One of the things I enjoy most about making and serving our afternoon tea at Margaret’s Cottage is our authentic vintage crockery, old silver tea pots, antique glass cake stands and our genuine damask Irish linen. My Mum has always been a great fan of antiques, and she used to drag me reluctantly around junk shops and jumble sales as a child. Mum would have an eye for a bargain and pick up all manner of dust-covered, stained and trashed treasure, that she’d buy for a pittance, bring home and lovingly restore to its former glory. Apparently , when I was about eight years old , a family friend asked me, “Do you like shopping with your Mummy?” To which I grumpily replied, “No. Mummy always takes me to dirty shops!”

I think that answer might have caused a few raised eyebrows and needed some hasty explanation from mum [!] but I was right. As far as I was concerned, at the age of eight, I’d rather have shopped with Mummy in shiny new department stores, with modern items, new things and also lifts and escalators and not be in dusty old flea markets, with old second or third hand furniture that smelt and looked horrid to my untrained eye.

Nowadays I love a good rummage in a charity shop, or car boot sale, or [if I can afford it] an antique or curio shop. I invariably find something for our lovely home that I didn’t know I needed, but that my life would be incomplete without!

My favourite shopping emporium is Ballinderry Antiques, and this is where I have bought all my tea and coffee pots which adorn the afternoon tea and breakfast table at Margaret’s Cottage. After a good wash and polish, and an overnight soak with Sterident [apparently it’s good for dentures as well as tea pots] they are all clean and shining - the tea pots not dentures.

And I always, always have a clean, ironed and starched pile of Irish damask linen dinner napkins. In fact they are the only items that I actually do like to iron.

I enjoyed our afternoon tea at the Slieve Donard in August, but wanted it to be a bit more vintage, a bit more…, well, a bit more like Margaret’s Cottage.

Yes, I do like old things. That’s probably why I love my Mum so much too!