Vera Drake

Hi
Did anyone see this film last night (Sat)?
I feel asleep after she was arrested and so missed the end!

 

Hi Stingo,yes I saw the film last night but had to video tape the end of it becasue it went on until too late.The trouble is I haven't had time to watch the end of it yet..I can let you know when I have watched it,unless there is someone else on here that can tell you the ending..sorry :D :D

 

I saw it. Rather a bleak film and slow-moving I thought. Certainly showed up the difference between the have and have-nots. Some nice nostalgic touches none-the-less, like the drinking tea from a saucer episodes...why did people do that?
Poor old Vera ended up doing time (2 and a half years) for her crimes. I believe the story was based on fact.

 

I just googled this Jack by the hedge:

Tea Rituals -- Drinking Tea from a Saucer Tea is truly a global beverage. Originating in Asia, it spread across oceans and continents, permanently altering the landscape wherever it landed. Tea rituals, the ways people in certain regions prepare and consume tea, are one piece of tea's cultural impact.


Some tea rituals, like the Cha-no-yu ceremonies of Japan or the showy way of pouring mint tea in Morocco, have been well documented. Others have gone largely unnoticed by most tea lovers.

Take the habit of drinking tea directly from a porcelain saucer. It's unclear exactly why this became popular. Some speculate that it was done to cool very hot tea to a drinkable temperature, and this seems to make sense. (Compare this to the debate about when to add milk to a cup of tea.)

I first encountered this ritual in 1997, and I've been wondering about it since then. Of particular interest is also where I witnessed it, but I'll get back to this later.

The origins of saucer-drinking are largely unknown. The earliest reference I can find is that the Duchess of York introduced it to Scotland in 1860. This seems incorrect, though, as Ernest Augustus, Duke of York and Albany during that period never married. It is more likely that Mary II of England (of the William and Mary reign) introduced it during her 1689-1694 rule. Her father, James II of England was the Duke of York from 1644 to 1685 before being crowned king. Still, the origin of Mary's purported habit and its adoption since then remain a mystery.

It is possible that saucer-drinking began in Eastern Europe where strong black tea was paired with cubes of sugar. Anton Chekhov mentions the custom in the 1922 short story "The Cook's Wedding:"


"... A big, thick-set, red-haired peasant, with a beard, and a drop of perspiration on his nose, wearing a cabman's full coat, was sitting at the kitchen table on which they chopped the meat and sliced the onions. He was balancing a saucer on the five fingers of his right hand and drinking tea out of it, and crunching sugar so loudly that it sent a shiver down Grisha's back."

In England, though, saucer-drinking fell out of vogue. George Orwell commented on the ritual in his 1945 "A Nice Cup of Tea." In this essay on steeping tea, he wondered:

"There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?)"

Certainly it would be out of place to drink from a saucer at a formal afternoon tea.

Today, the ritual is associated primarily with Iran. But in 1997 when I first learned about it, I was not anywhere near England or Iran. No, I was in East Africa in a rural area of Tanzania! My group was visiting the home of a local community member who served tea to welcome us. While most of us used teacups, he showed one boy how to sip tea directly from a saucer. We were told this was the way to drink tea.

It's very tempting to guess at where his family adopted the habit. Maybe it was a remnant of colonialism, of German or British habit passed down to the locals. Or maybe he had spent time with someone from Iran or Russia and picked up the ritual that way. Or perhaps it was a local invention of necessity, a way to quickly cool hot tea.

Regardless of its origin, or origins, drinking tea from a saucer is still one of the many fascinating rituals by which tea is enjoyed around the world.

 

Thank you jack by the hedge and everyone else for answering

 

Thanks, Kedi-gato for informing of the aristocratic origins of saucer-drinking in this country.
When I was a lik'l lad (in the 50s) it was looked down upon as a very "infra-dig" thing to do, even by the lower classes from which I originated (and still belong to!). The idea of cooling the tea is probably correct (I seem to remember mum pouring some in a saucer for me to drink with an instruction to blow on it to cool it down), but was tea really so much hotter 50 years ago?!