I’m afraid ‘scone gate’ leaves me in a bit of a jam
‘Heavily varnished wooden laminate floorboards”, “a walnut” – or “an Action Man from the Jungle Explorer range”. According to my husband, these are the shades of brown that a perfect cup of tea should be.
When he first explained the importance of this unusual colour chart – specifying that the milk must always go in first – I found it endearingly parochial. Then I found it merely parochial. And now it’s just plain annoying.
Who has the time to stand there dunking, dunking, dunking? He can have a cup of
watery milk and be grateful. But nothing gets British temperatures soaring quite like teatime etiquette, as anyone who has been following “scone-gate” will know.
Because this weekend, when a National Trust property in Cornwall made the mistake of advertising scones with cream – rather than jam – dolloped on first, all hell broke loose, with some Cornish locals threatening to boycott
Lanhydrock House and Garden, others decrying the atrocity as “cultural vandalism”, and the bitter rivalry between Devon and Cornwall (each of whom have different scone belief systems) firmly reignited.
As someone who hasn’t eaten a scone since 1978, isn’t sure how to pronounce the carbbased foodstuff and finds the idea of clotted cream and jam in any order quite simply laughable, I’m struggling to engage in the most divisive debate since Brexit.
I’m assuming that, as with all things etiquette-related, it comes down to the kind of class pretensions we love sending ourselves up about in Britain – but with a whiff of something fervently nationalistic and less funny. I’m not sure one would want to delve too deeply into the socio-political views of someone who finds a jamtopped scone “offensive” and “disgusting” – do you?