Gothic towers glow
In the grey midnight gloom
London sleeps silently
Midnight at St Pancras
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Tag Archives: london
Falling water
Ev’ry rain drop
Creates a ring of rippling
Wet but of quite short life
Espresso and extraction
Back in about 1995, I decided to leave the dental practice where I was working. I went to one or two job interviews, but did not feel that I would have been happy working in them had I been offered a job in any of them.
Then, I visited a dental practice next to the Portuguese Lisboa Patisserie in Golborne Road (near London’s famous Portobello Road). The owner of the practice, who has long since retired, knew me, but I could not remember him even though we had studied at the same dental school.
The interview began well after my future boss had gone next door to get each of us an espresso coffee from the Lisboa. It was one of the best espresso coffees I had ever tasted in London. We got on well, speaking for hours, for so long that I was late for a pre-arranged dinner engagement.
I took the job and worked in the practice for five interesting years, fixing and/or extracting many of the local’s teeth. I do not believe it was only the espresso coffee that persuaded me to join the practice, but it certainly helped.
I have long since retired from that practice in Golborne Road and also from dentistry, but still visit the Lisboa Patisserie regularly. The quality of the coffee and Portuguese snacks, both sweet and savoury, has not faltered over the years, and some of the staff are those who were there back in the late 1990s.
I can strongly recommend a visit to Lisboa and its coffee, which was so perfect that it helped direct my career pathway.
57 Golborne Rd, London W10 5NR
Under steel hoops
Huge steel hoops
Over tracks leading westwards:
Paddington rail terminus
Shakespeare and the seagull
A bird flies past the Bard
No sonnet for the gull
Will thaw this statue
Statue of William Shakespeare at Leicester Square, London
Promise of spring
Freezing windy rain falls
Yet flowers are blooming
Soon spring approacheth
Islands of worship
IN HYDERABAD, BOMBAY, and Calcutta I have seen mosques or large dargahs (mausoleums) located on islands in the middle of roads. Traffic flows on both sides of the places of worship like river water flowing around a rock.
I mentioned this to my wife, who reminded me that London has at least two churches that stand on islands around which traffic flows. Two of them are on the busy Strand: St Clement Danes and St Mary le Strand. This got me thinking about other places where a place of worship stands in a position that forces traffic to move around it. Only one place springs to mind as I write this. There is a small church in a street leading off Syntagma Square in Athens (Greece) that stands on an island in the middle of a street ( or, at least it did when I last visited the city in 1980).
Why are these places of worship on traffic islands? Maybe, the shrines were built before roads were laid out or perhaps a road was widened leaving the holy places stranded in the middle of the enlarged thoroughfare.
A SPECIAL TEA
I met the lady who was later to become my wife on the first day of the undergraduate course that we were both studying at University of London. We were enrolled in the same department.
I lived at home with my parents, who were very sociable and hospitable. They were happy to host friends whom I had met at the university. My future wife was a frequent visitor to our home. Often when she arrived, she used to present my mother with special leaf tea from India, where her family lived. This tea was her mother’s favourite, Lopchu.
Lopchu is a district through which runs the very steep, winding road that connects Dargeeling in West Bengal with Rangpo on the border of Sikkim. Recently, we were driving up this road towards Darjeeling when we spotted a side road leading to the Lopchu Tea Estate. We asked our driver to drive us down what proved to be a narrow road with barely any undamaged surfaces. It was full of treacherous pot holes.
We drove past tea gardens that resembled many others we have seen. However, because of the special connections between Lopchu tea and our two late mothers, we were pleased to have made a special effort to see the source of the tea that might possibly have contributed at least a little bit towards the development of the relationship between me and my future spouse.
Clouds
Why do simple clouds
Seem so dull in London
But lov’ly in Darjeeling?
Roll out the barrel
It always amazes me how often one misses the obvious when wandering around London. A few days ago, my friend, the author Roy Moxham, took us to a delightful pub, The Angel, near to Tottenham Court Road Station in central London.
Just before we entered the pub, Roy pointed at a stretch of pavement outside it. The usual paving stones had been replaced by granite slabs surrounded by granite cobble stones (see illustration above).
The reason for these harder stones is that they are less likely than paving stones to be damaged when heavy barrels are dropped on to them by the men delivering beer to the pub.
Since having been shown this localised special surface outside The Angel, I have checked outside other pubs and seen the same thing. For over 25 years (maybe over 7000 times) I have walked past the Churchill Arms in Kensington and NEVER noticed that it also has this arrangement, an area of tough stones close to the pavement entrance of its cellar. And, I consider myself to be more observant than average! It pays to keep your eyes open and to be curious – you never know what you might discover!
yamey 