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Anorak News | Making A Mocha-ry

Making A Mocha-ry

by | 10th, September 2003

‘ETON’S first tuckshop, as our well-heeled readers will of course know, was called School Stores and sold ‘sock’, which is Etonian slang for tuck, which is English public school slang for food.

‘Grande skinny latte, wet and with wings’

Tuck (or sock) was an essential supplement for meagre, and often rank, school food, especially at Eton where the local butcher used to provide the school with ‘boys’ meat’, produce that was so unsavoury it had already been deemed unsuitable for dogs.

We give you this little history lesson (courtesy of the Times) by way of introduction to the news that Charterhouse, another English public school, is closing its tuckshop and replacing it with a Starbucks.

The American coffee chain has signed a franchise agreement with the school, by which (for an annual fee) Charterhouse will use Starbucks equipment and distribute its publicity material around the school.

It will also provide our leaders of tomorrow with coffee for only 50p, compared with high street prices of, say, £2.15. We presume it will be ‘boys’ coffee’.

The Times put on its best Billy Bunter voice and warns that the move may spell the end of the tuckshop, ‘an English peculiar’.

‘No other race,’ it says, ‘makes such a tradition of sending its children who are neither criminal nor mad away to boarding school.’

Neither criminal nor mad when they arrive maybe, but one and normally both when they leave…’



Posted: 10th, September 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink