Open Writing

Courtenay Avenue in Highgate, North London, has been named as the most expensive address in England and Wales knocking Kensington and Chelsea off the top spots. The average property on the road is worth £6.8m compared with Kensington and Chelsea where the price is £5.5m.

The road, which runs between Highgate golf course and Hampstead Heath, is described as a leafy cul-de-sac and contains a number of large, detached houses many of which have swimming pools and large gardens. It runs parallel to Bishop’s Avenue which is described as “Millionaire’s Row” but has lost its rating because it contains a number of cheaper houses.

Chelsea Square, in the Borough of Kensington, is the second most expensive addres with the average house there worth £6.4m and Manresa Street, which runs into Chelsea Square, is the third most expensive street to buy a home.
Comment: Prices just keep on climbing.

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The Post Office is considering closing 169 of London’s 850 Post Offices as part of its plans to axe 2500 Post Offices nationwide.
Comment: Pensioners are complaining that it will force them to walk further to collect their pensions.

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The Grande Hotel, Brighton, favourite week-end resort of wealthy Londoners, was damaged by fire and 400 visitors were evacuated.
Comment: The hotel was bombed by the IRA in 1984 in an attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the Conservative Party conference. Five people were killed.

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The audience at the opening night of the opera “Lucia di Lammemoor” at the London Coliseum were stunned when the lead singer, Clive Bailey, was taken ill on stage and his place was taken from the side of the stage by Paul Whelan, another singer who was not due to take the part for a month. Bailey, who had a chest infection, struggled for 40 minutes and then had to give up but stayed on stage and continued to mime while Whelan sang. The substitute made it to the stage for the second scene but did not have time to change into 19th Century costume.
Comment: The audience went wild.

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Two North London councils are blocking in residents who park their cars in their front gardens without permission. They are installing concrete bollards that prevent damage to pavements.
Comment: The action has been taken in 33 locations.

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The Livesey Children’s Museum in Peckham, South-East London, is threatened with closure because Southwark Council says it can no longer afford the yearly cost of £146,000.
Comment: The Museum was opened in 1974.

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Looking Back

New feature: The Women in my Life…1

With a name like Eileen you might think that she was Irish. But the name came from the Medway, in deepest Kent, and her family owned a flour mill and were comfortably middle-class. Her mother had an independent streak, left home early, got married and widowed in quick succession, and then married a cinema manager who wore a dinner jacket every night and was in charge of one of those opulent palaces before the War where people who had no romance in their lives were seduced by the opium of Hollywood.

Eileen came to live in London, studied hard in a beauty school and assembled a private clientele of rich upper-class women who liked to avoid beauty salons and boasted quietly of their own private beauty specialist. I met her outside Charing Cross Station when she was trying to cross the road and ran into her in my cream and green Sunbeam sports car. She was shaken but not stirred and when I found out that she was trying to get to a house off the King’s Road in Chelsea I took her there.

That is how it began. She told me that she was in a loveless marriage with an antiques dealer who worked in Bond Street and lived with him in a flat in Hampstead but she said that the marriage was just a sham. Six months later she left him and we took a flat together in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a model community for middle-class professionals, before it was overrun by a flood of war torn refugees escaping from Germany and Europe. Then Eileen got a divorce and I was the co-respondent in the days when being involved in a divorce was a social catastrophe. But it made no difference to me or my job as Editor of a weekly newspaper for the hotel and catering industry and we were married as soon as the legal intervals permitted.

I was just 23 and working hard five days a week at a job I loved and to earn more money I took an extra Saturday job on the Sunday Dispatch newspaper. Eileen had her clients and most evenings I would bring her home from somewhere in Chelsea or Kensington. Later on I taught her how to drive and she drove me to work then used the car during the day and brought me home at night.

I was a total sex novice and Eileen was an accomplished teacher. But I was too young and unpractised in the complex art of love making and never achieved sexual equality with her and this caused me great sorrow.

At week-ends we would drive down to Aylesbury, 40 miles from London, to have lunch with her mother who always gave us roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and afterwards we sat around drinking tea, taking about nothing and tried not to be bored.

Aylesbury was a prosperous county town, well kept and tidy, and occasionally we went for lunch to the Bull’s Head Hotel in the market place owned by the local mayor named Gargini, whose ancestors came from Italy, and was a pillar of the local Conservative Party. Sunday was our day off and we would have liked to have stayed on to watch a film at the local cinema, where Eileen’s father-in-law was the manager, but organised religion was strong enough to keep the cinema shut and we never did.

(More next week)

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Poems from the Past

Farewell to Seebruck*
by Henry Jackson

The lake is the same,
The boat is the same,
The trees are the same,
The breeze is the same,
The food is the same,
The wine is the same,
The lips are the same,
My memory awakes,
We meet for the last time
And my heart aches.
---June 16 1993

*In the Bavarian mountains.

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Kevin White, aged 57, of Dagenham, East London, was gaoled for eight months for stealing scrap metal worth £20,000 from his former employers, Metronet Ltd, the former London Tube operating company.
Comment: He used the money to fund his gambling losses on horse and dog racing and slot machines.

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Today in history

1904. Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly” had its premiere at La Tosca Opera House in Milan.

1962. Astronaut John Glenn orbited the earth in a space capsule.

1965. Spaceship Ranger crashed on the moon after sending thousands of pictures of the lunar surface.

`1985. Ireland authorised the sale of contraceptives despite vigorous Catholic opposition.

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Famous Quotes

If you judge people then you have no time to love them—Mother Teresa.

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Me

I am now much better acquainted with my new home. The heating is now in full blast and keeps the place warm and I am getting used to the visits by carers and nurses who come in the morning and evening to keep the place tidy and give me my eyedrops. They seem to change frequently, and some of them speak bad English, but the system is beginning to work.

At the Day Centre I met two interesting people:

1. A man who spent most of his working life in a ship repair factory in Wapping when London was the centre of the ship repair world. When the factory closed he became a Whitehall messenger and carried documents from one department to another using the warren of underground tunnels under Whitehall itself.

2. And a woman of 83 who was born in Gibraltar but whose family came to the East End in 1942 and has lived there ever since. She confessed that she cannot read or write English but speaks it like a true Londoner. She has a razor sharp brain and has almost perfect eyesight. She is a non stop knitter and did not stop while we talked and claims that she can complete a garment in two days.