Lauderdale House is best for its chips and tea. I sit outside in all weathers to take in the incredible views of landscaped gardens and sky. I find it best to smoke here - it ensures a metre or so space is cleared for you between your blissful, solitary contemplation of the flowers, and the tweeting Highgate tots in knits all covered in sticky ice cream and carrying violins and oboes twice their size. I was once a little un here too, but, far from bearing a weighty musical instrument from the age of two, I was thrown out of the Lauderdale House children's Christmas party aged six for singing jingle bells, Batman smells too loudly and no doubt out of tune. It is that sort of place. But I bear no grudge, because the chips are good and they still sell Mr Men lollies. Highgate Mental Hospital is next door, so patients often come here for a quiet cup of tea. You could, like me, spend hours over a lifetime trying to work out if the sundial has ever told the correct time. (Or you might be intelligent and know how sundials work!) Andrew Marvell lived here once, or his patron did, and his poem about bees is quoted on the dial's face. The only complaint I have is that when the toilets run out of toilet paper, the cafe owners claim to be unable to procure any more because the toilets are run by somebody else. Inside the house they have ludicrously useless, twee and overpriced handmade crafts on sale by their makers every now and then. The house itself is lovely in a staid, sensible, English sort of a way reminiscent of cream teas. read more