Becky and her family are staying another night, so Jackie and I left them at home this afternoon while we spent a couple of hours at a barbecue party at friends Kathy and Rob’s at Walkford. On our return I watched the second half of the Test match highlights with Ian.
We were not aware that the theme of this party was ‘Indian Summer’ and required us to dress accordingly. Therefore we didn’t. But I was wearing sandals. There is much confusion about the origin of the term that is applied to a stretch of unseasonably warm weather on the approach to autumn. The Indians referred to are most likely native Americans, but it is also thought to evoke the weather of the Indian Ocean. It was not surprising therefore to find a more or less equal number of outfits representing North Americans and the people of the Indian sub-continent.
Our hosts were apparently in no doubt and provided a delicious range of curries. We took one bottle each of red and white wine, of which we sampled a little.
Jackie’s sisters, who were both present, remembered the gorgeous blue sari I had bought my lady for her twenty first birthday in 1969. She still possessed it in about 1990 when this photograph was taken.
By the early 1970s we had discovered Maya Rani. Maya was an Indian woman who made and sold clothes with Indian cottons and silks from her basement flat in Finborough Road in Fulham. 
She made a number of outfits for each of us. In August 1974 I still wore some of the shirts she produced, like the one in this photo taken by Jessica in our flat in Soho. In this picture I am wearing the patched trousers of the brown velvet suit, the demise of which was featured on 17th November last year. The books behind me are in some of the Chinese boxes I described on 14th September 2012.
Jackie was able to join the others in enjoying a spaghetti Bolognese cooked by Becky. I wasn’t, because I had had two plates of curry earlier. Becky wishes the world to know that she ‘imbibed diet Pepsi’.
Indian Summer
