The exciting future,
Era of liners:
Three cheers for art deco
Photo taken in High Street Kensington, London (UK)
Stylish times
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Tag Archives: london
Parrots
Feathers fluttering.
Our heads below:
Welcome to Kensington Gardens!
Hair today, gone tomorrow
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
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.
Bad weather
In London the rain lightly falls
And the leaden grey sky appals
Upon leaves it drips
Running to their tips:
This very foul weather truly galls
Archways
Arch-es of brickwork,
Tracks beneath and air above:
London’s old Circle Line
Bayswater station
Shine
Lamps, articulat-ed,
Shine variously
On diverse writers’ desks
Photo taken at Design Museum in Kensington, London
Ancient vessels
Stone vessels stand ornamentally
Beside a pool:
Call them urns, please
Photo taken in London near Lancaster Gate at the northern end of the Serpentine Lake
A brief glimpse of the past
“… 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:
Spring sunlight
A branching shadow
On a grassy green patch:
A tall tree stands nearby
Kensington Gardens on a warm spring afternoon, the first proper sunshine for quite a few days
yamey 