Once upon an enormously long time ago all newspapers carried classified adverts on their front pages; The Times, was the last to change that format. William Rees-Mogg was the editor and his son Jacob, was only one hundred and eleventy-one years old then. From that day to this spring and – presumably, for years to come if nothing changes, the letters page has carried joyous greetings announcing the passing of the seasons with various people claiming to have heard the first cuckoo returning to the UK for our summer.
In those far distant days of yore food used to be seasonal rather than international and so it has been my great pleasure, with spending roughly month and month about between LTC and TBS to note the changes at the fruiterers in the markets, where the old rules prevail – last month at LTC was cherries a-plenty, now it is plums and greengages – and they are all the more juicy and fruitful for being local rather than frozen and transhipped half way round the world. By old lore mussels should only be eaten when the month doesn’t contain an R, i.e. from May to August, which may account for them being a Breton holiday signifier. With Saturday being the last day of the official moules season it seemed a good idea to have a final dish so FMC and I liaised and filled our faces.
Whilst mentioning food I must relate this amusing – to me at least – story. There has been a series (on Radio Four, by way of a change…) which finished this week with mention of Mendel and His Mishbhoka and harked back to a time when Whitechapel was mainly populated by followers of the Jewish faith and Yiddish was almost as regularly heard as English. Mendel was singing a song about his beautiful beigels, which he pronounced in the London way as b-eye-gels rather than everywhere else in the world where they are pronounced Bay-gels. Nigh on twenty years ago I was driving close to Brick Lane in the wee small hours with a pillion passenger so we stopped at one of the 24 hour beigel shops. It was just after the end of Crisis and the Drinkers’ Shelter had been just round the corner.
What made that year particularly memorable was an attempt to cater for homeless couples and what became known as The Honeymoon Suites. Unfortunately some local working women realised that it gave them comfy quarters to take their clients and I had to use all my tact and diplomacy in dealing with this problem. I obviously did well – there I was at 02.30 being thanked in a particularly effusive manner by a young woman whose occupation was all too apparent. My explanation to my pillion passenger conformed to Denis Healey’s First Law of Politics – when in a hole stop digging as there is only one way to go…
A couple of days later I was leading a supervision group for a couple of counsellors and mentioned the incident at which they both expressed surprise. It was only in unravelling the situation that I discovered their surprise was not me being accosted in a friendly manner by a prostitute who knew me but that they had misheard me and thought I had been to a 24 Bible shop…. Oh how we all laughed.
With summer and the season rapidly ending I was totally enraptured by this fine specimen of a real camper (as opposed to the bourgeoisie go playing at roughing it) that I saw by LPM:
Now that’s what I call a camper. On the dashboard was an old-fashioned landline phone with twiddly dialling mechanism of the type that lead to the British emergency number being 999; oh, the nostalgia. It quite took me back to a trip to The Castle Museum in York, which had a mock-up street from the 1950s; for the older generation it was a trip down memory lane, for the younger it was, “can anyone really be that old?”
In part because of the crimes against the apple tree it has been absolutely overloaded with fruit (ibid) and so I have been doing ultimate apple picking – chopping branches off with gay abandon and then stripping them of the fruit. So far I have driven six neighbours away by trying to give them bags of apples, big bags of apples… As a family we moved in March, 1980 to a house with a big garden and orchard which had been freshly pruned for the sale – and the apple harvest was on the large side. There, also, neighbours would walk round the block to escape being inundated with apples. How things go round.
The running down of TPM continues – closed all weekend. I do wonder how much longer the place will stay open. One of Alchie Annie’s old chums from before she fell out with them accosted me at LCW, asking me whether I was married. I think that she has also fallen out with the place, as has Cariad John; small town politics. There is a new bar facing TYT in the square and it seems that AA has started going there – she offered me a lift to market last week and when I declined suggested a drink there; I remained true to TYT.
Speaking to FMC after the market it seems that many people are feeling lethargic at the moment and for once I appear to be with the majority – my energy levels are so that currently I have been spending more time asleep than awake. And it’s not only having Test Match Special all day every day on Radio Four.
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