Whatever Happened To Those Nice Tea Houses?

Whatever happened to those nice tea houses? You know the ones I mean. You walked in, sat in a comfortable chair at a table dressed in white linen. A waitress dressed in a smart black and white uniform served you with freshly made sandwiches and cakes on china plates, followed by tea served in a china teapot, with china cups and saucers, china milk jug and china sugar bowl. How different it is today. Now they are called cafeterias. My wife and I visited one recently that was part of a large out of town department store. We picked up a wet plastic tray, slid it along tram lines attached to the counter and helped ourselves from a row of plastic cabinets. The sandwiches were in triangular plastic cartons, the Eccles cake was individually wrapped in a plastic film bag and the fruit pie was on a plate sheeted down with cling film. We dispensed our own tea and coffee from vending machines. At the end of the counter was a girl taking the money who obviously didn't want to be there. We then made our way over to the sundries bar where we picked up two small plastic pots of milk and a small plastic pot of cream, two sugars in small paper sachets, two lollipop sticks for stirring our drinks and three serviettes. The third serviette was merely for mopping up the milk and cream that you always spill while trying to get the tops off the little plastic pots. We found somewhere to sit and unwrapped all the various items on the tray. We then sat and had our lunch at a bare wooden table which I can only describe as looking like a land fill site. We were surrounded by enough paper and plastic to fill a recycling bin. Oh well, I guess that's the modern way of doing things. Progress, I don't think so!