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As this is a what-I-did-on-my-holiday style blog, I’d better show the obligatory seaside pic. This is Catherine and Steve with me at Canet Plage, on the Med down near the Spanish border. It’s a pop-up bar and the last restaurant at the southernmost end of the beach. I’ve been going there for decades but have never registered a name.
My next visitor was Jill. I love going round exhibitions with he because she is always so critical of the labels; instantly spotting any inconsistency or imbalance caused by the latest fad. This is probably because she is a documentary filmmaker and used to handling biased information. There is a seven-meter waterfall in a canyon near the village, much frequented by the locals, and here is Jill after enjoying a dip.
After Jill carried on travelling south to see a friend in Spain, several of my friends arrived to spent time in their own houses nearby. Martha, seen here in Ceret where we went to see a very interesting Max Jacob show at the Contemporary Art Museum, and Roslyn and Gordon, who live just up the street from us.
Martha has a superb swimming pond in her garden; featured here many times in the past, and yet again we spent time sitting under the trees admiring the distant view of Mount Canigou. Her first house guest was Martin from Switzerland – as is Martha – seen here with Gordon paying close attention to the slicing of the tart.
I rarely see Roslyn and Gordon in England, as they live in Ashbourne in the Derbyshire Dales and rarely come to London, but in France we visit and shop together all the time. Here’s Gordon in the village square.
My next visitor was Camila who flew in from Portugal, via Barcelona. We both had work to do so the days passed quietly with breaks for lunch then, when the heat had subsided a little, a walk around 5:30, followed by drinks and a nice dinner. Here’s a few holiday shots:
Camila is a William Blake scholar, and though I like his poetry, I have never regarded his pictures as anything other than illustrations of his ideas, none of which have moved me apart from his ‘I want! I want!’ lunar engraving of a ladder to the moon (1793) which I love. We saw it at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Blake show in March. It’s tiny, as big as an I-phone. It’s been too hot to go out this summer, so it was good to retire to the cool of the library. Here Camila shows the correct reaction to The Naked Lunch. It’s supposed to be funny, even though it has apparently made some people retch.
We also made a trip to the waterfall, of course, which, although it is a bit of a scrabble to get to – a helping hand is needed in my case – is a beautiful setting being completely untouched.
I was delighted to see my old friend Log, a local doctor, who now lives down in Canet where he can walk along the beach each morning. He took Martha and I – another old friend of his – to a new restaurant in Eus where the natural wine was… well, okay.
The village held its annual Sardinade while they were there: thousands of sardines grilled over vine roots followed by sausages and, strangely, chocolate eclairs. To see hundreds of chockolate eclairs in one place is quite something. About 400 people crammed the square on long trestle tables, leaving plenty of room for the dancers. They love to dance, beginning with the sombre, gloomy Sardana, a traditional Catalan circle dance which sounds Moorish and might well be left over from the times of the Moors 800 years ago. But it’s the Macarena that they love, jumping 90 degrees in long rows, just as they have been doing each year since 1993 when the Los Del Rio song first appeared.
My friends Richard and Suzy were staying with me and brought with them Inke, a museum curator from Germany, who entered fully into the swing of things: dancing at the Sardinade and joining Suzy as she entertained us on the guitar. Here’s Inke, Richard and Gordon imitating the Three Wise Monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil but I got the order wrong.
And, just for the record, a pic of me and Suzy reviving the art of the hand jive as practiced in the 2-Is in Soho c1958
On September 3rd there was a launch party for the new edition of Frank Norman and Jeffrey Bernard’s Soho Night and Day, originally published 50 years ago. Frank Norman, who, sadly, I never met ,was the author of Bang to Rights, Banana Boy and many other books as well as the musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be which made him a lot of money. His friend Jeffrey Bernard was then a photographer and had not yet begun to write his serial suicide note, as Jonathan Meads called his ‘Low Life’ column. I wrote an introduction to the new edition and Frank’s widow, Geraldine, and I were interviewed by my friend Daniel Scott at the New Colony Room just off Regent’s Street to launch it. The book is sad to read in a way as it represents a lost world. In the sixties, Soho was the food centre of Britain. Cookbook writers would note that if an ingredient was hard to find it would always be obtainable at one of the food shops on Old Compton Street. In those days Old Compton Street had five or six butchers and nearby there was also a game shop. There were fish mongers and specialist French grocers where the vegetables were all labelled in French and arrived twice a week by lorry from France. You could get wine en vrac at the Vintage House and Berwick Street was a fruit and vegetable market, though even then they were mostly crooks who would slip a rotten fruit in the bottom of the paper bag. The New Colony looks very similar to the old Colony, with much of the old memorabilia and even a reproduction of the door and bar and the famous green paint. It has been recreated by Darren Coffield, author of the excellent Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Last Bohemia. It was a fun evening. Here are some pictures taken by Dean Chalkley: Scott, Geraldine and me.
