AND THE LARKS THEY SANG MELODIOUS

AND THE LARKS THEY SANG MELODIOUS…

Actually Not Melodious

The first reason that you notice ring-necked parakeets in London is the raucous din they make, and so it was on Monday (St.Mark’s Day) when I saw my first parakeets on Westbourne Green. I was just going round the end of the church and there was this terrific squawking in the trees by the footbridge. I knew at once what it was, but it took a moment to break into my consciousness (I was full of cold and had been in bed half the day). I looked up, and there they were, at least four of them, and because the trees are not very tall, they were clearly visible. I’ve been expecting them for at least eight years, so it was a moment of triumph as well as surprise. Not that I actually want them here, but they are such a west London peculiarity that it was always curious that they hadn’t got here, as my regular readers will be aware. To be fair, I’m not at all sure that they’ve settled, because I haven’t spotted them since, but this cold is still restricting my movements a bit. I remember when I first saw them in India it was the vivid green of their plumage that I noticed, but that was against the backdrop of the red sandstone of the gates of Agra Fort; in London their colour is surprisingly inconspicuous as long as they stick to the trees, which they mostly do.

The Quick Brown Fox

Remarked on a particularly scruffy fox by Latimer Road Tube Station the other day, to which my companion remarked, “Well, it’s a Ladbroke Grove fox!” but today I had one just as scruffy in my garden, at lunchtime. Someone should point out to them that they’re supposed to be nocturnal. This one turned tail on seeing me and jumped over the fence (not the lazy dog). I should perhaps record that one morning a few weeks ago I found a youngish fox curled up very comfortably in Timmy (the outside cat)’s hutch; I gave him the opportunity to leave, which he did. I was concerned about Timmy for the next twenty-four hours, but he reappeared, with no new injuries.  In the past Casimir has chased a fox out of the garden, but I didn’t want him to know about this one in Timmy’s hutch, because it would undoubtedly have defended itself if it was cornered, which would have been very bad news.

Little Venice

It was a dear old friend, Victor Pettitt, who introduced me to the novels of Anthony Powell back in the days of my youth. At that point Victor and his wife Margaret were living, like my mother and me, in an Essex village, but before that they had been in a flat in St.Mary’s Mansions, and subsequently they moved to a flat in Wymering Mansions (off Elgin Avenue). They had first fetched up in Little Venice in the sixties, when it was still quite scruffy and bohemian, and not so very different from what Powell had depicted from the forties, when he used it as the stamping-ground of  his character X.Trapnel (who shared some of the characteristics of the novelist Julian Maclaren Ross).. Victor and Margaret had both trained at Central School of Art, and told stories of the Chelsea Arts Club, but they both ended up working as travel couriers. They were pals of Len Deighton, and he put his name to a curious travel guide that they published in 1968, which sadly did not reproduce Victor’s marvellous maps. We gave Victor a fine send-off back in November.

We had a gala screening of “The Day of the Jackal” at St.Mary Mags last week, with Edward Fox graciously answering questions afterwards about making the film with Fred Zinneman, and people asked how we arranged this, but the answer was simply that Edward Fox is a local resident. He and Joanna David (Mrs Fox) have been in Little Venice for forty years or so, and Joanna said to me, “Of course Fred Zinneman lived in Little Venice too. Blomfield Road.” That does give a flavour of the slightly “arty” nature of the area back then. Of course the patron of our appeal, Lord Norwich, is the doyen of Little Venice, having been here since the early sixties, and no stranger himself to the bohemian. Nowadays, the bigger places in Little Venice house the likes of Michael Flatley, and the odd rock star, but mostly it’s quite staid, whereas a generation ago it seems to have attracted less wealthy but more arty types. 

When in Rome…

An example of cultural assimilation spotted the other day, at the Mozart Estate; a lady in hijab, with a toddler in a buggy. The toddler was wearing a superman outfit, and eating chips and tomato sauce.