Tag Archives: london

Tastes differ

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food toast meal morning

 

When I was a child, I spent a great deal of time with my aunt and her children. They lived a few minute’s walk from our family home and I enjoyed spending time with them. Often, my sister and I used to spend a whole day at my aunt’s house, sometimes over night especially when my parents were away on a trip.

My aunt fed us. Sometimes she made us fried eggs. Then, I was a very fussy eater. In those far-off days, I only liked the white part of the fried egg, not the central yellow bit. One of my cousins only liked the central yellow part, but disliked the white surrounding it.  My aunt was an extremely down-to-earth individual, laden with more than a fair share of common sense. Her solution to the fried egg situation was that after making the fried egg, she used to carefully dissect the yoke portion of the finished product and serve it to my cousin. I was given the white portion of the egg with a neat hole in it where the yellow had been.

Today, many decades later, I am not keen on any part of a fried egg and do not eat eggs prepared in this way. I much prefer omelettes and hard-boiled eggs. However, I do enjoy making them for other people, The challenge is to avoid breaking the yoke. 

 

 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A musical offering

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Maestro_240

 

This evening, I attended a performance of A Musical Offering by JS Bach (opus BWV 1079) at the Royal College of Music in Kensington. Each of the sections of this work was introduced by the conductor, Joe Parks, who explained what was musically interesting about them.

The whole piece is based on a theme composed by King Frederick II of Prussia. He gave it to Bach on the 7th of May 1747, and challenged the composer to do something interesting with it. A Musical Offering is what Bach did with the King’s theme. I am no musician, so can hardly explain the compositional procedures with which Bach exploited the King’s somewhat dull theme. For example, in one of the sections improvisations on the theme are played with musicians simultaneously playing the modified theme both forwards and in reverse. In another section, the theme is improvised in a range of different keys. In brief, this piece by Bach is both intriguing and challenging for musicians. Although this aspect of the music is lost on me, my enjoyment of the work was not impaired.

What fascinates me is that a piece of music so full of compositional twists and turns is a delight to hear. Bach has not only satisfied his desires to hone his compositinal technique in this piece, but also he has created a work that is highly satisfying to the listener.

Great music like great paintings reach into the the inner subconscious of the listener or viewer and thereby evoke an almost visceral sensation of joy. It does not matter that the music is full of compositional magic or the painting might be impressionistic or abstract because the great artist knows how to produce a work that reaches those hidden parts of the body that evoke feelings we call emotion. Without doubt, A Musical Offering did that for me.

Climate change

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Early morning flight_500

High above the clouds

A climate protester flies,

Changing the climate

 

 

This was inspired by an article in the Daily Mail newspaper (see: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6938095/Dame-Emma-jets-5-400-miles-green-is.html), which reported:

“Emma Thompson arrived at Marble Arch yesterday afternoon to support climate change protesters and urged others to join their numbers.

What she might not have mentioned to them is that she had just flown back to Heathrow Airport from Los Angeles the day before.”

 

Keeping fit

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Evening jogger_240

 

While I was engaged to my wife, she suggested that I join her at her health club and try some of its facilities.

The first time I went, I decided to go swimming. After swimming two lengths very slowly, I managed to climb out of the pool, exhausted and breathless.

For the next visit, my wife-to-be suggested that I try a session in the sauna. She thought it would do me good and would  not be particularly exhausting. I removed most of my clothes and sat alone in the poorly-lit sauna room. After a few minutes I began feeling cold, and started shivering. Fed up with this miserable experience, I left the sauna, and got dressed. The sauna had not been switched on!

Undismayed by this, I decided to give the sauna another try a week later.  This time it was switched on, and steaming hot. Because my first visit had been so boring, I decided to take a magazine into the sauna to read to pass the time. I took my place on a bench alongside some very muscular men and opened my copy of a glossy BBC clasical music magazine. Within minutes, the glue holding my magazine together melted. Numerous pages covered with fascinating information about classical music floated gently downward on to the floor of the sauna, Sheepishly, I recovered some of them, and then hurried out of the sauna.

“Why not try the exercise cycles next time? ” my wife asked. “Good idea,” I replied reluctantly. So, a week later, I sat in the saddle of an exercise bike. My wife was seated on a neighbouring cycle pedalling away while reading a book resting on the handle bars. The third cycle in the room was being pedalled furiously by a man lstening to his Sony Walkman through a pair of headphones. Meanwhile, I was just trying to move my cycle’s pedal … completely unsucessfully. After a few minutes, I abandoned the cycle, and after that I have never bothered with health clubs again. 

“That’s a pity,” you might think.

But, maybe not, as I will explain.

When I was practising as a dentist, quite a few patients, often young men, used to limp when they walked into my surgery. Almost everyone of them had injured knees or tendons whilst playing football or running, or trying to keep ‘fit’. When I saw them, I thought how lucky I was that I did not become addicted to ‘keeping fit’.

Fryers delight

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FISH

 

Sometime during the summer in the early to mid-1980s, when I was living in Kent, two young people came to stay with me from land-locked Hungary. Because travelling opportunities were limited and money was short in the Communist country, people did not travel abroad as much as people in Western Europe. My two guests had never seen the sea, except in photos and on the TV or cinema screen.

One evening, I drove my guests to the Kent coast to see the sea. We parked by a beach. As soon as we had stopped, the two lads leapt out of my car and ran into the sea fully clothed. That is how excited they were to see real waves and the sea.

After experiencing the sea, they asked me about ‘fish and chips’, which their English teacher in Budapest had mentioned. We walked to a nearby fish and chips shop and placed an order. When the fillets of fish arrived wrapped in crisp golden batter, my friends looked at them, wondering whether or not they had been served pieces of fish. They had never seen fish prepared like this before.

Fish prepared, fried and covered with batter, as it is served in British fish and chip shops is actually not a dish of British origin. According to that mine of knowledge Wikipedia, it was the Sephardic Jews, who settled in the UK from the 16th century onwards, who introduced fish prepared this way. Alexis Soyer (1810-58), the famous 19th century chef wrote in his A shilling cookery for the people, published in 1854:

“There is another excellent way of frying fish, which is constantly in use by the children of  Israel … In some families … they dip the fish, first in flour, then in egg, and fry in oil“, which is more or less what happens in a fish and chips shop. 

This leads me to the real subject of the article: a reccommendation. There are many highly-rated fish and chips shops (‘chippies’) in the British Isles. The ‘Fryers Delight’ is one of them. This unpretensious shop, whose decor seems unaltered since the day it opened back in in 1958, serves excellent fish with superb chips cut in the shop’s kitchen, all fried in beef dripping. I have eaten there twice, and look forward to my next visit. The staff are friendly, and the prices are very reasonable and the food is good value for money. 

The FRYERS DELIGHT, which is open from noon to 10pm every day except Sunday is located at:

 19 Theobalds Rd, Holborn, London WC1X 8SL

Hair today, gone tomorrow

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HAIR

 

The fastest haircut that I have ever had was in San Francisco (USA) in early 1995. The barber shop was staffed entirely by Chinese men, who were playing cards, maybe gambling, when I entered. Six minutes later, with my hair beautifully cut, I had already paid my bill. The barber could not wait to get back to his card game.

The slowest haircut that I have experienced (or, rather, endured), was in London. My wife suggested that I tried a salon near Holborn, which was also a training centre for budding hairderssers. For a modest fee, a student would cut one’s hair under the watchful eye of the professional hairdressing teacher. I was not against the idea as I had once had an excellent student cut at the London School of Fashion.

I don’t know whether the man allotted to practice on my hair was a complete novice or extremely nervous or just totally incompetent, but the experience was tedious to say the least. The appointment begun at 2 pm and was supposed to finish by 5 pm.  Throughout the afternoon, my student seemed to do little more than gather up swathes of my hair in his comb and then contemplate them. Very occasionally, he would snip a few strands of hair without much conviction. The afternoon wore on. 

By 4.45 pm, when all the other haidressing students had completed their tasks, my hair was much the same as it was at 2 pm. The teacher wandered over to me, pushed the student out of his way, and completed my haircut very competently by 5 pm.

Since then, I have had one more supervised student, which was performed by a very competent student, but she took much longer than an experienced hairdresser. Even if I have to pay more, I prefer my ‘short, back, and sides’ to be performed as rapidly as possible. 

Wasting time by the pool

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Pool side_240

 

My parents, like many other parents, wanted me to learn to swim. I was a reluctant learner. The reason was I could not believe that if I took my foot off the floor at the bottom of the pool or the sand beneath the sea, I would not sink like a stone. I could watch others swimming, but could not understand how they could do it and how much they enjoyed it.

Almost every Saturday morning, I used to be taken to one pool or another to get private swimming lessons. Year after year, these produced no results. I could not learn to swim. My parents must have spent a small fortune on these fruitless swimming lessons.

At school, we were taken to a public swimming bath at least once a week  during the Summer Term. The teachers supervising us were uninterested in those, like me, who were unable to swim. We were told to remain at the shallow end of the pool and not to move from there. This happened both at my primary school and also at secondary school.

Eventually my parents learnt of a Mr Brickett, who gave swimming lessons on Saturday ornings at the YWCA, which used to exist in Great Russell Street near Tottenham Court Road Underground Station. The red brick building still stands, but now it serves another purpose. 

Mr Brickett had a system that involved the pupil wearing an inflatable buoyancy arm-band arround each upper arm. Each armband had two separate inflatable chambers. With these fully inflated, I became convinced that I could make it across the pool without my feet touching the bottom. Each week, Mr Brickett would inflate the armbands a little less than the previous week, and then the pupil would be encouraged to swim to and fro across the pool. After a few weeks, I swam across the pool wearing my armbands. When I had done this, Mr Brickett revealed to me that he had not inflated the armband at all and that I was swimming without their assistance.  As I trusted Mr Brickett, I removed the bands and under his watchful eye I swam across the pool unaided. For this, I was awarded a certificate with my name and a Union Jack flag on it. It certified that I had swum 10 yards unaided, under my own steam.

 

I hardly ever swim any more, but I used to enjoy it a little bit, especially in the sea. I am glad that my parents persisted with the lessons, but regret that my slow progress led them to waste so much of their spare time by the pool.