We have a wander past the old book and print shops between Charing Cross Road and St.Martin's Lane, and find ourselves growing covetous. There's a large Hogarth print of Gin Lane. Can it be original? How many were there? And hand coloured Shepard illustrations of Winnie the Pooh. Then to the Portrait Gallery where we limit ourselves to the modern gallery, which changes frequently. We're both taken with a portrait of Sid James - painted with his face on a television screen, with the Radio Times and a Woodbines cigarette packet incorporated as collage elements. There's also an interesting exhibition of photographs by Dmitri Kasterine, including portraits of a young Margaret Drabble, Tom Stoppard, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Graham Greene, and a long-haired elderly Robert Graves.
Before we go out to dinner Maggi phones from Norway, her call coming through on the Cypriot mobile, which has fortuitously been left on. She'll meet up with us in Cyprus in January.
By tube again to Soho to have dinner with Alexander (just back from a whirlwind tour with Nigel Kennedy) and Flora. As we take the lift at Belsize Park underground station, two other women are as amused as I am by the didactic tones of the recorded message. "You have reached the lower level," the voice says, with pedantic slowness. "Exit, turn right...." As if we would otherwise have hit the wall as we turned right without exiting the lift.
We meet at the Gay Hussar on Greek Street. It's in what was once, quite literally, a red light district, immediately next to a Church of England refuge for women in distress. The Gay Hussar is a Hungarian restaurant dating back about sixty years. (When A first gave me its name over the phone I misheard it as "gay bazaar" - or bizarre? - and googled with predictable results. It has a long history as a meeting spot for left wing intellectuals, and the scene of many political plots. The two rows of tables are elbow to elbow, so that it's easy to be drawn into the next table's conversation, though the noise fosters intimacy at one's own table as we lean in to hear each other. The walls are lined with political cartoons featuring the left wing cast and the bookcases over the doors to the kitchen are spilling over with signed copies of works by former habitués. The food is mostly Hungarian and the wine list, A points out, divided into "Hungarian Wines" and "Wines from Other Countries." The house Hungarian red is quite good, though. Flora and I have the roast duck, A duck liver, and J stuffed cabbage. After dinner we head a couple of streets over to a spot A knows that does indeed, as promised, have excellent coffee. So we part with plans for a next meeting.
Quote from Baronness Kennedy in the New Camden Journal, as she pays tribute to the late Michael Foot, a man with integrity seldom found in contemporary politicians: "to spin is to deceive and to deceive is to fail."
JAWORSKI TRAVELS