Because of some problem with the bus route I wanted to use, I walked from Trafalgar Square to Embankment Underground station. On my way I passed the southern end of Craven Street. There I saw an old building – the end of a terrace – with a commemorative plaque, which I examined.
The circular blue plaque commemorates the house in which the author of “Moby Dick” – Herman Melveille (1819-1891 – lived for a few weeks at the end of 1849. He had come to London:
Originally known as ‘Spur Alley’, Craven Street was rebuilt by the Craven family in about 1730. Melville stayed in one of the surviving original buildings.
Apart from Melville, Craven Street included amongst its dwellers: Benjamin Franklin, the poets Mark Akenside & Heinrich Heine, and the haematologist William Hewson.
Franklin’s home is open to the public. I have visited it once. But when I visited it a few years ago, I had not known that Melville had lived in the same street, albeit briefly.
Had the bus route been functioning normally, many years might have passed before, if ever, I saw the sign commemorating Melville.
The Bengal Biennale was in progress while we were staying in Calcutta in January 2025. One of its venues was at Arts Acre – Museum & International Centre for Creativity (‘Arts Acre’) – artists’ village on the eastern edge of the city of Kolkata, 10.7 miles directly east of Flurys on Park Street. It was founded in 1984 by the artist and cultural activist Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharjee (‘Shuva’,born 1947). This essay was inspired by one of Shuva’s paintings on display at Arts Acre.
The painting that attracted my curiosity is “In search of Oscar”, in which Shuva depicts the German author, illustrator, and artist Gunter Grass (1927-2015) as Oscar – a character in his novel “The Tin Drum”. The painting is supposed to evoke solidarity with the marginalised people in Kolkata.
In July 2026, I visited an exhibition of paintings from the collector Kiran Nadar’s collection of Indian art. There was a painting by KG Subramanyan (1924-2016). Painted in 1990, it is called “Kali and Gunter Grass”. For those who do not know, Kali is a Hindu goddess usually depicted with her tongue sticking out of her mouth. She is often associated with destruction, death, passing of time, and more.
Seeing Subramanyan’s painting reminded me of Shuva’s painting of Grass at Arts Acre. I became curious about these paintings of Gunter Grass. Soon, I discovered, and then purchased a book, “Show Your Tongue”, published in 1988, and written by Gunter Grass. Not only does it contain both prose and poetry, but also a collection of dramatic sketches drawn by the author. The title refers both to Kali and a common facial expression.
The book is in three sections. One is Grass’s diary of his stay in Kolkata between August 1987 and January 1988. Another is a collection of the vivid sketches the author made while in the city. And the third is a long poem that incorporates his observations, reflections, and feelings about the city. In brief, the book expresses Grass’s fascination of, and his despair about, the city and its amazing poverty, as it was in 1987. Concisely, his diary manages successfully to produce a brilliant portrait of Kolkata, its problems and its history. The book is a ‘must’ for anyone with an interest in Kolkata.
Three pages into the diary, the following is written:
“The painter Shuvaprassana shows us the private art school he runs on Calcutta’s north side … I am asked if, at the start of the new year, I will dedicate an artists’ colony (‘art acres’) near Dum Dum Airport. My half-assent is taken as a full one.”
Throughout the diary section, there are references to Shuva., with whom he spent much time. Near the end of the diary, after having returned from a trip to places outside Bengal. Grass wrote:
“Home from our trip, here I am, as promised, at the dedication of ‘arts acre’. Shuva looks happy … He leads us, the first group of visitors, through the exhibition pavilion, where my etchings are hung. On a brass plate embedded in the wall next to the date of dedication, my name is engraved.”
Given this, and his friendship with Shuva, it is not surprising to find that the artist portrayed Grass in one of his paintings.
As for the other painting, “Kali and Gunter Grass”, its creator, KG Subramanyan was Professor of Painting, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. This institution founded by Rabindranath Tagore is north of Kolkata. Gunter Grass visited it during his stay in Kolkata in 1987/88, as well as at an earlier date. It is most probable that the author met Subramanyan.
Two paintings depicting Gunter Grass and my love of Kolkata led me to purchasing a copy of “Show Your Tongue”, which has given me great pleasure. On our next visit to the city, I hope to visit Arts Acre again, and this time, I will look for the plaque with Gunter Grass’s name.
Food stores in the Marks & Spencer retail chain used to sell Chicken Kiev. Since the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, this company have renamed the same stuffed chicken product as ‘Chicken Kyiv”. Which ever name you prefer, what is in the packet is a chicken breast stuffed with butter and garlic. It is delicious.
The first time I ordered Chicken K in India was at Kwality – an old-fashioned restaurant on Calcutta’s Park Street,
The décor in Kwality might have been considered fashionable or even ‘modern’ when it opened in 1952, but it looks as if nothing apart from regular painting has been done to it since then. Stepping into Kwality is like stepping back more than 70 years, but that is not a problem. Both the Indian and Western dishes served by the gentlemanly waiters, who are simultaneously both haughty and obsequious, are tasty and well-prepared.
The first time that I visited the restaurant, I ordered Chicken Kiev. It took about 45 minutes to arrive, but it was superb. Unlike British restaurants where this dish is usually pre-prepared, at Kwality, it is made fresh, from scratch. The copious hot butter that oozed out of the Kiev was without garlic. That is how this dish is often served in other restaurants in India, and is true to the original recipe, which, some say, originated in a hotel in Kiev at the beginning of the 20th century. However, its origins are not at all certain as Tony Jackman wrote (www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-03-03-throwback-thursday-chicken-kiev/):
“… it’s a chicken breast fillet that has been pounded and given a stuffing of cold butter, then crumbed and cooked. That is the tradition as found in hotel restaurants, particularly in the latter decades of the 20th century and in recent decades in supermarket freezers as a ready-meal. What it is not, purists say, is a chicken breast filled with flavoured butter. Chicken Kyiv is seen as a modern variation on Côtelettes de Volaille, or kotleta de-voliay, a stuffed chicken breast dish which a host of sources cite as being of Russian origin with French influences. In the 1840s, Russian royals, as they were wont to do, sent their chefs off to Paris in search of new fare for their bounteous table, who then returned with a dish for chicken “cotelettes”, or cutlets, stuffed in the way we know Chicken Kyiv to be.”
A year or two later, we visited Kwality, specially to have their delicious Kiev again. When I ordered it, the waiter said that I would need to wait an hour and a half for it to be prepared. Realising that this probably meant that it was too much trouble for the kitchen to prepare one portion, I ordered something else.
So, I leave it to you: Kiev or Kyiv? Garlic or not?
A FEW MONTHS before January 1994 when I set off for my first visit to India, my soon-to-be wife gave me a copy of the recently published A SUITABLE BOY by Vikram Seth.
I began reading it, and gave up after the first 300 pages.
33 years later, in September 2026, I began reading it again, and I have just finished reading the entire novel.
The book has over 1470 pages. Each one of them is a joy to read – not one of them is dull.
After having visited India more than 50 times and lived with my wife’s Indian family, the contents of the book make a great deal of sense to me. Words, traditions, and ways of life, which made little or no sense to me when I first tackled the novel in 1993, enhanced my second reading of the book. However, if one is not familiar with India and its recent (1950s) history, a reader might get less enjoyment fom the book than I have. That said, the novel provides a panoramic survey of the lives of various strata of Indian society during the first few years after 1947, when the country became independent.
It is amazing that the author has written a novel that remains compelling, exciting, interesting, and amusing over so many pages.
Anyone with even the slightest interest in India will gain much from reading “A Suitable Boy”.
Today, I came across an interesting article ( https://substack.com/home/post/p-202342382 ) about Albanians in New York City published on Substack by Jake who lives in that city. Reading it jogged my memory. I remembered something we came across on our visit to Albania in May/June 2016. Here is what we found in a tiny village in the south of the country. …
Tuesday, 31 May 2016. Many people had encouraged us to visit Dardhë, which is a village south of Korçë. To reach there, we had to drive via Korçë onto the main road to Ersekë. This thoroughfare was appalling. Its tarmac had been removed in anticipation of repairing the highway. We drove at snail’s paste along it, bumping constantly on the sharp rocks that lay along the roadway and raising clouds of white dust like thick smoke. After a while, we turned off onto a smaller but much better surfaced road that led across the plain to the village of Boboshticë. Soon after passing this place, we began climbing through wild, barren rocky landscape. Gradually the road began climbing ever more steeply and curling around sharp hairpin bends until we crossed the col of a pass, and then we began driving through a well-forested mountainous landscape. The village of Dardhë is perched high on these hills with a view down to a cultivated valley far below.
We parked our hired car close outside a stone building, which bore the date 1936. It had a newish sign saying it is the Pleqesia (presbytery) of Dardhë. It is close to a small steeply sloping park full of trees that provided much shade, which contains a building that houses a museum (the Muzeu Foto-Historik), which was closed. The headstone of the arch of the museum’s main entrance has the date 1924. A plaque on a wall, cracked in one corner, topped with a 5-pointed star, and dating back to the Communist times, read (roughly translated):
“In this building during the national liberation war important international meetings were held concerning the regional character of the province. It was the centre of partisan forces and warehouse for food and propaganda materials.”
Dardhë is mentioned twice in Roderick Bailey’s book about the SOE in Albania, The Wildest Province. It fell into German hands, and out of fear the inhabitants appeared to welcome them. Various members of the SOE recorded having spent time in the village, notably Major JG Hibberdine, who kept a detailed diary of the awful times he and his comrades-in-arms spent in Albania (between late 1943 and mid 1944). Major P Kemp recorded that the villages’ inhabitants were “Catholics”, and that 2 of his fellow ‘Britishers’ attended mass in a church above Dardhë. Given that the church in the centre of Dardhë is Orthodox, Kemp must have been referring to Shen Pjeter, which is in the hills above the village. In fact, on our way to Dardhë, we stopped briefly at a point above the place where there is a roadside shrine dedicated to St Peter and bearing a Roman Catholic, rather than an Orthodox, cross.
The museum building bore another memorial plaque, which recorded the fact that the building had been constructed with input (financial?) from the Dardhë society, named “BLETA”, its members residing in the USA. I contacted someone who works with BLETA, which still exists and has its headquarters in Worcester (Massachusetts), and was told that the present-day museum was originally a school, constructed in 1924 with help from the organisation. Many inhabitants from Dardhë emigrated to the USA. According to one source, their families formed the nuclei of the first Albanian communities both in the USA and in Romania. One of these migrants from Dardhë was Josif Pani (1868-1934), who was deeply involved in the important American Albanian patriotic groups, notably Vatra (meaning ‘hearth’), whose members included prominent Albanians such as Faik Konitza and former Prime Minister Fan Noli.
In the park next to the museum there is a monument, a bust of a man wearing a neck scarf (like those worn by Communist ‘young pioneers’) and on his head what looks a like an Indian ‘Nehru cap’. It is dedicated to the memory of partisans fallen in WW2. The base of the monument has an embossed metal plate recording the list of the dead. These people died on various dates between 24th December 1942 and 20th August 1944. More than half of the 17 deceased died on 9 September 1943. All those listed were born in Dardhë and were described as “rene deshmor”, which means ‘martyred’. On 24 December 1942, Dardhë was attacked by Italian forces. On the 9th of September a year later, a day after the Italians had given up their alliance with the Germans, their forces left Dardhë, sacking the place before doing so.
We visited the Orthodox church of St George, which is close to the museum. It was being restored. The BLETA organisation is helping with this. There was scaffolding on its bell-tower. Many of its fittings, including a lovely iconostasis and 2 intricate chandeliers made with gold coloured double-headed eagles, are of recent manufacture. An elaborately carved wooden icon stand appeared to be far older.
I wandered around the village, looking at its old stone houses that perch on the steep slopes of the mountainside. Their roofs are tiled with overlapping flat stones that resembled thick slates. There was a stone arch over the gates to a drive that led to a building near where we had parked. The stonework of the side of the arch that face inwards has a 5-pointed star embedded in its headstone. The side of the arch facing the street did not have one. Next, we had drinks in a large hotel above the village, the Dardha. Its overhanging roofs made it look like an alpine chalet. We were almost the only customers in this vast place when we entered it. Although Dardhë is undoubtedly a pretty place and full of interest, it failed to impress me as much as it had those who recommended that we visit it. However, the drive to and from it was well worth doing because of the spectacular scenery that we saw.
The thing that made the village truly remarkable for me was seeing the school, now a museum, whose construction had been financed by migrants from the village, who had made themselves a more prosperous life in the USA.
This is an extract from my book “Rediscovering Albania”, which is available from Amazon. The book contains my comparisons of what I found in Albania in 1984 with what I saw in 2016.
Nina Hamnett (1890 – 1956) was a Welsh artist and writer, who became known as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’. Between 1906 to 1907 she studied at the Pelham Art School and then at the London School of Art until 1910. In 1914 she went to Paris, to study.
Nina returned to London, where she continued her Bohemian lifestyle that had begun in Paris.
Her artistic style was post-impressionistic and noticeably avant-garde occasionally. She was a fine portraitist as can be seen at a small exhibition dedicated to her paintings at the Tate Britain., which will continue until 23 May 2027.
Amongst the portraits at the Tate, there is one depicting an Indian. Hamnett’s studio notebook recorded the model as “Chanda”.
The Tate’s label suggests the subject was “Apurva Kuma Chanda”. ‘[Kuma’ is most probably ‘Kumar’.] Apurva was known to have been close to Nina’s circle of friends.
I became curious about him.
Apurva was a son of Indra Kumar Chanda of Silchar in northeast India – in Assam. Apurva and his brother Anil Kumar Chanda were very close to the great Bengali cultural figure Rabindranath Tagore, and promoted his work, notably his songs that became known as ‘Rabindra Sangeet’. He lived from 1893 to 1967, and would have been about 15 when Nina painted him in about 1918.
Looking at the picture, which depicts a young man with a drink in his hand, he looks like a very mature 15 year old – or, possibly, the painting is not of Apurva, but someone else.
Apurva or not, the paintings of Nina Hamnett are well worth seeing.
In 1949, a year after my father, Basil Yamey married my mother, one of his cousins arrived in South Africa from Europe. Hendrik (aka: ‘Henry’, ‘Hendrik’ and ‘Heinrich’) Jami set foot on South African soil after an arduous trip. Tragically, his life ended suddenly and by foul means in South Africa.
Hendrik was a son of Moses and Dora (née Peisel) Jami. The Peisel family owned a brewery in Budapest. Moses was a brother of Basil Yamey’s father Solomon Yamey. Hendrik was born in Plunge in Lithuania in 1895, soon after his uncle Solomon had migrated from Plunge to South Africa. His brother Kurt (1901-1984) migrated to Rhode Island in the USA, and another two brothers, Isidore (1903-1946) and Max (1905-1990), followed their uncle Solomon to South Africa between the two World Wars. Records in the National Archives of South Africa suggest that Hendrik was planning to go to South Africa to join his brothers there in 1939. However, it took him 10 years to reach the country.
Hendrik, who had been living in Budapest for several years, must have perceived, as did many other Jewish people, that the Nazis in Germany were beginning to make life very uncomfortable for Jews. Even after the Second World War broke out in 1939, Hungary – an ally of Germany – was not occupied by the German troops; this only happened in 1944.
From late 1938 onwards, Hungary invaded territory beyond its eastern and south-eastern borders. This increased the length of its frontier with the Soviet Union. Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1941. I assume that it must have been sometime before that date when Hendrik began his journey eastwards towards Shanghai. This city in China was just about the only place where there was no administrative difficulty for Jews to gain entry. According to Sally Ogle Davis writing in an article[i] published by the on-line Jewish Journal in 2002:
“It wasn’t that the Chinese deliberately set out to help the Jews of Europe, it was simply that among the warring colonial factions who ran Shanghai — the French, the British, the Japanese — no one wanted to control the passport department because no one wanted to take ultimate responsibility for the chaotic province. And in chaos lay an escape route for the Jews.”
Many of the Jews who fled to Shanghai travelled by boat via the Suez Canal. Others, including Hendrik, travelled by train across Stalin’s Soviet Union to China. Shanghai, their destination, had an established Jewish community. This was founded by wealthy Baghdadi Jews, including members of the Sassoon and Kadoorie families, in the 1870s.
Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese in 1937[ii]. It was then that the port allowed entry without passport or visa, making it a place that Jewish refugees could gain access freely if they could travel so far from Europe. By the time that Hendrik reached the city, there were already many Jewish refugees there, and conditions were becoming crowded. By 1943 there were at least 18,000 Jews sheltering in Shanghai. It was then that the Japanese forced them all to live in a small ghetto, a three-quarter square mile area of Shanghai’s Hongkou district. Conditions were cramped and difficult to say the least, but the Jews, most of whom might have already perished had they remained in Europe, were safe for the time being.
The Shanghai Ghetto was liberated in September 1945, and by 1949 most of its Jewish inhabitants had moved away from China. Hendrik Jami was amongst these. When he arrived in Cape Town in 1949, he was met by one of his brothers, Max Jami (who was to change his surname to that of his uncle Solomon: i.e. ‘Yamey’). Max took him to his home in Wolsely, which is just under 90 miles north-west of Cape Town and 10 miles south of Tulbagh where Solomon Yamey used to live. Hendrik lived with Max and his family for a few weeks while he acclimatised to his new surroundings and a new way of life.
Eventually, Hendrik moved to the town of Worcester, which is about 26 miles south-east of Wolsely. In time, he bought the Afrikaanse Koffiehuis in the centre of this small town in the High Street near where it is intersected by Porter Street; the establishment still exists. The Koffiehuis was both a café and a general store. Hendrik’s nephew, Max’s son Mervyn, remembers visiting his uncle once a week on Sundays. He recalls that Hendrik was a very friendly man who got along well with everyone. He was very generous, always plying his nephews with gifts of confectionery. Mervyn told me that his uncle’s generosity extended well beyond his family. Once, for example, he donated a huge sum of money, £1000, to the Dutch Reformed Church in Worcester. Mervyn also remembers that Hendrik did not believe or trust in banks, and kept much money in his living quarters which were situated behind the shop and separated from it by an almost enclosed yard. Another source of information, the Cape Argus newspaper, said that Hendrik was often seen around the town with his bulging wallet stuffed full of banknotes.
In early 1956, Hendrik sold his business to a Mr Athanassiou. He continued to work in the shop as its manager, and lived as before in his quarters behind the shop. Shortly before midnight on the warm summer night of the 10th of January 1957, Hendrik Jami, the manager of the Afrikaanse Koffiehuis, was seen taking a leisurely stroll along Porter Street in the small town of Worcester in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Next morning, Mrs Rena Erasmus, who worked as an assistant at the Koffiehuis, arrived at half-past seven to find that her workplace was still closed. Usually, it was open by then. She knew that Mr Jami always opened the shop promptly at five thirty in the morning. He was always telling her so.
Alarmed, she telephoned the café’s owner, Mr Athanassiou, from a public ‘phone box, and told him about the unusual state of affairs. He told her to look at Mr Jami’s rooms behind the café. What she found there was very unpleasant. Mr Jami was lying fully dressed on the floor of his kitchen. His hands were tied behind his back with a handkerchief, and there were bruises on his throat. A cloud of flies hovered above him, buzzing. He was dead. His murdered body was described in gory detail in the Cape Argus. It made front page news on several consecutive days. After some days, two different rewards were publicly offered for any information that lead to the arrest and conviction of Hendrik’s murderer(s). Both Mr Athanassiou and Hendrik’s brother Max offered rewards of £100 (worth well over £1000 today).
The crime was not resolved immediately. Eventually, the murderer and his accomplice were discovered and arrested. Hendrik’s nephew Nat Yamey told me that they were both sentenced to death in the Circuit Supreme Court in Worcester. In those days the death penalty was by hanging, and he remembers that his father told him that they were both hanged in Pretoria Central Prison.
[ii] A friend of mine, the late Sir Henry Norman Brain (1907–2002), was a British diplomat in Shanghai when it fell to the Japanese. He remembered that the seemingly unending fighting stopped suddenly. Soon after this, he asked a Japanese general what had made the Chinese surrender so suddenly. He was told the Chinese soldiers, who were all mercenaries, had accepted a bribe from the Japanese to do so.
I do not know why I suddenly thought about them when waking this morning, but several mnemonics came to mind. All of them I learned at school. Here are a few:
BODMAS : Brackets Of Division Multiplication Addition Substraction
Referring to the order in which arithmetic operations are carried out.
The Serpentine Galleries – both North and South – rarely put on exhibitions that are anything but adventurous. Such is the case for the latest at Serpentine South, which can be viewed until 10 January 2027. The exhibition showcases creations by Justin Caguiat, who was born in Tokyo in 1989. He is known for his inter-disciplinary works which explore the connections between architecture, spirituality, and everyday rituals.
The exhibition is called “Change Ringing”. The name refers to the commonly employed English method of ringing church bells, which, as is explained in a Wikipedia article, is:
“… the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a tightly controlled manner to produce precise variations in their successive striking sequences, known as ‘changes’ … This creates a form of bell music which cannot be discerned as a conventional melody, but is a series of mathematical sequences.”
Caguiat’s exhibition incorporates painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound and film. The sounds are produced by a collection of bells and loudspeakers positioned throughout the gallery. The bells are struck by electrically operated mechanisms. They do not ring randomly, but are programmed to sound according to a score composed by Lily Pickett. As one views the show, you can hear a sequence of sounds produced by the bells.
Apart from the bells and the sounds theyb produce, there are some attractive, abstract, colored canvases to be enjoyed. Some of them have been mounted on wooden frameworks behind which the brickwork of the gallery has been exposed by removing its plaster covering. There are also some sculptures. Some of these incorporate bells, which form part of the sound creating ensemble.
“ … a new series of thermochromic paintings that continuously change in response to heat and light. As temperatures fluctuate, layers of heat-sensitive pigment reveal and conceal different forms, creating works that remain in a constant state of transformation.”
During the brief time we saw them, we did not notice any transformations, as described.
I enjoyed viewing “Change Ringing” because it was not only aurally and visually satisfying, but also innovative in an engaging way.
