This condolence and thinking of you gift is a great way to express your sympathy to anyone going through a difficult time, such as experiencing the loss of a job or loved one. Or even a bad breakup. When you're hurting, it's hard to ask for what you need - and this lovely comforting gift will remind them you care.
Tea And Sympathy
I completely disagree with Sands up there - you must just expect everyone to bend over backwards for you, for the restaurant to revolve around YOU. I wonder how many times you've fought with servers over wanting different meal menus at the wrong time of a day. The rules are there for a reason. I've been to tea and sympathy I don't know HOW many times in the 6 years I've lived in New York, have taken countless out of towners and even one welshman there, and have never heard such dissatisfaction. I have found that it is a lovely, cozy place, with great English food, and sweet waitresses who will tell you they need to move you or need you to leave after a meal, but not in any manner that ever offends anyone rational. Like any New York restaurant, the servers are expecting a 20% tip. Like any New York restaurant, they don't encourage squatters. And unlike most restaurants anywhere, the owner is willing to stick up for her employees, which I think is great. Those ladies run around like crazy with all the little bits and pieces that go into serving tea and I have never once seen them drop anything or knock into anyone. And now, off of my rant. Although there is no fancy presentation to the tea or meals, they are very good, very filling. I particularly love the scones with clotted cream, and the lentil stew sheperd's croquette style served at dinner time. And if you have room the desserts are to die for. In the winter bundle up for your wait outside, and in the summer grab a quick iced soy drink across the street at the soy luck club to sip while you wait. If you really want to go to sit and read, go at an off hour - breakfast times are particularly easy to stay for awhile since all the tourists come for tea time and all the locals come for dinner or lunch. Cheers!
physically impossible for me to be objective about this. basically its about tea and sympathy & masculinity and heteronormativity & homosexuality and assimilation & deborah kerr and her bafta nomination
Arrived in her parlour-bedroom with this strange companion, Janet Holcum's heart fluttered. It was the first time that a man had been with her there alone. If visitors should arrive, what would they think? Of course it would be impossible to explain that here was a gentleman whom she had caught trying to commit suicide, and whom she had undertaken to cure of his self-destroying propensities by means of tea and sympathy.
De Forest's story was reprinted numerous times in various U.S. newspapers over the next half century. However, it is the only U.S. instance of "tea and sympathy" from the nineteenth century. In Australia, meanwhile, the phrase first pops up 14 years after the De Forest instance, but it seems to have spread far more widely and deeply. From "A True Story of an Australian Christmas: A Tale for the Little People," in the [Melbourne, Victoria] Australasian (December 27, 1884):
But there was no time to waste in lamenting over ruined clothes and complexions, and, with a strength born of renewed confidence, the weary children set off again on their homeward route. When they climbed to the top of the first high hill they could see right across to the waters of the bay, and they felt sure that if they could once reach the friendly, and familiar, front beach, even at a point distant from their home, they would be at an end of their difficulties. They would surely find tea and sympathy in any of the fishermen's huts, and some kind of conveyance would quickly be procured to take them to their anxious parents.
Mrs. Spencer Brunton, looking the picture of dignity, arrived somewhat; late with her distinguished-looking hubby. By the time the last race had come and gone the men looked sadder and wiser, and the women were only really for Winter Gardens, tea and sympathy.
The "Joan Committee" (as the women have got to call it) does not content itself with tendering tea and sympathy, however. Although the social and sentimental side of its activities was best expressed in the Anzac Day gathering, when something over three hundred women were entertained, there is a very practical work of advice and relief conducted most capably by M'me Boult. Gifts of arm garments and other winter comforts are always welcome at her studio in Hunter Street, and many a bereaved family comes to her for succour and guidance in their trial and difficulties.
Less than an hour of his discovery of her, they were occupying two chairs in friendly intimacy at a small table in a tea-room near the Crown, and Eva was feeling a different woman. She now knew that what she was needing when she sat solitary and in tears in the park was tea and sympathy. Lord Doulton had given her both without stint. And hope shone on the horizon like a star.
The town is fairly bristling with the well-known Red Triangle; everywhere there are notices, huts, hostels or canteens. There is a hostel for the relatives of the wounded. The Y.M.C.A. undertakes to provide shelter and to convey to the different hospitals the relatives of those dangerously ill. At the head of this hostel is a motherly w0man who is ready at any hour with the two great comforts, hot tea and sympathy. This establishment is an oasis in the desert for the travel-worn and sorrow-stricken.
Although I had thought it likely that the expression originated in Britain, newspaper database matches do not back up that hypothesis. The first unmistakable match for "tea and sympathy" from a British newspaper is a version of the article about YMCA hostels in France that appeared (three months later) in the Creswick Advertiser cited above. In Britain, the British Newspaper Archive finds its first definite match in a version of that article that appeared the Yorkshire Evening Post of August 21, 1917.
The 1953 instance of Tea and Sympathy as the name of a Broadway play may be independent of the earlier instances of the phrase. The playwright, Robert Anderson, was an American, born in 1917 and thus unlikely to have had a close connection to World War I use of the phrase. I don't think it at all unlikely, though, that vestigial use of "tea and sympathy" as a set phrase persisted long after the Armistice. Perhaps Anderson was exposed to the expression at some point and found it appealing.
Bill Reynolds, Tom's sanctimonious, hyper-macho house master, is no help. Tom's only consolation is his friendship with Laura, Bill's understanding wife. Something of a misfit herself, Laura defends Tom and tries to help him weather the crisis. Bill warns her a house master's wife should be a disinterested bystander, merely offering the boys occasional "tea and sympathy." The play suggests Bill's persecution of Tom stems from doubts about his own masculinity; Bill apparently married under pressure from colleagues, is distant from Laura and prefers hiking or mountain climbing with his boys.
As Laura, Joanna Hubbard has the unenviable task of inhabiting a role indelibly created (and preserved in a 1956 film) by the transcendent Deborah Kerr. If a shade artificial initially, Hubbard does convey the innate niceness, sympathy and understanding. Despite the genteel manner, she finds genuine depth in Laura's frustration at her lifeless marriage and her need to reach out to Tom. 2ff7e9595c
Comments