ROBBIE wrote
<font color=purple> > <a rel="nofollow" style='text-decoration: none;' href="http://www.geocities.com/jimmy_the_bleeder/cakey.htm</font" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/jimmy_the_bleeder/cakey.htm</font</a>>
Just a few footnotes to a vivid and memorable account of a memorable
and vivid evening.
Fitzrovia is still OK. You walk a short step from the dismal tat,
pulullating tourists and snarling commercialism of Oxford Street, and
find peaceful streets and old pubs. Nigee and I agreed as we waited
for ROBBIE that even if the people outside the pub are sometimes brash
and overtly successful heirs to Gordon Comstock, at least they are
local versions of the species.
It was good to confirm again -- as people here will know -- that Nigee
and ROBBIE are witty and thought-provoking characters, and that the
wit is fast and spontaneous and the thought wide-ranging. Apart from
what ROBBIE has mentioned, our talk covered libraries, Croydon's
cultural policy, databases, World War 1, abgoites, people who
disapprove of Guys and Dolls, second-hand bookshops, Alan Bennett,
what you do to get thrown out of boozers, Auden, the possibility of
Britain's spiritual transformation, Pinter, the Camberwell Beauty,
Joyce Grenfell, and much else. We learned several of ROBBIE's real
names, but wild horses and all that...
Nigee and ROBBIE had been filled with altruism on their recent
travels. Nigee had brought back from the seaside some postcards that
make Donald McGill look like Edward Burne-Jones. The one he gave me is
hidden upstairs. ROBBIE gave me a wonderful Edwardian boys' boarding
school story, deeply imbued with unintended comedy both verbal and
visual. Nigee was given a scholarly study of the provenance of
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The decision as to who was who was briefly accomplished. Nigee is
tallest so he got George, ROBBIE's Croydon-ness gave him Muggeridge,
so that left me with the suicidal Magyar rapist who wrote about
Jungian synchronicity.
The observation about 'Buttocks' as Sonia's nickname was just a
citation from Kingsley Amis, himself citing someone else, and I abjure
responsibility.
The bouzouki player in the Elysee began with *Never on Sunday*. I
thought of Selene, because Melina Mercouri became *the* campaigner on
the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles. Selene, we didn't need to go easy on
the ouzo because the triple gin-and-tonics and the house red were
enough already.
The maitre d' was almost certainly one of the Karageorgis brothers. He
also looked just like a Cheeryble. His English was a bit shaky, but he
pointed out the adjacent table as Graham Greene's Stammtisch, and we
knew that *our* table must have been George's own.
The other Orwell party were introduced to us by a hairy hacker. It was
hard to hear him among the exploding plates and detonating dishes, but
we gathered they were a campaigning group on issues of privacy and
freedom of information. When I yelled in the ear of their leader -- a
bloke in a dark T-shirt -- that we had an Orwell Cake and an Orwell
Song, he hugged and kissed me briefly.
The Cake was baked by my wife to her usual high standards -- the
apricot jam was French -- and decorated by my friend John who happened
to be also decorating our back room at the time. I've known him since
I was five, and he remains one of the most erudite, amusing and
talented pepole I've ever met. When he was at school he won a free
cruise through the Greek islands in a national calligraphy contest,
and he's gone on producing subtle and skilful work ever since. You
can see a few of his recent pix at:
<a rel="nofollow" style='text-decoration: none;' href="http://www.numasters.com/artists/gallery/view_artworks.asp?sup_id=67&gall_top_poss=9" target="_blank">http://www.numasters.com/artists/gallery/view_artworks.asp?sup_id=67&g..._top_po</a>
Singing the Song with the Singer was a privilege. We had no piano in
the pub, so we couldn't produce the harmonic shift between tonic and
diminished chords in the opening -- a sequence you also get, as it
happens, in Jelly Roll Morton's *Buddy Bolden's Blues* -- or the final
melancholy plagal sound of the Elgarian coda, but we did our best. You
don't get to sing lines like this in the middle of London every night
of the week:
"..He undertook, to write a book
Filled with pessimism
About Winston's Smith's losing fight
With Oligarchical Collectivism..."
For those who want to recall the song, go here and click on George:
<a rel="nofollow" style='text-decoration: none;' href="http://www.geocities.com/jimmozz/flyingmartini/home.htm" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/jimmozz/flyingmartini/home.htm</a>
The snug of the Wheatsheaf was cosy but they rang the bell several
times and we had to go. As ROBBIE says, the thought of making
Piccadilly a Waugh zone in the autumn is tempting. Finding ways to
"behave disgustingly in the environs of Jermyn Street" is fertile with
possibility. Any ideas?
The 176 bus was in hiding, so I got the 171 back home. Juddering past
lots of the locations in Down and Out, Clergyman's Daughter and the
hop-picking diary, and then silently walking up the night-softened
hills of South London, no longer carrying a cake but clutching a lurid
German paperback, was a good way to end.
[Pernickety/scholarly footnote: It wasn't me and my wife who met just
along the road in Peckham from where ROBBIE's great-uncle was once a
priest, but my parents, during World War 2. My wife and I first met on
Hungerford Bridge, once painted by Pissaro and also the place where
Dorothy has a much nastier time.]
I hope everyone else's George's 100th was as good as ours.
Tom
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