointment.

One of the few things you can rely on here is meat. It isn’t always easy to come by, but for richness and lusciousness, it cannot be beaten. (That was my one joke, I hope you appreciated it.) There are few things that cannot be substituted for a really good cut of meat. Even jam. Made a cake but have no filling? Meat. Need a pie filling? Meat. And if you are trying to coax a gentleman to take tea with you, then you won’t go far wrong if you offer him some hot meat with plenty of stuffing. 

I do apologise, I seem to have become rather over-excited and may need to sit down for a moment.