Dear Readers,
The Tea and Crumpets is both funny and serious at the same time. I don't know how that is possible, but it is. Don't skip the serious parts, read it all! Unless you happen to be doing something worthwhile (and school does not count unless you are reading The Iliad for school), then you have no excuse.
Mary Moberly
Senior Editor of the
Tea and Crumpets
Oscar Wilde once said that books used to be written by nobles and read by the public, but now they are written by the public and read by no one.
That is very true. Most books that are published today are written because the author either needed money, wanted to be just like another author that wrote a really awesome book, or just had an idea for a story (or all of these reasons might apply). The books that result may be entertaining, may be exciting, may relieve boredom, but very few of them will last. Very few of them will be cited in numerous other books and articles, very few of them will be analyzed by people in the next century. Very few of them will become classics.
Why does it matter whether they will become classics? Classics are boring. I don't need to read classics. If that is your response, if you read books only to relieve boredom, or only to score points in the Reading Counts! Program or Accelerated Reader Program or Catch a Dragon by the Tale Summer Reading Program, I don't care. Keep doing that if you want to, but never, never, never think that you don't need to read the Classics.
Let me quote Thoreau, in his excellent book (now a classic) called Walden (and you'd better read it):
"A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;--and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
"I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him,--my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction
between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were."
Pet Vet is a radio show that is sort of like that one show on Animal Planet. Here is one of the two shows that we ever made. (I have taken some small parts out to make it shorter.)
Nurse: What is his name?
Owner: Slither.
Nurse: What is his problem?
Owner: He's gone mad.
Nurse: He's gone mad! Slither has gone mad!
Owner: (crying)
Nurse: He is in solitary confinement and now he's escaped!
Owner: (scream)
Surgeon: Why do you keep him in that pumpkin thing?
Nurse: Why don't we have a lid for that?
Owner: Where's a lid? Where's a lid?
Surgeon: Miss, find a lid!
Nurse: Find a lid!
(struggle)
Nurse: He's getting loose! Aghkkgwak!
Surgeon: Nurse? Nurse? Have you seen my CD player?
Owner: I don't think that has a lid.
(silence)
Nurse: Get back in there!
(pounding)
Nurse: Be very quiet. Maybe the loud noises are scaring him.
Surgeon: How long has he been this way?
(silence)
Nurse: Yes, how long has he been this way?
(Pause)
Owner: (sigh) Well... since this morning.
Nurse: So... this morning?
Surgeon: Describe what happened.
Owner: Well, I... I don't know. I was just...
Surgeon: So, you - when you woke up, did he just go crazy or what?
Owner: I... I was just walking in to feed him... and... he was... slithering around like crazy.
Nurse: She was walking in to feed him and he was slithering around like crazy.
Surgeon: What do you feed your animal, Miss?
Owner: What snakes eat. Mice, and... um...
Nurse: Speak louder, please.