We spent this morning the same way Jayne spent Friday morning – waiting in for a maintenance man who never arrived.

After that we headed out to Kent. Yesterday I promised Jayne a cream tea and , in my opinion, the best cream tea to be had is in Quaintways tea shop in Penshurst, Kent, so thats where we headed.

After negotiating the dangerously tiny roads we reached Penshurst, and the first thing we saw was that the tea shop was closed! Apparently they are closed on Mondays, but for bank holidays they stay open and close on the Tuesday instead.

How was I to know?

We had a look around the village, including the church, churchyard, and a group of ancient buildings called Leicester Square, then went on to Penshurst Place. It is a long time since I visited Penshurst Place – at least ten years – and it has changed a lot.

Not the house itself which doesn’t even appear to have been dusted since my last visit, but the ‘visitor facilities’. You used to enter via a gate in the garden wall, paying at a small sentry box sort of affair, but now there is a large gift shop and ticket office a lot further along.

It seems like all the investment has been going into that, and upgrading the tea shop, and building a ‘venture playground’, rather than do anything to the building and its contents. The public areas of the house are distinctly shabby and threadbare, with huge cobwebs and dust everywhere.

There are some paintings which may be quite good, but they are very poorly hung – high up on the walls with lighting arranged to reflect on them so you can’t see them properly. Some looked suspiciously dark, as if they needed a good dose of restoration.

If anything, Penshurst Place suffers in the same way Arundel Castle does, from still being a family home in part. Only a part of the house is open to the public and the rest is still occupied by the Viscount De L’Isle or someone like that. As a result all the guide books over-emphasise the importance of the family and are written with the sort of toadying reverence you would expect. All of the guides are pensioners who are probably in awe of the local nobility.

Personally if I visit these places I am a lot more interested in the building itself than in whichever chinless wonders have lived in it over the years. With each new room I could feel the call to arms in the class war getting louder. The gardens are nice though.

But before going back through the gardens we had a cream tea in the tea rooms. It was nowhere near as good as the Quaintways tea shop! A proper English cream tea is a bit ritualistic. Maybe not as formal as the Japanese tea rituals, but even so the experience is not enhanced by self-service, pushing a tray along a counter and carrying it over to pick up all the sachets of sugar, cutlery etc. The journey home deserves a post all of its own…