It's been a while now that I've been wanting to have Afternoon Tea and in conversation with Mr G and Jeffo they expressed an interest in joining me, we had pencilled in January, but things conspired against us, then we pencilled in March, but the date we picked happened to be Mother's Day so Jeffo couldn't join us, and though Mr G and I were still going to go, a freight train shed it's load all over the line near my place, so we had to postpone that too, but eventually on 6th April 2008, we made it and had afternoon tea together.

Was it worth the wait, to be honest it was.... kind of... it had been a while since Jeffo, Mr G and myself had hooked up for a proper chinwag so in that respect it was great. Afternoon Tea is a great way to meet friends and have conversation, I would even say it may even make a great first date, but if you do decide to have afternoon tea, I'd suggest you avoid the Crowne Plaza Hotel, as the quality of the eats, just wasn't that good.

Since the days of Anna the 7th Duchess of Bedford, who is reported to be the instigator of the Afternoon Tea tradition, it has consisted of a pot of tea and sandwiches....over time cakes were added, but bearing in mind the Duchess was pretty loaded you know that the ingredients would have top quality produce, but alas at the Crowne Plaza, it wasn't that.

Now the price was £16.50 each....now I fully understand that we're paying for the privilege to sit in a hotel tea room and have eats, but when you can clearly see that they have scrimped and saved it's annoying...for the tidy sum of £16.50 we each got four finger sandwiches, two small scones and a couple of cakes.... the thing is you could tell that they had taken two slices of what felt like Tesco value bread and made a sandwich, cut off the crust and then sliced it into three... so basically between the three of us they use 8 slices of bread.

The slices of cake, was clearly a Mr Kipling style small circle cake with