Afternoon tea should be strong on fantasy

Sometimes it is necessary to take time out from the recession to thrash things out

GROOMING. IT is something you need to learn at your mother’s knee. It’s not about buying expensive creams. It’s about knowing how to apply them properly with firm upward pats and strokes and drumming of fingers across the face to get the blood flowing. It’s about keeping your hair at the right length and nourishing and brushing it to a shine. It’s about exercising muscles, including the hidden ones, about getting enough sleep to be clear of mind and eye. It’s about keeping the hands soft, the nails trimmed, the elbows buffed, the ankles rotated, the heels smooth, and so on and on and on.

Grooming sounds like a nice leisurely pursuit, suggestive of a dressing table laden with jars and bottles and initialled brushes, but the reality is a little less relaxing. It is time consuming, it is boring and expensive and sometimes very painful but, after a certain age, there are things that have to be done if one doesn’t want to wake up one morning and find Widow Twankie staring back in the bathroom mirror.

Which is why this week, on a day trip to London to catch up with a long distance friend, I found myself killing time in a reclining chair in a busy corner of the cosmetics hall of John Lewis, having my eyebrows (and other areas) threaded.

This procedure involves lying back, handbag on the knees, while an Indian woman hovers overhead, working two lengths of thread across one’s forehead, uprooting stray hairs. She moves with tremendous speed, all the while shaping the brows into an elegant arch, but still it is excruciatingly painful, not to mention embarrassing when the threads hover over other furry zones – chin, lips cheeks.

The lady also asks whether you want those areas done too while she’s at it, in full view of hundreds of shoppers, some of whom stop and stare. By the end you need a balaclava to cover up all the tell-tale red blotches, but the overall effect is good. What you don’t have in the way of natural thick brows, the lady artfully fills in with a pencil and gel – and of course you feel obliged to buy these too.

With such immaculate brows I felt able to face the lobby of the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge, where my friend and I had arranged to meet. It’s one of those grand London hotels that got a makeover by Irish architect David Collins, the king of hotel and restaurant design.

Consequently it is very smart, and the prices are astronomical. My friend had come all the way from Sydney to attend to some quite depressing family business, and insisted we treat ourselves to afternoon tea. She had been dreaming of hot buttered toast and cucumber sandwiches, and this was her chance. We sat in some quite stiff little chairs in a corner behind a pillar. A menu was flourished and whisked away, and before you could say Mad Hatter, we were presented with a hideous modern take on the traditional afternoon tea.

Our waiter lowered a cake plate on to the table, said something in accented English, and then produced a mini-torch that threw out a tiny red laser-like beam. This he pointed in the direction of the petit fours, which, he announced, the pastry chef had created in response to London Fashion Week.

Thus there was a yellow rectangle of sponge after Lanvin, a morsel of pastry with a squiggle of icing on top that was meant to evoke a Laboutin shoe, something in a shot glass inspired by Vivienne Westwood, and a tiny green handbag made of marzipan. Personally I felt handbagged by the whole performance, and kept raising my eyebrows to heaven. My friend was reminded of the time she asked for a BLT in a fancy New York hotel and had it served to her in cocktail glass.

We ate hardly any of it, but sucked down the accompanying glass of champagne each. It was time out from the recession, and we thrashed the whole thing out – homes, jobs, children, men, money. Her training as a financial analyst tells her that things will rebound, and that fresh killings will be made in the money markets, but that opportunities have already been missed. Six months ago was the time to go shopping for shares for those who had the nerve, and the cash. You get rich at the bottom of a market, not at the top, she said, and we both considered this for a while.

The bill came to a staggering £100, and there was no Mrs Doyle-style row over the bill, as neither of us was up to paying the lot. Then we had the agony over what to tip the Frenchman with the torch. We left a shameful heap of coins and scurried away. Despite my killingly smart eyebrows I felt like a country mouse come to town, surrounded as we were by glitzy women nibbling on their petit fours.

Note to Irish hotels: ditch the big scones and think high heels, frou-frou and fantasy for tea.