Afternoon Tea with Mindful Ghosts: A Nation in Conversation

Written by Shams Bhatti

Click here to listen to the literary opinion essay.

Prologue:

I have lived long enough in England to realise that grammar is rarely only grammar. It is posture, restraint, confidence, hesitation, politeness, humour and the quiet art of not saying everything at once.

I write these pieces because I do not wish to judge, but to support; not to pass verdicts, but to look at the bigger picture. I have learnt not to believe in first impressions. We can all change, develop, and become better than we are and what we are capable of.

This dialogue is set in a café, where afternoon tea is served with that gentle British certainty which suggests the world will behave itself if we hold our cups correctly. Three voices sit together: Shakespeare, Dickens and Orwell. Their manners belong to their own centuries, yet their moral boundaries remain fit for modern Britain. They agree with grace, disagree with courtesy, and, as I have said elsewhere, agreement is beautiful; logical disagreement is priceless.

The grammatical purpose is simple: to let you hear direct speech and indirect (reported) speech moving naturally inside a living conversation. In Britain, people often report what was said with more elegance than they say it the first time. That is not hypocrisy. It is civilisation.

Afternoon Tea with Mindful Ghosts

The café had no name that mattered. It was one of those modern places that pretends it has always existed: pale wood, polite lighting, a chalkboard promising artisan thing and a silence carefully maintained by laptops. Outside, the rain did what rain always does in Britain: it softened the edges of the city until even worry looked respectable.

They arrived as if they had always been expected.

Shakespeare entered first, his gaze moving across the room like a man surveying a stage. Dickens followed, carrying warmth as though it were a coat he offered to strangers. Orwell came last, spare and watchful, as if the air itself might contain propaganda.

“Good sir,” Shakespeare said, settling with regal ease, “this house serveth tea with a solemnity fit for counsel.”

“It is rather a virtue,” Dickens replied, studying the menu with amused offence, “that even the biscuit has been promoted to a companion of culture.”

Orwell glanced at the chalkboard. “The language is doing a lot of work,” he said. “If you call it artisan, nobody asks who can afford it.”

Dickens smiled. “My dear fellow, you speak as if words do not pay rent.”

“Words always pay rent,” Orwell answered. “The question is who collects it.”

Shakespeare watched them with quiet amusement. He said the scene reminded him that all the world’s a stage, with men and women merely players, each persuaded that their part was the principal one.

Dickens clapped his hands softly, as though applauding a well-recited line. “A stage indeed,” he said, “but the actors appear tired before the play begins.”

Orwell remarked that Shakespeare had enjoyed the advantage of writing in an age before nations attempted to explain themselves in economic graphs.

Shakespeare raised an eyebrow. “Thou wouldst have me write with numerals?”

“No,” Orwell said. “I’d have politicians stop writing with them.”

Dickens leaned forward. “Let us speak of Britain now. What is she becoming?”

Shakespeare sipped his tea. “Methinks,” he said, “she is a realm that carries uncertainty with remarkable manners.”

Orwell noted that the nation had developed a habit of placing a polite comma where a full stop might be more honest.

Dickens observed that he had walked past faces in the street and sensed people carrying their worries the way they carried umbrellas: by habit rather than by hope.

Shakespeare said Britain still knew how to queue, and Orwell replied that queues were often where the quiet revolutions of a country truly began.

They spoke of values. Dickens listed them: fairness, decency, patience, tolerance. Shakespeare remarked that order was often the dream of those who feared disorder. Orwell added that values sold best when packaged as merchandise.

Then the conversation turned, as it had to, towards migration. The subject arrived not as a shout, but as a pause.

Dickens spoke first. He said a society revealed itself in how it treated the stranger and the vulnerable.

Shakespeare observed that strangers had always been part of England’s story, though England sometimes spoke as if she had invented herself alone.

Orwell added that modern anxiety was not only moral; it was arithmetic, rumour and mistrust. He said a nation could become unkind simply by feeling misinformed.

Dickens glanced at me.

“Tell us, sir,” he said, “what does the street say now, without the polish?”

I answered honestly. I said many people felt overwhelmed. They complained about numbers, not faces. They spoke of hotels, of public money and of the sense that the state had become generous to strangers while appearing slow with those who had paid into the system for decades. I added that some spoke as if the country were being quietly billed for a crisis it had never agreed to order.

Orwell repeated my thought in a colder form. He said I had heard citizens claim that immigrants were being housed at great cost while no plain account was offered of what was true, exaggerated or politically convenient.

“And if the figures are true,” Orwell continued, “whose task is it to stop the waste? If the figures are false, whose duty is it to correct the lie? In either case, silence is strategy.”

Dickens frowned but conceded the point. He said muddle could be politically useful: it kept people angry without pointing them towards a solution.

Shakespeare remarked that Britain trusted good manners to carry difficult conversations a little further down the road.

I said this was what made the matter tense. People wished to be humane but felt poorly informed, and minds starved of clarity fed on suspicion.

Dickens said the public could not remain calm if it felt lectured rather than informed.

Orwell turned the conversation. He said a country that demanded sympathy only for itself would soon forget how sympathy worked.

“And who are these migrants?” Dickens asked. “Why do they risk so much to come here?”

I answered that people came for English, for education, for safety, for legal protection they trusted more than what they had fled. I added that Britain still signalled dignity: one might be questioned, but one could also be heard.

Shakespeare said desperation had always travelled. Men abandoned homes because home had become unliveable.

Dickens said poverty and war were old engines, still driving people across borders.

Orwell observed that the number of sufferers in the world and the number a single nation could receive would never be equal. He said compassion without capacity became theatre, while capacity without compassion became cruelty.

“And whose responsibility is control?” I asked.

Orwell said it was the government’s duty to govern honestly, to control borders if it claimed it could, and to speak to the public like adults.

Dickens said the public, too, had responsibilities: to resist scapegoating and to remember that a crisis explained was not the same as a crisis solved.

Shakespeare then turned to me.

“And thou,” he asked, “who hast dwelt here long, paid thy dues, raised thy young beneath this sky — where dost thou stand?”

I said that many migrants were no longer newcomers. They had lived here for decades, paid taxes and built families. Their children and grandchildren knew no other home. Yet in the present storm, they were sometimes grouped with those who had only just arrived. I said a settled citizen should not be asked to carry the anxieties of a crisis they did not create.

Dickens said a society that forgot the difference between neighbour and newcomer risked harming both. Contribution should matter more than origin.

Orwell remarked that when fear ruled conversation, distinctions collapsed and long-settled citizens became visible only as labels.

Shakespeare murmured that names could honour, but they could also erase.

Then Dickens turned the mirror again.

“And what of those,” he asked, “born here, yet offering little to the common labour, yet speaking as if the country owed them a living by inheritance?”

I answered that such people existed in every society. Some had been failed by education, some left behind by industry, some accustomed to a system that asked little of them. I said entitlement without contribution was not a question of origin but of responsibility.

Orwell nodded. He said contribution mattered whether one arrived yesterday or descended from centuries of residence.

Shakespeare smiled.

“Then the quarrel,” he said, “is not between migrant and native, but between those who bear the weight of the ship and those who merely claim the deck.”

Dickens said societies healed when they judged people by what they gave, not by where they came from.

Orwell put on his coat. He said the future would depend on whether Britain could recover its respect for truth. He added, almost as an aside, that he had heard phrases spoken in the street with the certainty of prophecy — “take back control”, “we are at breaking point” — and that once slogans entered the bloodstream of a nation, reason had to work twice as hard to keep pace.

Dickens rose. He said Britain had always been capable of decency, even when it doubted itself.

Shakespeare lifted his cup once more. He said Britain must learn again to speak plainly when plainness was needed and poetically when poetry healed, but never to confuse politeness with honesty.

They left quietly. The café resumed its ordinary rhythm.

Epilogue:

And as their chairs emptied and the cups cooled, I found myself thinking of the country that had hosted this conversation inside my mind.

I thought of the Britain that chose abolition over profit, that heard the cries across the Atlantic and answered with conscience even when mills in Manchester stood silent, and families went hungry rather than touch cotton picked by enslaved hands. I thought of the Britain that sheltered children fleeing fascism, that stood alone against tyranny, that built a health service when its treasury was bare, that opened its doors to the expelled and persecuted and that chose peace in Northern Ireland over pride. Again and again, this island had paid a price so that others might keep their dignity.

And I realised that when people today speak in fear, frustration or fatigue, they are not only speaking of the present. They are measuring themselves against a long inheritance of moral courage. They worry that they may no longer recognise the nation they once admired. They worry that generosity is being stretched beyond its means. These worries deserve to be heard, not dismissed.

I remembered a conversation with my father when he visited me here. We were speaking of morality, of nations and of fate. Suddenly, he said, with the simplicity of someone who has watched life closely, “My son, Allah never abandons a nation that protects its needy, its disabled and its animals. Whatever their religion, whatever their belief, their blessings will not cease, because they care for the weak.”

I have carried that sentence with me ever since.

And so, when I think of Britain — in its kindness and its confusion, its welcome and its worry — I cannot see only failure or only virtue. I see a country still wrestling with its conscience. I see a people trying to balance compassion with capacity, truth with politeness and duty with fear. I see a nation that has done great good at great cost before and therefore feels the weight of living up to its own story.

Perhaps that is why this conversation matters. Not to tell anyone what to think, but to remind us that the argument itself is proof of life. A country that still debates its conscience is not finished yet.

And if, in that debate, we remember both the suffering of those who arrive and the strain of those who receive, perhaps we may yet speak to one another not as enemies but as fellow travellers, carrying the same fragile hope that decency can endure.

Agreement is beautiful.

Logical disagreement is priceless.

The task is to keep the disagreement human.

Bibliography:

Dickens, C. (1859). A Tale of Two Cities. London: Chapman & Hall.

Orwell, G. (1946) ‘Politics and the English Language’. In: Orwell, G. (1968) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950. London: Secker & Warburg.

Orwell, G. (1972) ‘The Freedom of the Press’ (intended preface to Animal Farm). In: Orwell, G. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume IV. London: Secker & Warburg.

Shakespeare, W. (1623). As You Like It. In: Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio). London: Isaac Jaggard & Edward Blount.

Copyright © Shams Bhatti [2026]. All rights reserved.

Reproduction or distribution of this work in any form is prohibited without prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations with acknowledgement.