Those who know us know we have had a longstanding love affair with things British for many years - the architecture, the people, the antiques.
And every so often an item ends up on a dealer's table or under the auctioneer's hammer that makes us smile and say: "That's just so... so British."
Take the case of the royal wedding cake. A piece of one, that is... from the 1871 wedding of Queen Victoria's fourth daughter, Princess Louise, to the Marquis of Lorne.
Not the decoration, an actual piece of very old cake. Asking price: 145 pounds, or $215US. Would you shell out your hard-earned pound notes for this slightly crumbly tidbit?
We'll find out - it goes up for sale today in Birmingham.
The slice, which is one-inch thick and protected by parchment, is a tiny portion of the towering 5-foot (1.5 meter) cake served at Princess Louise's wedding. The entire cake originally weighed over 225 pounds (102 kilograms) and took three months to create.
The wedding caused an uproar when Princess Louise angered the Prince of Wales by becoming the first British princess to marry a commoner. She was determined not to be burdened by the ritual of marrying another royal.
The cake slice is still wrapped in its original parchment, and it was kept for generations in a gentlemen's "cabinet of curiosity" where men kept treasures to show off, such as fossils and pieces of Egyptian art.
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