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Do you know the difference between high tea and afternoon tea? Both are traditional English meals but afternoon tea has probably spread to many other parts of the world whereas high tea, I think is particularly British. It’s certainly the meal I remember best from my childhood.

Afternoon tea can barely be described as a meal. It’s more like an excuse for a social gathering over a pretty tea set with a few tiny sandwiches and cakes. Personally, I always picture society ladies, dressed in designer frocks, gossiping with teacup in hand, particularly in a large de luxe hotel like the Savoy or the Ritz in London.

I once went to afternoon tea at Harrods in London. This wasn’t the delicate, polite occasion you might imagine. I don’t know what it’s like now but then, in the 1970s, it was a celebration of greed. For a set price, you could eat as much as you liked. There were sandwiches, scones and cakes of all kinds on a self-service counter. At the entrance to the self-service there were stacks of large dinner plates not dainty tea plates. People piled their plates and trays with enormous quantities of food including a heart attack inducing number of cream cakes. Almost staggering under the weight of their trays, they sat down at tables, nicely laid up with linen tablecloth and napkins and were quickly served with pots of tea.

I’ve never been able to eat large quantities of sweet food without quickly feeling sick so I’d only taken a couple of small sandwiches and a couple of cakes – very modest by the standards of others in the restaurant. Amazingly, I saw people going back for second helpings. I think some of them put the extra cakes in bags to take home.

It was a strange experience to see such unbridled greed and a determination by customers to get more than their money’s worth.

By contrast, high tea is a proper meal served to young children when I was growing up in the 1950s. I used to eat it after school until I was about 11 or 12 years old. Then I was allowed to stay up for dinner with my parents instead.

My lensography Books Make Great Gifts

Lensographies (lists of Squidoo lenses) are usually not very interesting although they can be useful. This is more likely if you do lensographies on individual niche subjects.  It is also possible to make them interesting and attractive to visitors looking for information on the topic of your niche too.

First of all, don’t use the word lensography in the title or text because this means nothing to anybody outside Squidoo. Think of a good title using relevant keywords and that is going to sound attractive to someone searching on Google.

Similarly, it’s important that the first paragraph of your introduction contains keywords and is likely to capture the attention of someone searching on Google.

I use two ways of trying to make lists of lenses interesting and attractive. The first can be seen on a page I did to gather my book reviews together to which I gave the title Books Make Great Gifts. I took the ‘give a book as a gift’ angle using my book reviews as suggestions. I wrote about why books make good gifts and the importance of matching the book with the recipient. I divided the lens up into different sections according to genre, eg Mysteries and Thrillers, Books for Children, Classic Books, and wrote a bit about each genre followed by a list of reviews of books of that type. I followed each list with an Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list of books in the hope of making some sales.

The other type of lensography I’ve done can be seen on England’s Seaside Towns. I wrote a little about individual lenses on individual seaside towns (one of them made by another lensmaster but it fitted in well) but mostly I’ve written about different types of seaside town with a link to more information from tourist information sites. There are maps for each place I wrote about on this page so people can see exactly where it is in England with pictures and a video of one place. Towards the end, I included a list of my lenses about seaside resorts. This seems to work quite well as it gets a few hundred visits a week – not earth shattering numbers but better than many lensographies. I used a similar style on a list of lenses about historic towns called Historic England.

I’m trying to think of more aspects of the American Wild West to accompany these two but the problem is that, as an English woman living in England, it’s not a natural subject for me or something I know a lot about. I shall carry on researching, though, to see if I can find an angle connected to the topic that I can write an interesting article or two about.

Quizzes aren’t really very quick to make, even though I always think they will be. It takes quite a while to think of questions that aren’t too easy or too hard. As the format of the quiz is multiple choice, it can take a while to think of alternative answers to give the choice for each question.

Once that’s done, just a quiz isn’t enough. I feel that more content is required otherwise the visitor will feel short-changed. I’ve put in quotations, a couple of Amazon Spotlights about a relevant book and movie and some really nice pictures and posters. Then I added a bit more information about a couple of aspects of the American West.

Bournemouth Pier

I just spent a week’s holiday (vacation) staying at my best friend’s house in Bournemouth on the English south coast. I was very lucky with the weather because it was hot and sunny all day, everyday and the good weather continues still.

We didn’t do anything very special but we had fun, caught up on gossip, went shopping, sat in the garden, and enjoyed ourselves. As we’ve been friends for over 30 years, we have a lot to talk about and we share so many memories.

Now I’ve had a break, I’ve come back with ideas for new Squidoo pages. I finished a very long but excellent novel while I was away so I might write a review of it. I bought about eight new books so there might be more reviews I can do of some of those too. I’ve also been looking through an old book in which I wrote recipes that people gave me. I haven’t made some of those for years so I’ll probably try some of the old favourites and put them on lenses if they are suitable and good.

Squidoo's Purple Star

When I was a little girl in primary and junior school, getting a tick and a gold star for my work was a real thrill and encouraged me to try harder. I’ve always been a sucker for praise.

It looks like 50 years later I haven’t moved on much emotionally. Since Squidoo introduced Purple Stars for exceptionally good lenses made by Giants, I’ve been just as thrilled as I was when I was seven years old each time one of my lenses has got one.

Last week, one of my earliest lenses, The Historic City of York, England, was awarded a Purple Star and, this week, a lens I made a few months ago, Art Nouveau – A Beginner’s Guide.

I think that one of the big addictive factors of Squidoo is the praise that lensmasters can receive for good lenses. This comes mostly from other lensmasters leaving comments in the Guestbook although we can set the Guestbooks so non-Squidoo visitors can leave comments too.

If you want to get good comments, 5 star ratings and being recommended for Lens of the Day or Purple Stars, you really must take an active part in the Squidoo community. That way people know who you are and will visit your lenses.

Being active in the community means visiting the Lensmaster Lounge (Squidoo’s forum), looking at other people’s lenses and giving them a star rating and leaving a comment. Of course, you should only give the star rating the lens deserves and that includes not rating it at all.

Squidoo’s community is one of the best I’ve ever joined on the web and I would recommend anybody who likes making web pages and being part of an active, supportive community to come and join Squidoo.

My Purple Star Lenses

• Crazy Quilts With a Difference
• Make Do and Mend from the 1940s
• Meccano – One of My Favourite Toys
• Make a Reader Friendly Lens
• I Had a Mini-Stroke and What Happened After
• Historic City of York, England
• Art Nouveau – A Beginner’s Guide

For this week’s Squidoo Rocket Moms lens we have to write about a place we’ve visited.

This is so hard. My thoughts are whirling. Should I write about St Maartens, a Caribbean island I visited briefly but loved?

Maybe I should write something about Paris, France, a city I’ve often visited and one of my favourite places. I could write about the small French fishing town of Honfleur in Normandy, another place I’ve visited several times because it’s a favourite.

Instead of writing about somewhere in another country, I could write about the county where I live, Wiltshire, or somewhere in London where I lived for about 20 years. I’ve already written about Wiltshire’s Stonehenge and associated sites so that’s out. I’ve also written about the county’s best known city – Salisbury and its cathedral.

I’ve written extensively about London too and many other places in England. I feel as if I’ve exhausted my interest in writing about places now. I want to get on with this lens but just can’t make up my mind what topic to choose. Sometimes having a wide choice of subject is much worse than having a very specific topic set for the challenge. At least I’d know what I had to do and I’d just apply my nose to the grindstone, do my research and get on with it.

EDITED on Thursday, September 17th

I made up my mind a couple of hours after I wrote this post. I finally chose to write about Kew Gardens, UK – World Heritage Site.  I really love Kew Gardens so it was quite easy once I started.