Well Lady Mendl's Tea Salon lived up to expectations and a good old tea-sodden Anglophilic time was had by all. We had to walk around Gramercy Park and Union Square for quite awhile in the cold to work off all the tea and scones and cakes. Then today I updated my Doollee.com entry and the updated-affirmative response included the address of Doollee creator and proprietor Julian Oddy - so I had to check it out on Google maps and he lives on a charming street in Dorset. The pub next door offered "toasties all day" on its sign and I had to ask Julian what it was. His response:
Take two slices of white bread, butter them, add cheese and ham to make a sandwich then toast > toastie
Interesting facts about Doollee.com - the name is based on the way Oddy's grandchildren pronounce his first name. The web site was created by him in 2003, in his spare time, as a project to teach himself HTML. He's not involved in theatre, but his wife is.
Also, clearly Julian Oddy is good people, as demonstrated by his obvious disdain for right-wingers in this comment in the Guardian back in May.
I first heard of Dorset, like so many English place-names, via Monty Python - the Council Ratcatcher Sketch:
Ratcatcher: Wainscoting ... Wainscoting ... Wainscoting ... sounds like a little Dorset village, doesn't it? Wainscoting.
(Cut to the village of Wains Cotting. A woman rushes out of a house.)
Woman: We've been mentioned on telly!
The Royal Oak of Weymouth, Dorset. Julian Oddy says it's a lovely pub.
