Gin Mayo, Votes for Women, Orchard House, and Miss C's Favourite March

While I was recovering from knee surgery over the Christmas holidays, Mr. C took our three children to Chelsea Market, where he and I had spent a lovely après-Christmas afternoon last year.

They bought me some beautifully wrapped soaps as a gift, and the salesperson threw in the bag two tubes of the curious "Gin Mayo." No-one asked what it was. It looks like a tube of Krazy Glue, or some dangerously strong bonding agent. except for the charmingly alarming graphic. It reminds me of  Cindy Sherman photograph from her Heroines series.

But Gin Mayo is, apparently, exactly what it purports to be: mayonaise infused with gin. It's the brainchild of an Amsterdam-based seafood restaurant, Mossel & Gin.

I don't wish to puncture one of the tubes to taste the concoction inside, so I think I'll bring them to my office and pop them inside my "votes for women" replica teacup.

Coincidentally, I bought this tea cup at Orchard House, home of Louisa May Alcott, when I made a summer scholarly tour of Concord one summer.

That's the summer I suffered from heat exhaustion after having walked to Walden Pond (but allowed to wade in because of high bacteria that afternoon(!) and back to town, and then getting disoriented in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery the next morning trying to locate Authors Ridge.

Those distressing memories aside, I think the Gin Mayo will complement the Votes for Women tea cup, especially since blue and gold were the colours of suffrage in the United States.

P.S. Amy was always my favourite.