My first visit to Paris

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WHILE SORTING THROUGH some old photographs, I came across some I had taken during my first visit to Paris. It was 1968 and I was 16. I travelled there with my parents on the overnight Silver Arrow, a train that was put on board a ferry to cross the English Channel. We stayed in a hotel on the Ile St Louis. Everything about the city both enchanted and amazed me.

Paris Gare du Nord

The photograph included in this post was taken through the window of my compartment in the Silver Arrow as soon as the train pulled into Paris Gare du Nord.

I have visited Paris many times since 1968, but it was during my first visit that the city impressed me most. Although the photographs I found brought back happy memories, I have no great yearning to visit Paris again in the near future.

A shared taxi and Greeks buried in Kolkata (Calcutta)

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Having visited the Jewish cemetery in Kolkata, we hailed an autorickshaw to carry us to College Street. There was already one passenger in the three-wheeler that stopped for us. He moved from his seat in the rear of the vehicle to make room for us, and then sat next to the driver on his seat. After going a short distance, our driver stopped to pick up another passenger, who squeezed into the seat alongside us. She disembarked after we had driven a few blocks further, and handed the driver a few rupees. After we left the autorickshaw and paid the driver a modest fee, the other passenger continued his journey in the vehicle. Like most autorickshaws in Kolkata, the one we had just taken was a shared cab that ran on a pre-determined route.

On the way, our autorickshaw rushed past a gateway on Narkeldanga Main Road, which I noticed was marked “Greek Cemetery”. Established in 1777, it is India’s only Greek cemetery. In Henry Cotton’s encyclopaedic “Calcutta Old and New” (published in 1907), he noted that the first “eminent” Greek settler in Kolkata was Hadjee Alexios Argyree, who arrived in Bengal in 1750, and worked as an interpreter. Other Greeks in Kolkata were involved in trade and commerce. The city’s only Greek church was erected in 1780, and still stands near Kalighat on Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road, along which we often travel between central Kolkata and Tollygunge to the south of it. The well-maintained building is neo-classical in style, and Greek Orthodox services are held there regularly.  Today, there are few if any Greeks left in Kolkata, and the cemetery in Narkeldanga, home to about 300 graves, is in a sad state of disrepair (according to a report in the online Times of India, dated March 2018).

A museum of money in Kolkata (Calcutta)

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BY TAKING A SHORT walk north of Kolkata’s 18th century Church of St John one reaches number 8 Council House Street, now home to the Reserve Bank of India (‘RBI’) Museum. In an interesting article published online, Sudabhip Mukherjee wrote that the museum is housed in what was originally the building constructed for the now non-existent Alliance Bank of Shimla, which flourished from 1874 until 1923. In 2019, the ground floor of this elegant Victorian building constructed in red brick with white stone facings was converted to become the RBI Museum.

The aim of the museum is to give visitors an understanding of all aspects of money and banking from the beginning of time until the present. It achieves this very well using imaginatively designed displays, which render the subject of interest to visitors of all ages. Rather than being a dull museum with conventional display cabinets, the designers of this place have produced displays that are both original and artistic. The visually exciting features begin as soon as you enter the building. For example, the pillars in the entrance hall are decorated with patterns made using out-of-date Indian currency coins, and in the centre of one of the larger display rooms, there is a dramatic sculpture that depicts the circulation of money across the globe. Had we not walked past the entrance to this museum after visiting St Johns Church on a Friday morning in late December 2024, I doubt we would have got to know about it. Many of our friends in Kolkata had never heard about the place.

An artist from India in a park in London

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THE SERPENTINE NORTH (Sackler) Gallery (in London’s Hyde Park) is hosting a wonderful exhibition until 27 July 2025. It is displaying paintings and drawings created by Arpita Singh (née Dutta), who was born in Baranagar (now in West Bengal, India) in 1937. Between 1954 and 1959, she studied for a Diploma in Fine Arts at the Delhi Polytechnic in New Delhi. In 1962, she married the artist Paramjit Singh, and they live in New Delhi.

The works on display at the Serpentine were created from 1971 onwards. All of them were both intriguing and enjoyable to see. Even without knowing what the artist intended, I got the feeling that, apart from some abstract works, the images Singh creates are full of messages, stories, symbolism, allusions to feminism, and social comment. Though full of meanings, Singh’s works are subtle – their messages, which are left for the viewer to interpret, are not ‘full on’, but add to the visual enjoyment of the images. Her colourful paintings often lack the conventional European way of depicting perspective. In many of the paintings and drawings, the elements of the composition seem to be floating on the canvas or paper. Some of the pictures look like collages, but on closer examination what appeared to have been stuck on was in fact painted on the artwork.

The colourful artworks on display at the Serpentine are well worth seeing. It is a special show not only because it is her first solo exhibition outside India but also because Singh’s work is so satisfying to see.

Painted in blue and displayed at Kew

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THE SHIRLEY SHERWOOD Gallery of Botanical Art is a relatively new addition to the buildings dotted around London’s Kew Gardens. It is an attractive clean lined contemporary edifice containing several interconnected exhibition spaces of varying sizes. Until 23 March 2025, it is housing an exhibition of mostly enormous ceramic objects, which were created by Felicity Aylieef, Professor of ceramics and glass and research at the Royal College of Art, London.

The enormous ceramic objects, which look like grossly magnified jars and vases, were handmade by craftsmen in China, whose names were not prominently displayed (if at all) in the exhibition. Ms Aylieff has painted attractive designs on the vessels using blue paint containing cobalt oxide. The painted ceramic objects are then placed back into enormous kilns, and fired once again to fix the painted designs and to glaze them. Undoubtedly, what she creates is impressive, but maybe pointless. However, the art historian John-Paul clarifies things a bit:

“These are objects to be encountered physically, peered at anear, admired from afar. They may derive from utilitarian vessels, but as objects they are architectural, sculptural even, in their forms. Painterly, we might also say, for the manner in which their surfaces are articulated with glazes”. (Quoted from a label at the show).

I enjoyed seeing these gigantic ceramic objects, but kept wondering whether the great effort (especially physical) to make them was worthwhile.

They say lightning never strikes the same place twice

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THE ONLY PERSON I know who has been struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale was one of my fellow dental students at University College Hospital Dental School. He was a keen golfer, as many dentists are, and was hit while out on the golf course.

Years after that, I was told a joke that concerns lightning. It goes like this. The businessman and the bishop were out on the golf course. The businessman made a lousy shot, and said:

“Jesus, I missed.”

The bishop said:

“You should not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

Then, there was a rumble of thunder, and the bishop was struck dead by lightning. A voice boomed out from the heavens above:

“Oh blast, I missed.”

Now, to get to the point of this essay. A few days ago (in March 2025), we visited the wonderful gardens at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. In it there are plenty of trees, but one of them, a redwood, is particularly interesting. All the remains of the tree is part of its tall trunk, and that is not intact: it has dramatic longitudinal splits. This is because it was struck by lightning. However, it was not struck once, but twice (in 1987 and then again in 1999). So much for the old saying: ‘lightning never strikes the same place twice’.

A hamlet with a memorable name in Cambridgeshire

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ONE OF MY FAVOURITE uncles used to be highly amused by the name of a place found on maps of eastern England. The place is Six Mile Bottom. The first time I heard him mention the place was when I was about six years old. As far as I can recall, I never visited the place until today (17 March 2025). As we were passing near it, we took a small detour to see it. There is not much to see, but at least I have at last been there.

Six Mile Bottom is a hamlet in the Cambridgeshire parish of Little Wilbraham, which is not far from Cambridge. The place was so named in 1801 because it is six miles from Newmarket and rests in a ‘bottom’ (an old name for a valley).

Before the 1790s, there was only one building in the place. In 1802, a large dwelling was built close by. One of its earliest residents was Augusta Leigh, who was a half-sister of the celebrated Lord Byron. Otherwise, Six Mile Bottom cannot boast of any other noteworthy former or current residents. There was a railway station at the hamlet, which served passengers between the 1860s and 1967. The hamlet still has a single-track railway running past it and boasts of two level-crossings.

During our brief visit to Six Mile Bottom, we parked outside the only shop, the Six Mile Bottom Spar grocery store. Across the road from it, there a carved stone cross, which serves as a war memorial. This monument records the names of the 16 men from Six Mile Bottom, who died during WW1. A side road leads across one of the hamlet’s level crossings to the Church of St George, which is constructed in brick and flint. Its foundation stone was laid in 1933, and the edifice was built by 1935. Mrs Favell Helen Hall, who laid the stone, was the widow of Major Alexander Cross Hall (1869-1920), who served in both the Second Anglo-Boer War and WW1 (www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/82010). The Major’s father, William Henry (Bullock) Hall (1837-1904), was the first-class cricketer and military historian, who changed his surname from Bullock to Hall when he inherited two Cambridgeshire estates from his uncle General John Hall of Weston Colville and Six Mile Bottom. The major lived and died at Great Rollright in Oxfordshire. Our brief visit to Six Mile Bottom today has satisfied my curiosity about the place whose name used to amuse my uncle. I am not sure that I would bother making a detour to see this hamlet too often. Maybe, once is enough.

Seeing things from a different perspective at South Kensington

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AN EXHIBITION AT LONDON’S Victoria and Albert Museum, which is showing until 5 May 2025, displays works of art created in the Moghul Empire between about 1560 and 1660, a period in which the Emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan reigned. Apart from wonderful jewels, jewellery, jewel-encrusted swords, and various other luxurious items, the exhibition contains a superb array of painted miniatures. Each one of these meticulously painted images is filled with a wealth of detail, and depict people as well as scenes of (often) courtly life.

The miniature paintings differ from those created in Western Europe (notably in Italy, France, Germany, and the Low Countries) during that period in many ways. One of these differences is the portrayal of perspective. To the eyes of people used to looking at Western European paintings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Mughal miniatures seem to lack any obvious portrayal of perspective when compared to what was being painted at the same time in Western Europe.

Many of us living in the twenty-first century are accustomed to seeing perspective portrayed in the way it has been done since the fifteenth century, when it was pioneered by the architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi, who rediscovered what the Ancient Greeks and Romans knew already. While I was looking at the Mughal miniatures, I wondered whether people who were living in the Mughal Empire at the time when they were painted saw the images in a different way to us, who are used to having perspective ‘spelled out’ or depicted in the Western European way. Did they look at the paintings and understand the perspective, without it having to be emphasised as it is in European art? Did their experience of life, as it was, allow them to understand the spatial relationships of the subject matter depicted in the paintings, or would it have seemed to lack depth as it does when we look at it today? Or was the subject matter more important to them than how it looked in ‘real life’?