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A palace in Kutch

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A painting in London brings back memories of a wonderful trip to Gujarat…

yamey's avatarGUJARAT, DAMAN, and DIU

VARSHA blog size

Varsha Bhatia, whose family originated in Kutch, trained as an architect in Bombay. Now, she has become a painter, specialising in water colours. Her delicately executed, finely detailed works display her appreciation of the asethetics of architectural masterpieces.

Following a recent visit to Kutch Mandvi, she has painted a pavilion that is perched on the roof of the Vijay Vilas Palace built by the Maharao of Kutch in a traditional Rajput style during the 1920s . 

My wife and I visited this lovely palace during 2018. This extract from my book Travels through Gujarat, Daman, and Diu describes what we found:

“A notice on a wall near the main entrance reads: “Tides come and go but the legend here of sheer enchantment continues unabated”.  On entering the palace, we saw a large banner which exclaimed: “Welcome to palace and experience history which is housed within.” The walls of the…

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Time zones and … O Juice

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clock

 

I am writing this on the 30th of March,  the day after that on which the UK was scheduled to leave the EU, but did not. This day, Saturday,  is in the last weekend of March. Early on Sunday morning, we shift from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time, by advancing our clocks by one hour.

In late 1994, while we were on holiday in California, we decided to drive over to the State of Arizona to see Lake Havasu City. After London Bridge was dismantled in 1968, its stones were carefully labelled and sent to Lake Havasu City, where it was reconstructed. By 1971, the bridge had been re-built in a picturesque lakeside position where it has become one of Arizona’s major tourist attractions.

After settling into a motel, we wandered over to a restaurant. For the duration of our evening meal we were the only diners. I ordered ‘New York Steak’, which turned out to be strips of beefsteak. Soon after taking our order, the waitress returned and asked: “D’ya want it with or without O Juice?”

I had never heard of eating steak with orange juice, so I said:

“Excuse me, what did you say?”

She replied, slightly impatiently: 

“O juice, you know kinda gravy.”

What sounded like ‘O Juice’ was the waitresses attempt to pronounce the French culinary term ‘au jus‘.

After eating our meal, it was only eight o’clock. We asked the waitress where were all of the other diners and why was she clearing all the tables and stacking the chairs, getting ready to close the eatery.

“It’s  getting late you know”

“But it’s only eight,” we retorted.

“Nope, it’s nine,” she informed us.

We had not realised that by crossing from California to Arizona, we had moved into a time zone one hour ahead of California.

With a baby in Belgium

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baby seat

 

Young parents sometimes ask my wife and I when it is safe to take their baby abroad for the first time. Why they ask us is a mystery. We are not experts on child care. Our experiences in this field are confined to our only child, our daughter.

We first took our daughter abroad when she was six weeks old. We went on a driving trip from London to Belgium and Holland. After about an hour driving through northern France, our daughter began crying plaintively and continuously. We stopped, removed her from the baby seat, fed her some milk, and that brought the complaints to an abrupt end. At that stop, both my wife and I had separately thought that  we were not too far from home to turn back and abandon our trip. Neither of us expressed this thought verbally when we stopped, but later we discovered that we had had the same idea.

Several hours later, we arrived at our destination, Damme, which is close to Brugge (Bruges). After settling in the hotel, we  found a restaurant nearby. It was Saturday night. The restaurant occupied a long room. There were tables on both sides of a corridor that ran the length of the room. Most of them were occupied by frumpy-looking, late middle-aged, middle class Belgian couples, none of whom seemed to be having fun.

Soon after we settled at our table, our daughter began crying. She was hungry and my wife wanted to breast-feed her. She asked the head waiter whether there ws somewhere secluded that she could breast-feed. The waiter pointed to a back room. When my wife stood up, the hitherto silent and rather glum Belgian diners became animated. They told us that they did not want the baby to leave them. From that moment onwards, all of the diners cheered up and became lively, firing us with questions and advice about our tiny daughter. It seemed that our arrival was the best thing that had happened to them for many a year.

A few months later, we took our child to India, and that was also a successful trip. So, if you are crazy enough to ask my advice (based on a sample of only one) about travelling with a baby, my answer would be “go for it.”

 

 

 

Picture from argos.co.uk

Common sense

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Common sense is one of the least common traits found amongst human beings. It is uncommon to chance upon someone with common sense. There are plenty of intelligent and very bright people around, but most of them lack common sense and often wisdom also.

When I was a pupil at Highgate School in north London between 1965 and ’70, all of the teachers except one had degrees from either Oxford or Cambridge. The exception, Mr B, had been at a training college just east of the City of London. Mr B taught an unacademic but practical subject: woodwork. I was not any good at his craft and luckily I missed most of the classes on account of my having broken my arm during the woodwork term. Amongst all of the teachers at Highgate, Mr B had the most common sense, in fact more common sense than all of the rest of the staff combined.

Another person, who was brim-full of common sense, was one of my aunts. For various reasons, probably not completely unrelated to losing her father at a young age, she did not shine at school. Yet, throughout her long life she approached everything with straighforward down-to-earth common sense.

I am not sure whether the following anecdote was a manifestation of my aunt’s common sense, but I will relate it anyway. Once when she was at a party, a stranger introduced himself to my aunt as follows:

“I am a neo-Platonist. What do you do?“

Cool as a cucumber my aunt answered:

“I am a cabbage.”

Thus, she put pay to her pretentious new acquaintance, and ended what might have become a tedious conversation.

My photograph (above) shows a well-known London landmark. For those who are unfamiliar with London, the picture depicts the Houses of Parliament, which contains the House of Commons. During the current discussions regarding the UK’s future relationship with the EU, many intelligent Members of the House of Commons are demonstrating a worrying shortage of common sense.

A brief glimpse of the past

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PANZ

 

“… and set off after the cab. He dismissed it by Panzer’s Delicatessen on Bayswater Road…”

So, wrote Frederick Forsyth in his novel The Fourth Protocol. 

If you look for Panzers today, you will not find it in Bayswater. There is a Panzer’s delicatessen in St Johns Wood, but it is not the same firm.

The shop was on Bayswater, facing the Czech Embassy, between Linden Gardensand Claricarde Gardens.  Panzers was still in business in 1985. It closed sometime after that (before 1993). 

A couple of days ago, I noticed that the shop front of a recently closed branch of  the wine retailer Oddbins was being renovated. The sign board above the display window had been removed, revealing some old tiling. Barely discernable on the tiling were three letters ‘PAN’, these being the first three letters of ‘Panzers’. For a brief time, the remains of the now long-gone delicatessen mentioned by Frederick Forsyth may be seen by passers  by. Soon, it will either be removed or covered up.

This long lost shop also appears in another well-known novel, 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. She wrote:

“She painted until one and then drove me down to Kensington for lunch … 

… She took me to a little Italian place for lunch, down near where she and Leo live, called Panzer’s Pasta and Pizza …”

A photograph taken in the 1970s shows that there were two Panzers close to each other in Bayswater (see: https://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/notting-hill-gate-the-other-high-street/). I have posted a detail from it. The branch, whose sign was partially revealed recently is marked with a red arrow. The other branch, which I suspect was the one in Helene Hanff’s book, is marked with a yellow arrow:

PANZERS 

What? No kitchen…

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During my early years in dental practice, I came across two instances of people living in houses without  kitchens.

 

antique burn burning close up

 

The first instance concerned one of my fellow dentists. He bought a house from a lady, who only used a microwave oven. Her home had no kitchen. My colleague had to convert one of the rooms in his new home into a kitchen. 

The second example was also connected with dental practice. It was the home of one of my dental nurses, whom we shall call ‘S’. She was a delightful young lady, who worshipped the late Marilyn Monroe. Sadly, her eyesight was not quite adequate enough for working in a dental surgery. She and the senior dental surgeon in the practice decided that she should seek another type of employment, which she did.  On her last day of working with me in my surgery, I gave S a small bottle of Chanel No 5 perfume as a ‘thank you present’. S was thrilled. I could not have chosen a better present. S told me that Chanel No 5 was all that her heoine Marilyn Monroe wore in bed. Well, I had no idea about the filmstar’s habits, but I was pleased that inadvertantly I had chosen the right gift for my visually-challenged dental assistant.

If you are now thinking that I have strayed from my subject, you are wrong. While S was working in our practice, she revealed that her mother hated cooking, so much so that there was neither kitchen nor dining room in the house where S lived with her family. S told me that the family ate every meal, including breakfast, at restaurants and cafés near their home.

Maybe I am too conventional, but I was surprised to learn that people who are able to afford accomodation with a kichen or kitchenette choose not to have one. In complete contrast, my wife told me that some of her ancestors lived in homes (in India) with two widely separated kitchens: one for meat and one for vegetarian food.

 

 

Photo by Fancycrave.com on Pexels.com

History on a stone in Bhavnagar

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Amazing how much historical information may be obtained by studying a neglected stone…

yamey's avatarGUJARAT, DAMAN, and DIU

The Pil Garden in the centre of the city of Bhavnagar (in the Saurashtra district of Gujarat) is a pleasant place to relax. Triangular in plan, the park is named in honour of Sir James Braithwaite Peile (1806-82)[1]. Educated at Oxford University, he entered the (British) Indian Civil Service in 1855. He went to India the following year. He learnt Gujarati and worked in many places in Gujarat including Bhavnagar. Between 1874 and ’78, Peile served as a Political Agent in Saurashtra. He helped to coordinate the activities of the numerous heads of Princely States in the area, including that of Bhavnagar. He also helped organize famine relief during the great famine of 1877. Peile gained the respect of the heads of the Princely States. Mr Peile described the Kingdom of Bhavnagar as follows:

“With flourishing finances and much good work in progress. Of financial matters I…

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