Month: May 2006

If you re having

If you’re having a party and wondering how much soft drink to get in, here’s a graph summarizing the proportions of consumption we saw at our little do the other day. It’s more-or-less in-line with the
moderately interesting Britvic soft drink report 2006 (PDF, which contains wonderful phrases such as: “Consumption occasions are the key to understanding and targeting consumers, to ultimately unlock category expansion”).

Graph showing soft drink consumption

I think we could have shifted more volume of the J2O, and we definitely over-budgeted on lemonade-based drinks. Mineral water was popular.

Of course more beer was glugged than all soft drinks combined.

Afternoon tea and teashops

I feel that this could be the year of the teashop, or maybe just afternoon tea in general. So far we’ve visited 3 this season.

The first was when we were in Haworth with my Mum and Dad over Easter. We stopped off at the Apothecary Tea Rooms which is a pleasant place with a great view over the Worth Valley. Richard and I had sandwiches, but Mum and Dad had scones, and so it counts as afternoon tea rather than lunch 🙂

The second was Tallulah’s Tea Rooms, here in Brighton, in fact just around the corner from our house. We’ve eaten breakfast there (excellent), and we’ve had sunday lunches there (tasty and fresh), but up until yesterday we hadn’t managed afternoon tea. Richard and Nikki were still in Brighton after my birthday party on Saturday and so we met up with them for fresh, warm scones. As with all the rest of the food we’ve had there, excellent.

Then today we decided we were peckish after our visit to the British Wildlife Centre and so stopped off at the Duddleswell Tea Rooms in the Ashdown Forest. I drive past these tea rooms quite often on my way home from work and so it was good to try them out. It’s a busy place, so we sat outside and watched the world go by. They seemed to have run out of scones, so whilst my Old English Tea of crumpets and jam turned up really quickly, Richard’s Ashdown Forest Tea (2 scones with butter and jam) took 5 or so minutes longer to arrive. The crumpets were excellent, and the scones were pretty tasty too. Be prepared for a wait though as this is a popular place.

I’ve borrowed Sussex teashop walks from a friend at work so that should give us some inspiration for other tea rooms to try in the next few months 🙂