Raising Masterpiece Theatre

Ian likes to ask for food at random intervals.  He'll summons me, from wherever he is in the house, as follows:

"Dad?!"

"Yes?"

"Can I have some food?"

In a perfect world, I would come to wherever he is in the house and list all the viable menu items I can think of and help him select the best possible candidate, and then go off to prepare the "food".

It doesn't always work quite that way.

But it doesn't stop there.  His patrician manner - quite unfeigned and guileless - is much enhanced by his love of tea and his quasi-British accent.  Ian does something with his R's - or *doesn't* do something with them - that makes people ask whether he might be English.  It's hard to explain how a family where everyone else talks like a Yankee - and a Connecticut Yankee in the case of Mommy - could happen to include a Subject of the Queen as well, but I have been asked in the past - and not just by children - if Ian is English or perhaps Irish.

So last night was the perfect moment for this surreal phenomenon, combining aristocratic manners with aristocratic taste.  Just before bed-time, I heard Ian paging me from several rooms away, and when I got to him, he sought out clarification on a request I somehow hadn't actually heard, from earlier in the evening:

"Dad, where are you?  You didn't, perhaps, hear me when I asked for tea, did you?"

(December 7, 2014)