Saturday, November 3/2012
To our Starbucks office in the morning for filter coffees and internet. J with the Saturday Guardian and I with the Playbook, on which I download a London map. Not everyone buys as much as a filter coffee. The man at the little table next to us has no coffee at all but is sustained by a packet of chocolate covered digestive biscuits - currently on special offer next door at Sainsbury's for £1.
In the afternoon we go down to Regent Street to see the cars on exhibit before tomorrow's annual London to Brighton car run. They're wonderful - dating from the earliest years of the 20th century (all before 1905). Brass headlamps gleaming like little hurricane lanterns and old-fashioned bicycle style horns. Most of them are open-topped and all of them full of personality - many with names like Annabel and Edwin. Some are accompanied by drivers in period costume and a woman in an old style scarf-tied motoring hat retrieves some food from a wicker basket fixed to the side of her car. Most seem to be two cylinder; sometimes, astonishingly, only one. Six point five is a typical horsepower.
Back up to Oxford Street to take the tube to Camden Town. On the pavement a large sign proclaims that America is Ending - according to God. No shortage of apocalyptic vision here and plenty of people to receive it - almost too crowded to walk. As it is on Camden High Street, though it's a little less crazy heading down to Lidl and the charity shops than following the young people in the other direction, toward Camden Market.
A bus from Camden High Street to Kilburn High Road and an early meal at Roses. We've gone intending to have fish and chips, which are always excellent here, with golden breaded fillets extending over the rim of generously sized plates. But when we sit down, the man at the next table is being served a succulent lamb kleftiko and J can't resist ordering the same. So I go with the fish and chips and we share both dishes. Two veg and roast potatoes with the lamb, and nothing that has seen the inside of a freezer. We share a portion of cheesecake for dessert for a total of £13 (€16 or $20.50 CAD - Canadians note that includes tax). Roses has quite a varied menu, most of which they can produce on any given occasion, and their dinners would feed two people of modest appetite. IJ once sent his compliments to the chef, who had cooked perfectly an enormous fish fillet of varying thickness.
Midway between Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes Day and costume occasionally evident: a young woman on the tube in pink dress with full skirt and ballet shoes with platform soles and pink-streaked hair, as well as a man in red cape on the street corner waving his sword.
Home in time for special TV programs celebrating the life and work of Eric Sykes. Though I loved watching his comedies in the 60's (black and white), I'm ashamed to realise that he ony died this year and not long ago - aged 89 and performing almost to the end despite profound deafness and, in the end, complete blindness. A master of facial expression and timing and his work as impressive now as it was sixty years ago - the writing as timeless as the acting. The last film in which he appeared was, to the delight of his grandchildren, one of the Harry Potters.
To our Starbucks office in the morning for filter coffees and internet. J with the Saturday Guardian and I with the Playbook, on which I download a London map. Not everyone buys as much as a filter coffee. The man at the little table next to us has no coffee at all but is sustained by a packet of chocolate covered digestive biscuits - currently on special offer next door at Sainsbury's for £1.
In the afternoon we go down to Regent Street to see the cars on exhibit before tomorrow's annual London to Brighton car run. They're wonderful - dating from the earliest years of the 20th century (all before 1905). Brass headlamps gleaming like little hurricane lanterns and old-fashioned bicycle style horns. Most of them are open-topped and all of them full of personality - many with names like Annabel and Edwin. Some are accompanied by drivers in period costume and a woman in an old style scarf-tied motoring hat retrieves some food from a wicker basket fixed to the side of her car. Most seem to be two cylinder; sometimes, astonishingly, only one. Six point five is a typical horsepower.
Back up to Oxford Street to take the tube to Camden Town. On the pavement a large sign proclaims that America is Ending - according to God. No shortage of apocalyptic vision here and plenty of people to receive it - almost too crowded to walk. As it is on Camden High Street, though it's a little less crazy heading down to Lidl and the charity shops than following the young people in the other direction, toward Camden Market.
A bus from Camden High Street to Kilburn High Road and an early meal at Roses. We've gone intending to have fish and chips, which are always excellent here, with golden breaded fillets extending over the rim of generously sized plates. But when we sit down, the man at the next table is being served a succulent lamb kleftiko and J can't resist ordering the same. So I go with the fish and chips and we share both dishes. Two veg and roast potatoes with the lamb, and nothing that has seen the inside of a freezer. We share a portion of cheesecake for dessert for a total of £13 (€16 or $20.50 CAD - Canadians note that includes tax). Roses has quite a varied menu, most of which they can produce on any given occasion, and their dinners would feed two people of modest appetite. IJ once sent his compliments to the chef, who had cooked perfectly an enormous fish fillet of varying thickness.
Midway between Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes Day and costume occasionally evident: a young woman on the tube in pink dress with full skirt and ballet shoes with platform soles and pink-streaked hair, as well as a man in red cape on the street corner waving his sword.
Home in time for special TV programs celebrating the life and work of Eric Sykes. Though I loved watching his comedies in the 60's (black and white), I'm ashamed to realise that he ony died this year and not long ago - aged 89 and performing almost to the end despite profound deafness and, in the end, complete blindness. A master of facial expression and timing and his work as impressive now as it was sixty years ago - the writing as timeless as the acting. The last film in which he appeared was, to the delight of his grandchildren, one of the Harry Potters.