taxi – derrickjknight

Marylebone And Little Venice

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..Today I scanned another batch of my Streets of London colour slide collection, this time from June 2004.

Warwick Crescent, W2 lies in the heart of Little Venice, as evidenced by the Regents Canal basin in the foreground. Much of this street was bombed during WW2. The building to which the street name is fixed is a survivor. One other, to the far left, out of the picture, is the 19th century Beauchamp Lodge, where I rented my counselling room. The rest consists of 1960s council building. We were bemused when, in the 1980s these boringly banal boxes began to be tarted up. The answers were probably revealed when the Council Leader’s gerrymandering exercise was exposed. The Waterside Café provided good snacks, cakes, and beverages; the Waterbus offered trips along the canal to Camden Lock and back. During my running years I sometimes exchanged waves with passengers as I jogged alongside them.

These steps taking pedestrians up from Porteus Street, lead to a bus stop at the large Harrow Road roundabout. To the left of the wall is the entrance to an underpass beneath the main thoroughfare. I knew people who would not use it for a not unreasonable fear of mugging. The trees at the top of the shot screen the canal.

Here is another shot of our friend the bemused window cleaner of Cabbell Street, NW1, which contained some rather beautiful mansion flats;

as does Old Marylebone Road;

a turning off which is Homer Row, W1. Traditional London taxi cabs are black. This driver chose red, and likes pink. The mansions shown above are reflected in his passenger window.

Regular readers will know that my self-imposed constraint on this series is that a street name sign must be included. I cheated a bit in this one, because it is Crawford Place, W2 that is featured, but St Mary’s Church, Marylebone, is actually in Wyndham Place, NW1. I was intrigued by the various examples of geometry on display in this scene.

Since this area is one of Westminster’s most prestigious, road sweeper, like this gentleman in Bryanston Mews East, W1, are rather more in evidence than in the poorer London Boroughs.

The embassy of the Republic of Angola is situated in Dorset Street W1 alongside the corner of Clay Street;

whilst on the corner of Dorset Street and Kenrick Place stands The Barley Mow, claiming to be the oldest pub in Marylebone. Time Out had this to say on 17th May 2013: “This corner pub in Marylebone started life in 1791 as a meeting place for farmers to pawn their goods. Legend has it that the wooden snugs (now listed) either side of the bar gave them a bit of privacy in which to make their transactions. These days, there’s a good range of lagers and bottled beers along with the ales, plus food (mainly Pieminster pies), with music in the evening mix.”

I wasn’t the only one with a camera on the go in Broadstone Place, W1.

The Tudor Rose pub on the corner of Blandford and Manchester Streets, W1 is featured in the London Pub Review website, thus: “Our dire predictions haven’t come true – this one’s still not changed in years. Good. It’s not a bad place at all, with decent beer on the hand pumps and proper pub grub served downstairs (upstairs there’s a restaurant) including such delights as Spam fritters. Being in a Marylebone backwater, this place hardly ever gets crowded, although there’s a weekday lunchtime trade, so if you need place for a quiet pint in the area, this place will do nicely. The service is prompt and friendly and the prices are on par for the area. Whilst you wouldn’t necessarily make a special effort to seek this place out, if you’re in the locale, do drop in. Oh, except on a Sunday – it’s closed.”

While I was working on this post, aromas of cumin and coriander led me to investigate the kitchen, where Jackie was occupied inventing her own cauliflower bahji,

which we were to enjoy for dinner with her classic lamb jalfrezi and basmati rice with onions and peppers.

A Competition

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Although the wind lessened somewhat first thing this morning, it soon picked up again and was not conducive to repair work in the garden. Our sole venture in that direction was to buy some more canes from Everton Nursery. Aaron and Robin began building a log shelter in the garden, after I had travelled to Mole Country Supplies with Aaron to buy materials.

Jackie and I watched the final stages of the Olympic men’s marathon.

It was sometime in 1984 that I entered my one and only photographic competition. This was held by Westminster City Council on the subject of London Transport. I can’t now remember which images I submitted, but this afternoon I scanned a batch of the colour negatives from which I made my selection.

I began with a scene outside a back door to Victoria Station, alongside a sandwich bar. One gentleman sits on a food crate while another studies the menu.

The seated man smokes a cigarette,

then engages in conversation. Is the debate about the plated sandwich, I wonder?

A middle-aged couple wait outside the Victoria Sandwich Bar for a bus. In those days the gentleman could have boarded with the cigarette, but would have had to ride upstairs.

(Barrie Haynes has provided the following information about this bus: ‘The ‘L’ in RML 891 stood for Long as these buses had an extra bit inserted in the middle, a bit like a stretched 747! She was already around 20 years old and about half way through her life although probably not much remained of the original 891 after a visit to Aldenham.’)

This bus sets off for Cricklewood Garage; the young man in the foreground rides a bike,

whilst the passenger in this taxi reads one of the still published broadsheet newspapers, unperturbed by the cabbie’s expression suggesting he knows it will be some time before he manages to clear the environs of Victoria.

Across the road, beyond the bus station, a younger group lounge outside one of the entrances to the Underground.

In the terminal station itself platform surfacing was being undertaken. This young man wheeled steaming asphalt across the railway line by means of a temporary bridge.

Venturing into Tooting High Street, thinking to depict traffic on the congested A24,

I diverted myself with a street scene involving gleeful children and the multi-ethnic nature of the area in which we lived during that decade.

In those days, I was unaware of what a difficult manoeuvre it would have been for the elderly gent negotiating his way between such boisterous little people, even though they respectfully stepped aside.

Further along the A24 the box containing Lambeth Salt is in readiness for snow and ice that may cover the streets in winter. This is to thaw the precipitation and give tyres a grip.

These two women at a bus-stop are classics of a type, complete with hats, handbags and ladylike gloves. The price of a weekly bus pass in those days would take you just one stop on a single journey today.

I certainly didn’t include this shot in my competition entries, but the shop and its prospective customers – a different generation from those above – were there, so they appear on my strip of film.

I didn’t actually win anything. Perhaps my take on transport was considered a little off-piste. There are more images to follow, when I get around to scanning them.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s scrumptious sausage casserole; mashed and new potatoes; crisp carrots and cauliflower; and green greens. Jackie drank fruit juice and I finished the Alentejano.

On The Road To Bridgetown

I very rarely stage a photograph, so I probably wouldn’t have thought of Jackie’s ladybird shots this morning. She spotted a somewhat sleepy ladybird – not literally of course, because this one already wore its spots – on a rounded pebble in a colourless corner. Thinking it needed something red to set it off, she picked up the pebble perch and plonked it among primulas in the window box on the front wall. The obliging insect stayed put.

We then filled two more canvas bags with hedge clippings and took them to the dump. Our spoils included two large pots and three folding wooden chairs.

Through the medium of donations of plants, seeds, gardening book and tools, the forthcoming First Gallery exhibition intends to raise funds for Southampton public libraries. Jackie will be donating some of the many seedlings that crop up in our paths and elsewhere in the garden. One of these is the geranium palmatum, a splendidly shrub-like perennial.

I made some small prints with which to enable buyers to know what they were purchasing.

This image of The Dead End Path shows the scale of the plants.

This afternoon I scanned another dozen colour negatives taken on my walk along the road to Bridgetown, Barbados, in March 2004.

Most gardens contained a brightly coloured, prolific, bougainvillea, which also adorned the roadside.

Taxis were really people carriers who happily held the centre of the road as they careered along,

occasionally stopping to pick up passengers at bus stops. Were they actually a variety of bus, I wondered?

An elegant egret, craning its neck in the undergrowth,

seemed oblivious of the BWIA passenger plane flying overhead.

Like the shady tree in the bus stop picture above

I could not identify many other blooming flowers.

This evening we dined on succulent chicken Kiev, creamy mashed potato, green beans, and ratatouille; followed by chocolate sponge pudding and cream. Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I drank reserve des Tuguets madiran, 2012

Sod’s Law

On the train from Southampton to Waterloo, to which Jackie delivered me this morning, an extremely rowdy, already drunken group of young men bearing beer cans and plastic wine glasses, accompanied by very tiny fascinators flickering and wobbling above very weighty women wearing dresses to match, fortunately alighted at Winchester. One of the men rested his shod foot on a window. As they left, two of them didn’t know which way to turn with their unwieldy plastic packing case containing further cans. I wondered how they would fare at Ascot.

I finished reading John S. Morrill’s ‘The Stuarts’ and began Paul Langford’s ‘The Eighteenth Century’ in the Oxford Illustrated History of Britain.

We paused outside Clapham Junction where the embankment was incongruously meadow-like.

The Ascot crowds convening at Waterloo displayed far more elegance and fascination than my earlier companions on the train.

Having previously determined against it, my trip of a couple of days ago demonstrated that whichever way I walked I was not going to escape the global influx, so I took my usual route to Green Park to catch the Jubilee Line train to Neasden, and Norman’s for lunch.

The London Eye attracted its usual long queues.

A little girl riding along the Embankment perched on her father’s shoulders reminded me of Becky’s superbly adapted Fathers’ Day card.

She, too, will not have forgotten that climb up Mount Snowdon. I had walked up and down the Miners’ Track with her on my shoulders. Although I copped out of the last bit to the summit I had walked up this route regarded as the easy one without too much trepidation. That was because we were walking through clouds.

On the way down when they had cleared I realised that there was a sheer drop either side of the narrowest section of the path.

After I’d got past it, my shirt was wringing wet. The only trousers available in the 1970s were that sartorial aberration, flares. This made me think of a glorious episode of ‘Minder’ set in the 1980s when they were no longer de rigueur, and the hapless Arthur Daley, played so well by the marvellous George Cole, bought a bargain box of jeans. The dismay on his face when he opened the container elicited amused delight from Dennis Waterman’s beautifully depicted Terry, and howls of laughter from me. The garments were, of course, flared.

Westminster Bridge was slightly less populated than usual. A carnation (see post of 28th February) had been discarded on the pavement. Further along a vociferously combative middle-aged woman demanded £20 from a reluctant young man on whom she had planted another.

A London taxi had broken down in a most unfortunate spot. The driver alternated between tinkering outside with the engine and revving up the accelerator inside his cab.

Basking on their rocks, St. James’s Park’s pelicans enjoyed the spray from the fountain which cooled them on another sultry day.

Building works had brought single lane traffic to St. James’s Street. One had to weave around stationary taxis to negotiate zebra crossings. As the meters continue to click over whilst the cabs are not able to move, I dread to think what the fares cost.

As I sat down to Norman’s roast pork dinner, I burst out laughing. In response to his query I related a conversation I had had with Jackie last night. While we were enjoying her roast pork dinner she had said: ‘You will have roast pork tomorrow’. ‘Eh?’, said I, ‘How do you know what Norman will give me?’. ‘Sod’s law’, she replied.

This prompted Norman to tell his sod’s law story. ‘When you drop a slice of bread and jam on the floor it always lands jam side down’. ‘Yes……’, said I, sensing there was more to come. ‘Except’, continued my friend, ‘when you are demonstrating sod’s law’. Perfect.

Carta Roja gran reserva 2005 accompanied today’s meal that was completed by summer pudding which he knows is one of my favourites.

I went on to Carol’s and thence back to Southampton by my normal routes, and Jackie drove me back to Minstead.