London Lives

Beach at Aberystwyth

London Lives decamped for a 36-hour jaunt to lovely Wales last weekend. The journey was in honour of a good pal’s significant birthday. Boo to not being able to have more time off work  for the visit to Aberystwyth; I had to shoot there and back over a very short period of time. But what’s not to love about a long train journey, complete with coffee, iPod, book, writer’s notebook (always…)

There were football fans travelling up to Birmingham where I had to change. Good-natured banter, thankfully. Even when I noticed they were cracking open cans of Stella Artois at 11.00am. Then there was a very pretty journey on the section to mid-Wales.

Aberystwyth was beautiful. My first visit there and I was excited to see the sea for the first time in ages. There were walks along the seafront, new buildings to look at, introductions to new people, the pebbled beaches to explore. And great tapas and good wine with pals old and new. On to a pub for more wine, then we ambled back to hotels long the seafront, a brilliant and huge moon hovering over black sea.

After breakfast, another walk far along the seafront; far along past the university, the war memorial and on up to the marina and the river Ystwyth. Then we walked back along the beach, with its smooth grey pebbles. Splendid dogs roaming over them, their owners calling them back. And then I had to go back myself, through the pretty countryside, the occasional wind farm and hillsides of shaggy cows. Back to change at Crewe and a straight run to London Euston.

I picked up a beautiful smooth grey pebble from Aber. It rests on a cabinet in my bedroom, next to the conkers I picked up from Hyde Park last week.

Above is one photo of the beach.  And I’m fond of a nice building with a date on it (below). More Aber pics to follow.

To a Friday rendezvous at my friend’s local in east London, catching up on the week’s gossip over gin and tonics. Friday after-work pubbage is a rarity these days; I’m more likely to be cooking something or eating out. Anyway, good to see some regulars, catch up on my friend’s news and chat to one of her friends too.

There had always been a plan to fit food into the agenda and it was never going to be difficult to persuade her into the the local Indian for a sit-in and natter. We had prawn biriyani, side dishes, and Goan haddock with pilau rice. They have quite an extensive fish menu which we’ve promised ourselves we’ll work through. Biriyani always sounds bland, but I think it’s a very delicately spiced dish, that matched the chilli and lime of the fish. All very lush and for once we didn’t over-order. All of it was eaten.

A quick swish around the supermarket was needed (alcohol, milk, breakfast things). Then we linked arms and trundled home among the blustery streets. We’d been warned about fairly wild weather this weekend and it was starting with bits of squally rain and serious winds. Near the Tube station, a man who’d been walking ahead of us suddenly turned and handed us pieces of paper. We muttered thanks and each of us knew they must be religious tracts. Upon inspection, we were right. “What’s Your Burden?” it asked.

Wandering to my friend’s house, the wind was gearing up. Under the street lights there were piles of enormous leaves, blown flat to the path by the wind and  kept there by numerous sheets of earlier rain. We stood for a while under the light, watching a beautiful tree as it writhed in the wind.

At her house, we sipped Amaretto liqueurs and played with her beautiful cat Phoebe. She is quite adorable. Caught up with music on Later with Jools Holland. He always has someone interesting: Steve Martin playing the banjo (Steve Martin – who knew?) and a great band called Delphic. I must look them up on iTunes.

Overnight, I was snuggled asleep in the living room, but the cat-flap was swinging so much that Phoebe kept cantering to the kitchen to check no other creature was invading her territory. The wind and rain were ferocious.

I got my hair done today and had to venture out among all the wind. The hair is great, veh slinky. I am very pleased with it. I bought nice shopping on the way home with a view to battening down the hatches this evening.

Salmon and mash planned  for dinner. Tomorrow I am supposed to be shopping for a proper winter coat. Weather permitting.

There were fireworks starting even when I was on the way home from work. From the window of my flat, I could see displays over Canary Wharf, over to the City, across to Battersea Park and beyond. We were meant to be going to the Waltham Forest ones, but my pal is working late so we can’t. Neither of us can manage the Ally Pally ones on Saturday, either. Still, the displays are great and the ones in the parkland over the back of my house were gorgeous.

Hope all the local moggies are safely indoors…

Five years ago today, I was attending my uncle’s funeral. He was my father’s older brother and had been ill for some time. It was a poignant day for all of us, my father in particular. It was the most gorgeous autumn day, brilliant blue sunny sky, very chilly, with yellow leaves on the trees. A piper played the Last Post, recalling my uncle’s time as a Bearskin when he was a young man. I held my father’s hand tightly as his brother’s coffin was lowered. My mother was holding his other hand on the other side. I’d never attended a burial before, so was unsure how I would feel. The churchyard was familiar, though. My father has taken me round it before, pointing out the graves of my great-grandparents and various people who lived near his family when he was a child.

I don’t think I’d really comprehended how strong this loss would be for my father until we were chatting a few months before my uncle died. My father and his brothers were brought up in outer London during WWII and he simply said: “That’s my older brother; when we were kids we were bombed out of our beds together.” And they were.

After the service and the burial, we went to a local pub with numerous cousins, aunts, uncles (hundreds of people, most of them bearing my surname) and chatted, drank, laughed and pored over memories. It sounds strange to say that the day of a funeral can be beautiful, but this one was.

The first truly blustery and rainy day of Autumn. I am snuggled here on the sofa and have no plans to move. I’m catching up on things I’ve recorded this week: a documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain and now something from the Age of Glamour series about Al Bowlly.

The Marr programme is the first of six and was brilliant: this episode covered the period from the death of Victoria to the illness of Joseph Chamberlain in 1906. Along the way, he explored the horror of the Boer War, nepotism in Parliament, music hall and Votes for Women. An extraordinary era which is of great interest to me (1900s, Edwardian Britain, inter-war Britain). I look forward to the remaining series. Next week, we move inevitably to WWI.

The Age of Glamour strand on BBC4 is also fantastic and has covered people of the age (the Bright Young People), golden liners of the era and Art Deco icons (loads of brilliant stuff about the Tube, particularly at St James’s Park station). These programmes also cover interests of mine (Art Deco, design, luxury design, social history). Al Bowlly was a very popular crooner of the era. I love documentaries like this, even about people I have only vaguely heard of because of the social history that is inevitably on display. In fact, I was surprised at how many of his songs and recordings I knew from hearing them round and about on many programmes. Dennis Potter was inspired by him to write Pennies From Heaven. I haven’t watched any Dennis Potter stuff for ages; I must see if they’ve got DVDs in the library. After surviving the bombing of the Cafe de Paris previously, Al Bowlly, poor man, was killed when a Luftwaffe bomb hit his house during the Blitz in 1941.

After a brief glimpse of sunshine, it is clouding over again. It’s very, very quiet today. No noise from the other flats downstairs, barely a car to be heard on the road. Last night, I could see the BT Tower flashing lights and today I discovered it now has a screen counting down to the Olympics.

Foodwise, I have some nice salmon and dill tartlets that I made last night, as well as tomatoes and spinach, some crusty bread, halloumi and biscuits. I need not step out of the door if I don’t want to. I’m aware that this is a very lazy-sounding post, but that is what this particular London life is doing today.

When I’m on my way to work in the morning, I am frequently passed by a man running to the Tube station.

He is neatly dressed in a suit for work, with smart shoes and his jacket folded neatly over his arm as he runs. The first time I saw him, I assumed he was late for work. When I kept on seeing him, it occurred to me that he couldn’t just be late every day; he would simply change his routine rather than have to run to the Tube station each morning.

So, it must be part of a routine, for whatever reason. It struck me that he is wonderfully composed as he runs, never out of breath and evenly paced as he runs in his work clothes. This morning he climbed on to the same Tube carriage as me, still perfectly composed.

I love seeing my street wake up and get to work in the mornings. Parents trundle their children to the nearby schools (mothers check their phones and shout encouragement to kids wobbling along on bikes; a father here and there carries his briefcase and his child’s lunch box). People sail by on bicycles, helmets neatly affixed. The street sweeper appears, iPod on, checking his phone. Cats sprawl themselves on front walls. People walk their dogs. A jogger sidles by. On Tuesdays the refuse collectors and recycling vans make their way along the road. At the moment, men are laying new paving slabs. The normal activity is like a TV drama writer’s dream.

More poppies and fireworks about now. The clocks have gone back and it is dark by 5pm.

In Clapham yesterday, I wandered further up towards Battersea Rise than I had been before. There are a number of little bars and shops to be explored at a later date. The sun has swung lower, shooting out from the side streets as I pass.

I picked up a British cookbook for my father and I’m really thrilled with it. The Hairy Bikers’ book looked great, but this caught my eye. It has loads of classic meat, fish and puddings in it that he’ll love to make. Both of us have really caught the cooking bug over the last few years. I made a lovely kedgeree for a friend on Saturday. She asked for seconds, which is very flattering. We had Prosecco, wine and some Amaretto later on.

I saw my first poppy on the Tube this evening. Too early, I think.

I have booked the restaurant where I’ll celebrate my 40th birthday next month. That means it’s real now.

The day dawned in an unpromising fashion then the weather became unexpectedly lovely as it went on. At about 10am, I spotted a fox asleep on the wall of next-door’s garden. He was well camouflaged and snoozing peacefully. I’ve spotted him in the undergrowth at the end of the row of gardens and also sleeping in our own garden. The slinky tabby cat from next door-but-one sometimes sits on the same wall, peering intently into the undergrowth. Now I know what he’s looking for.

I went to Chiswick today. It’s a fairly long ride out west, but the weather was lovely: a beautiful autumn day with a gorgeous sky and shimmery sparkles glinting from anything shiny at street level. The bus noodled gradually, heading out along Marylebone Road. I could write oodles on this blog about Marylebone, but that will come.  There was a wedding taking place at the old Marylebone Town Hall. Always lovely to see happy people and beautiful coloured clothes spilling out onto the pavements as you slide by on the bus. There’s a sense of sharing that snippet as you pass by.

Sweeping across Edgware Road, the bus went on to Paddington and Notting Hill.  There is a road just past Notting Hill Gate called ‘Palace Gardens Terrace’ which I think is a wonderful road name. Palace Gardens Terrace. Lovely.

On Chiswick High Road,  the park at Turnham Green was bright and green and clipped, the church at its centre looking solid and wonderful. Cyclists swooned past, giving off gentle smells of fabric conditioner. I was looking for a shop called Dada, which sells books, CDs and DVDs. Last time I was here, I picked up a CD of Nat King Cole (like having velvet gently fed into your ears) and DVDs about Joe Strummer and the Old Grey Whistle Test. This time I picked up a Julie London CD and a DVD of Leonard Rossiter which I’m planning to give to my father for his birthday. He’ll love it. I think I’ll get him a Hairy Bikers cookbook as well.

When I was a child and living in the Midlands, my parents used to bring us to London to visit various relatives and friends. We came to Chiswick on those visits, to see a friend and former neighbour of my parents. She had a fabulous three-storey house and her husband had a bedroom on the middle floor (they were a couple that had separated but never divorced). Their children had other bedrooms on the various floors. One of the things that intrigued me about this house as a child was that the bathroom was on a ‘middle’ floor. You climbed two flights of stairs to get from the ground to the first floor and this bathroom was reached on a level between the first and second flights. Big chequerboard tiles and you had to stand on tiptoes to reach the long handle to the pull-flush, with the cistern high up near the ceiling.

I remember us visiting in October 1981 and we had an ‘early’ Christmas dinner, because we wouldn’t see them at Christmas. The IRA had left a bomb in a Wimpy bar in Oxford Street and it killed the bomb disposal expert. It was all over the news. I remember it on the TV just before it was switched off as we ate our dinner.

Some years later (1993, I reckon, the year after I’d moved to London), my mother and I travelled to see her friend and we spent a lovely afternoon in her garden, eating food and chatting over old things. Her husband had passed on, and she has since. At some point, I will walk back along that street in Chiswick and look up at the house where my parents’ friend lived and at the neighbouring house where my parents lived as younger people.

At Writing Group on Wednesday, we discussed coincidences, the morality of lying and favourite Beatles’ tracks. We will be writing a character sketch for next time, which I am looking forward to doing. It’s meant to describe someone in terms of events and their reactions to those around them, rather than saying “He was tall with dark eyes,” etc.

Tonight, I headed home on the Tube after a mammoth busy week at work. Quite gloriously, the song on my iPod as I stepped onto the train was Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express. Hoorah! I love it when it works out like that. It would be great to ascend the escalator at Angel station (the longest escalator in the Tube system) to the sound of the Stone Roses’ I am the Resurrection.

And as I walked home from my Tube station to home, I was treated to the full eight-minute version of Ride’s Leave Them All Behind. An appropriate end to the working week.

The nights are drawing in, the leaves are falling, warming food is calling.

It has been raining since before lunchtime now. At that point it was that small fine rain that you know will soak you to the skin, even with an umbrella. I am still in linen trousers and Birkenstocks and will move on to Suitable Autumn Clothing when I’m good and ready (although the increasing chill will no doubt force my hand over the coming weeks).

So I couldn’t go out at all to buy the goat’s cheese I needed to complete my lunch (having brought in all the rest, too). I spent the afternoon archiving some old documents. There is something so pleasing about throwing papers into the Confidential bin to be taken away for shredding. And after a brief respite, the rain tipped down for the better part of the afternoon.

A gap in said rain afforded a chance to escape home. At the other end of the Tube, it was tipping down heavily again, so I needed to dash for the bus to my house when I usually walk. Bus not too crowded, windows steamed up from breath and the rain, the crying child behind me audible despite my iPod.

The walk to King’s Cross and then from the bus stop at the other end left me somewhat sodden and looking for good food: mini roast potatoes with paprika and rosemary, baked salmon, the leeks left over from yesterday added to the roasting pan with the potatoes. Absolutely lush. And with some very nice Gavi di Gavi to drink too.

‘Patchy Rain’, said the weather woman with wonderful understatement as she described today’s weather. Patchy rain? It’s been enormous and has covered most of my day.

OBITS
It’s probably silly to reminisce about people who’ve died that you don’t ‘know’. The thing is, we do ‘know’ them and they’ve been in our lives longer and to an extent that we don’t always imagine.

Awww. Today we lost two lovelies:

Patrick Swayze (1952 – 2009). A woman at work reflected that she could probably quote Dirty Dancing word-for-word from start to finish.

And Keith Floyd (1943 -  2009),  whose shambolic style masked a great cook and splendid personality. It’s a cliché to say we won’t see his like on TV again, but we won’t.

Farewell both.

One of the first truly lovely mornings today as I walked to work. A beautiful high blue sunny sky while everything on the ground was cast in shadow. The tall houses in my road were gleaming. After the Tube, the wide expanse of Euston Road, with the high sky above UCH and Friends House. It can seem odd to describe London as being so lovely, but there are some lovely lovely mornings sometimes.