MAY UPDATES
Hot tap rant/accolade ...
The big selling point of instant hot water taps is they are economical because you don't have to keep boiling the kettle. What they fail to mention is if your tap is leaking it's not just a matter of changing a washer. You have to shell out over £200 for a new tap, decidedly not economical.
Even so, I love my second hot tap just as much as the first one. And the beverage station I set up for social distancing (and not because I'm a bad host) means guests can still serve themselves - as can members of the building trades. When there are workmen about I usually go hide in the pub and avoid those "Is it ok if? ....." questions which invariably mean cutting corners you later regret agreeing to.
Laurie Cunningham statue
A start has been made my much-anticipated Highgate Cemetery report, with much more to follow.
The NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY reopens on June 22. It's a great favourite of mine which has been closed since March 2020, undergoing a £44 million refurbishment. Admission is free. I will definitely be checking it out, likely book-ended by coffee in Foyles bookshop and a Chinatown lunch.
HANDEL AND HENDRIX IN LONDON is now open following the coupling of their adjacent former homes. See Mayfair East.
Various notes added to Highgate Cemetery including actress JEAN SIMMONS, playwright ANTHONY SHAFFER and footballer UGO EHIOGU.
For music fans, DENMARK STREET added to Soho ......
I watched the Coronation - my second and probably last - on TV. I’m no royalist, but I once worked for BBC Outside Broadcasts so had a professional interest in their coverage. Also, the procession passed through two Monopoly properties – Whitehall and Trafalgar Square.
Many
people bought their first TVs for the Queen’s Coronation, the first to be
televised. This included my parents - at huge expense. A 14” TV cost £80 in 1953, equivalent to £1800
today. It is estimated there was an average of 17 people glued to each
television set for the transmission. I vaguely remember our front room was
packed around the tiny monochrome screen. The curtains were shut, and my mum
made cheese scones. Tea would have been served and we probably also feasted on bread
and dripping. But I was only five so don’t remember much. Now I’m of the age I
don’t remember much from last week, let alone 1953.
For the Coronation of Charles III, you had to
feel sorry for the rolling news channels, having to broadcast from dawn until
11am with no breaking stories. There seemed to be some lengthy analysis on the
complexity of assembling the armed forces in London. For goodness sake, these
guys are trained to invade countries – so catching the 0830 train from
Aldershot hardly qualifies as a special military operation.
All
this padding reminds me of the days when we were on air for Cup Final
Grandstand at 9am when the game kicked-off at 3pm. One memorable filler was to
run a feature on ‘the oldest surviving finalist’. He was found, an interview
filmed and ‘painted’ with archive footage. And then he died. So the next in
line was tracked down and a second feature prepared. Alas, he passed away a few
days later, as did the third. By now ‘kiss of death’ was being bandied about at
planning meetings and it was decided to wait until a few days before the final
before filming our last ‘victim’. To the relief of everyone he survived to be
interviewed on the day. But we also had oven-ready obit.
10 FUN FACTS
1. You can't see your ears without a mirror.
2. You can't count your hair.
3. You can't breathe through your nose with your tongue out.
4. You just tried no.3.
6. When you tried no.3 you realised it is possible, but you look like a dog.
7. You are smiling right now, because you were fooled.
8. You skipped no.5.
9. You just checked to see what no.5 was.
Hi Mick
ReplyDeleteAs your post arrived on the same day it was announced that the QEII funeral cost the Government (by which they mean us) £160m, I’m feeling distinctly unroyalist which made me wonder whether the Windsors had shares in Baird or Phillips or Redifusion or whoever made all those TV sets back in 53. I am told I was taken next door to watch the previous coronation (I was a month old) as we didn’t have a set. I remember nothing of that one and I avoided watching a minute of the latest nonsense. Off with their heads…or at least those silly crowns.
Phil
Phil -
ReplyDeleteI think our TV in 1953 was an Ekco and could only receive the one channel (BBC) that was available at that time. When commercial TV was launched in 1955 we couldn’t afford another set. I clearly recall, as a treat, going to our neighbour’s house to watch Sunday Night at the London Palladium and marvelling at the ads, most memorably the Murray Mints (too-good-to-hurry-Mints) animated cartoon. We persisted with our Ekco TV for some years. It wasn’t very reliable; the line scans would often collapse. But the picture could be restored by my dad poking a steel knitting needle down the back of the set (to reseat a valve?). We certainly lived on the edge in those days.
Ekco was an electronics company founded in 1924 by E K (Eric Kirkham) Cole and based in Southend. During WWII Ekco contributed greatly to the war effort, producing wiring looms for Lancaster bombers (which my dad flew) and crucially developing radar. In 1960 Ekco and Pye merged with Cole as Vice-Chairman. He retired a year later.
Trivia bonus: The first ad aired on British TV was for Gibbs SR toothpaste.