An unusual musical collaboration, well worth a listen if you happen to be a fan of prog rock and/or jazz violin…

French fiddler Stéphane Grappelli featured in my Unusual Jazz Instruments post the other week, and it has been brought to my attention that a tape of him jamming with Pink Floyd during their recording sessions for the 1975 record Wish You Were Here was recently unearthed.

The tape, previously presumed wiped, was included on yet another money-spinning, horse-flogging EMI re-release of the prog-rock classic last year. Apparently Grappelli was recording with Yehudi Menuhin in studio two at Abbey Road while the Floyd were in studio three. Both maestros were invited to play on the track but Menuhin didn’t like improvising and chickened out.

Grappelli’s solo comes in about halfway through. Listening to it, I reckon the violin gives the track a lovely rural feel, a bit like much of Bob Dylan’s Desire album.

This week, the true story of how Rita got a visa to enter the United States of America…

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

These famous lines from “The New Colossus” by Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus are engraved on the Statue of Liberty whose open arms have welcomed immigrants for generations. But Lady Liberty is not in quite such a welcoming mood lately. In this age of economic anxiety immigration is a topic ripe for demagoguery, and there is no shortage of demagogues ready and willing to take up the challenge.

According to some politicians and pundits the borders of the United States are so easily penetrated by illegal immigrants of all stripes, drug dealers, farm laborers, terrorists, pregnant women, and other assorted “wretched refuse,” that something drastic must be done. Maybe an electrified fence, a Berlin-style wall, armed posses, national identity cards, nuclear deterrents! No measure is too extreme to secure the homeland. I’m not so alarmed, because in my experience it is actually quite difficult to get into the United States. I didn’t have to cross an inhospitable desert under the guns of vigilantes, or ford a raging river, or stow-away in a shipping container, but the U. S. Department of State did almost succeed in keeping me out. Unbelievable as it may seem, back in 1970 I was perceived as some sort of threat to the security of the United States.

At the time I was a 22-year-old recent university graduate planning to visit my American boyfriend. Several of my friends were going to live in Canada, so I also applied for Canadian immigration papers. If things didn’t work out with the boyfriend I would join my friends in Vancouver. The first clue that there might be trouble with this plan came when a friend advised me to get the Canadian papers first, before applying for an American Visitor’s Visa. According to him, officials at the American Embassy in London suspected that young visitors really intended to stay in the country. Declaring my Canadian immigration papers on the Visitor’s Visa application would be evidence that I had other plans. I took his advice and proceeded accordingly. So I was totally shocked and in tears when my Visitor’s Visa application was returned stamped “Denied.” What possible objection could they have to my visiting their country? I had visited the previous summer and left before my visa expired, violating no laws as far as I knew. I was a young woman in love (foolishly as it turned out), now separated from my boyfriend by a heartless bureaucracy.

The hero of this story is my father, for it was he who came to the rescue in an example of selfless parental love that I didn’t fully appreciate till years later. He took my application papers and traveled up to London to confront officials at the American Embassy in person. He was gone all day. When my father took on a cause he could be very determined and tenacious. As he described it when he finally returned home to an anxiously waiting daughter, the first answer he got was a brusque “no” without explanation. But he wore down the first layers of officialdom, insisting on taking his case higher and higher up the chain of command. “Why don’t you want English people to see America? Aren’t you proud of your country?” he challenged them. Then the reasoning behind the mysterious denial emerged. It wasn’t that English people in general weren’t welcome, the State Department factotum explained. It was young university-educated people specifically. They go over and join all these anti-war demonstrations and stir up trouble on campuses, he told my father. “We don’t want these young radicals influencing American youth” was a direct quote. I would hardly describe my young self as a wild-eyed radical, just an average young English woman with a naïve faith in socialism and, of course, opposed to the war in Vietnam. But the American officials knew absolutely nothing about me. Apparently they were so spooked by the anti-war demonstrations in Grosvenor Square outside the Embassy that they attempted to exclude an entire generation from their country.

I’ll never know what exactly my father said to change their minds. Perhaps he painted a picture of me as a Young Conservative warmonger; perhaps he just wore them down by refusing to give up. All I know is he returned home with my Visitor’s Visa and two weeks later I left England for the New World.

When my Visa was due to expire I did just what the Embassy officials had feared. I stayed in the country. But I did it by legal means. Reader, I married him.

Rita Byrne Tull is an ex-pat librarian who lives in Maryland.

In this week’s bulletin, Toby Ferris explores Norbiton’s sympathy with non-existent but thinkable fauna…

When Hanno the papal elephant died in 1516, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este tried to obtain the bones for his collection of naturalia.

He failed. The animal was interred in the Belvedere under a memorial fresco painted by Raphael and with an epitaph written by Pope Leo X himself, who had been present at his death.

Elephants were marvels – Hanno was particularly noted for his pale, almost white colour – but they were not particularly rare. Unlike the giraffe. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, strange beasts were the currency of princes, but giraffes were notoriously difficult to get hold of. Lorenzo the Magnificent, however, obtained one, fruit of a futile diplomatic manoeuvre on the part of the Mameluks to secure Florentine aid against the Ottomans. From contemporary accounts it seems the giraffe was at liberty to wander the streets, and it appeared to enjoy the adulation of the crowds it drew.

What is odd about these scenes – the crowds mobbing the giraffe in Florence, the Pope watching his white elephant die – is that we can easily visualise the animal in each case, but not the human protagonists. An elephant is an elephant, more or less, and a giraffe is a giraffe: there is little scope for change in five hundred years or so. The streets of Florence in the fifteenth century are to us almost unimaginable, but a giraffe ambling around them is, unexpectedly, in accurate focus, almost as though it were an emissary from our own time. Which is as much as to say, I suppose, that in the great welter of creation we stand closer to the giraffe than we do to quattrocento Florence.

But perhaps, after all, that is not quite true either. A giraffe or an elephant in the Renaissance was, culturally, many things – semioticians, those fabled beasts of our own day, could no doubt make much of them as empty signifiers to which a variety of meanings could be appended – and cultures have histories, they are apt to mutate. Thus in the fifteenth century the giraffe, vaguely associated in the bestiaries with the camelopardolis, a beast half-camel, half-leopard, acted as a bridge to the uncategorised totality of a vast but finite and comprehensible cosmos, in a way they no longer can. Giraffes for us do not have that estranging power. We might get a better sense of what Lorenzo the Magnificent saw when he looked at a giraffe, if we consider not at a giraffe at all, but, say, a Tapir-Nymph.

The Tapir-Nymph or Tapir-Iauare is the yeti of the tapir world. Cryptozoologists explain that it is an aquatic carnivorous tapir which lives in the zaniest corners of the Amazon basin; they speculate that it is a remnant of the mesonychids or hoofed carnivores which flourished between the Palaeocene and the Oligocene. It hunts alone or in small groups, beats its long cow-like ears on the water to alert its companions of danger, and can carry off a small caiman.

Needless to say, the beast has not yet been described by science; but then in fairness to cryptids generally we should consider that the gorilla was only described for the first time in 1847, and Baird’s tapir in 1843. We will not be able properly to establish their non-existence until we eliminate the Amazon forests. Even then, perhaps, they will continue to thrive, in the fishy depths of the internet, or of the past.

The fifteenth-century giraffe existed and the twenty-first century Tapir-Nymph probably does not, but in many ways the fifteenth century giraffe stands closer to the Tapir-Nymph as a cultural object of knowledge than it does to the twenty-first century giraffe, the commonplace and disregarded furniture of nurseries. Norbiton does not have a cardinal, nor does it maintain a cabinet of curiosities in which to house the whitened bones of a tapir; but it is sympathetic, in imagination at least, to the impossible Plinian project of a catalogue of the cosmos and its mutable effects, among which it must now number both non-existent but thinkable fauna, and unknowable historical moments.

The Atlas of Norbiton is a weekly bulletin from Norbiton: Ideal City of the Failed Life. Unlike its more comprehensive, detailed and discursive mother site, the Anatomy of Norbiton – the Atlas is intended as a pocket guide to the Failed Life for Failed or Failing Individuals on the move.

‘For the sake of thoroughness he proceeded to electrocute his genitals’… Elberry enters the world of the mad scientist…

So the world never found out how savannah chimps would respond to the sight of a live leopard rolling down a hill towards them in a wire-mesh ball.

This is the kind of thing you find, when you open Electrified Sheep. It is accurately subtitled “atomic pigs, glass-eating scientists, and more bizarre experiments”. Scientists set out to study the world, Boese to study the scientists. There probably are some fairly normal scientists, somewhere, but to date I haven’t met any, nor do any appear in Boese’s book.

It’s a humorous but often sobering account of the lunacies of scientists, lunacies all the more grotesque as the perpetrators imagine themselves to be dispassionately devoted to truth; to be, in some way, above mere humanity and the world. For example, we have Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a typical scientist; having constructed a voltaic pile he began to systematically electrocute himself:

Next he carefully placed the wires on his tongue. The positive pole produced an acidic flavour – after a few moments his tongue felt as if it were bursting out with welts – whereas the negative pole tasted alkaline and produced an empty feeling, as if an enormous hole had formed in the centre of his tongue. Sticking both wires up his nose caused him to sneeze. When the wires were in his ears, he heard a sharp, crackling buzz on the negative pole and a muffled noise, as if his head was full of sand, on the positive pole. Finally, he touched the wires gingerly to his eyeballs. Strange colours swam in his vision. In one eye, shapes bent and warped. He saw blue flashes. Objects shimmered and bowed outward. In the other eye, everything he gazed at became sharper and smaller, veiled in a red haze.

For the sake of thoroughness he proceeded to electrocute his genitals, with consequences too interesting to report on a family website.

At first glance, Electrified Sheep seems a scurrilous collection of silly and horrible experiments, by silly and horrible people. It goes somewhat deeper, however: there is something grotesque and human about men like Ritter, and Boese manages to capture something of this “human, all too human” lunacy. There is a curious incongruence between the ideals of knowledge and discovery, and the actual grubbiness, cruelty, and mania of scientists; so, for example, we learn that in the public relations battle between AC and DC electricity, Eddison hired one Harold Pitney Brown, to torture animals with electricity, a common theme in this book.

When not torturing and killing animals, scientists also like to play with weapons of mass destruction (but then, who doesn’t?). On 1 July 1946 an atomic bomb was dropped on Bikini. Presumably unwanted ships were stationed close to the blasts, as targets. Not wishing to miss out, scientists placed psychoneurotic goats on one of the ships. The fortunate goats were remotely filmed, to see how neurotic animals would react to an atomic explosion; the film was viewed, and in the offical report of Operation Crossroads:

‘Goats are imperturbable animals…The pictures give a clear view of the goat, and show him munching his hay without interruption as the shock wave struck and debris flew all about.’

Nuking an uninhabited island (uninhabited because the habitants were forcibly evicted) is all very well but not a sufficiently satisfying demonstration of power. Boese records:

By the late 1950s, the United States and Soviet Union, in their desperate bid to outdo each other, had dropped nuclear bombs on all kinds of things. They had levelled fake cities, Pacific islands, naval fleets, and quite a few desert landscapes. As a result, the public had grown complacent, accustomed to a steady stream of press releases announcing new nuclear tests. The generals and military planners were beginning to wonder, ‘Is there anything else we can bomb?’ Or rather, ‘Is there anything we can bomb that will still get people’s attention?’ The answer appeared above them at night, hovering in the sky like a giant target. It seemed so obvious. Nuke the moon!

This isn’t a joke. Luckily:

[...] the Soviets, like the Americans, ultimately backed down from the idea of nuking the moon. Their main concern was that the rocket might fail fully to lift the bomb out of earth’s orbit – rockets weren’t exactly reliable technology. Then they’d have a fully armed nuclear bomb slowly spiralling back down to a random spot on earth, which might cause awkward political issues. The Soviets also concluded that, even if their bomb did make it to the moon, the explosion simply wouldn’t be impressive enough. People on earth, if they were looking at exactly the right moment, would see a small bright flash, and then nothing. It hardly seemed worth the effort.

This is the kind of book Dr Johnson might have enjoyed, as demonstrating the insuperable humanity of human beings. For all the achievements of the human intellect, human beings remain, on the whole, witless and irresponsible. Giving a nuclear weapon to a human being is like giving a loaded pistol to a small child. No one, however, gave nuclear weapons to human beings; we invented them; but we failed to become more than human: we simply became heavily armed. And so the interest of Boese’s book, the disparity between the great technical achievements of science, and the appalling folly and pettiness of human beings. It would be a fantastically grim book but for Boese’s style, his penchant for the farcical – and, being as it is a book about human beings, it abounds in inadvertent comedy. And so:

But maybe, somewhere on a farm in China, a giant, cosmic-ray-enhanced pig is rolling happily in the mud.

A pleasing thought.

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To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, we’re serialising The Pickwick Papers…

Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we’re exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser.

Chapters 9 and 10 can be heard below. You can catch up on previous chapters here. Tune in next week for more…

Chapter 9: The supper was ready laid…

Chapter 10: How much are they ahead?

Naxos Audiobooks – The Complete Dickens

For Charles Dickens’ 200^th birthday, Naxos Audiobooks are completing their unabridged catalogue of all 16 of his major novels, with Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and The Mystery of Edwin Drood released by May next year. See their website for more information.

Naxos AudioBooks are one of the leading independent audiobook labels, specialising in the classics. You can see the full range at www.naxosaudiobooks.com and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

You can buy the The Pickwick Papers abridged audiobook – currently being serialised by The Dabbler Book Club – here.

Gaw ponders the attractions of the Big Event.

Everyone knows that we philistine Brits only queue overnight for things like the Next Boxing Day sale, Centre Court Wimbledon tickets or squatting rights to a pavement stone with a view of the latest royal matching or despatching. So what’s all this about people – of all ages too – queuing in the wintery cold through the wee hours to see Leonardo’s court paintings at the National Gallery? Or to see Jerusalem, a rather intellectual and challenging play that began life at the arty Royal Court?

We could argue fruitlessly about whether this sort of thing dispels accusations of dumbing down – it’s a big subject with a mass of conflicting and slippery evidence. However, I think we’re on surer ground when we see it as a sign that we are all of us – and regardless of our brow height – living through the Age of the Big Event. Our cultural landscape is infested by blockbuster art shows (Hockney’s is the latest, with Lucian Freud’s building), arts festivals (I note that ‘Hay’ is now an international lit-fest brand), rock jamborees (a glut of Glasto-lites marks just about every summer weekend). The international pop concert circuit has never been more profitable. Stand-up sells out arenas. Football thrives in obscene fashion despite the downturn. Then this summer we’ll witness – perhaps even in person if you’ve beaten the most amazing odds to nab a ticket – the crowning spectacle of our Age of the Big Event, the London Limpicks.

This was all quite unexpected. Back in the ’90s it was thought we might be witnessing the death of Live. The late Gilbert Adair, perhaps one of the cleverest cultural critics of the last couple of decades, thought so:

…the ubiquity of technological reproduction in general, and of television, video and compact discs in particular, means that ‘liveness’ is no longer perceived as a necessary condition for any of the performing arts, no longer perceived as a cultural value at all… [T]he live is dying.

So what went right? There’s no doubt that the entertainment industry needed to put its marketing money behind a product that couldn’t be downloaded, pirated, copied or otherwise consumed for nothing. And whilst bytes are difficult to keep tabs on, atoms, in the form of paying customers, can very reliably be counted in and counted out, whilst being required to part with upwards of £50 a go.

I do, though, think there’s more to it than this. Humans are perverse creatures who habitually confound expert prognostications, of course. But that’s not to say we’re unbalanced; in fact, quite the contrary. I think the more our relationships are virtual – much like the one between you and me right now – the more value we put on the odd bit of physical engagement. It becomes a refreshing contrast to our day-to-day disembodiment. Less innocently being there also happens to serve up a pleasing portion of conspicuous consumption. And is there a more conspicuous place to brag about where we’ve been and what we’ve seen than the online world? What would fuel our blogging, Facebookery and Twittering if we weren’t able to show off about the latest thing we’ve been to see? And which you, poor thing, haven’t, but really ought to… Ironic, that.

Incidentally, as I was making this argument a certain logic was making itself felt. Is our very own Dabblerfest™ only a matter of time?

This week Mahlerman is contemplating the peace of the grave…

Over 500 years ago in Flanders, or possibly France, Johannes Ockeghem notated the earliest extant Requiem Mass that contained two melodic threads woven together to make a satisfying, formalized whole – and polyphony had arrived in liturgical music. For hundreds of years before that Plainsong and Gregorian Chant, both monophonic forms, had served Western Christianity when the dead begged recognition. The floodgates were then opened and the last half-millenium has seen the pious Requiem morph into countless forms, often having more to do with the living than the dead. Not many composers since the Renaissance have been able to avoid the form, and few have tried – but even the greatest have expanded the original message to suit their own purposes. The German Requiem of Johannes Brahms really deals with romantic heroism; the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten which we heard a few weeks ago is, with the words of Wilfred Owen, a passionate anti-war treatise from a noted conscientious objector; Mozart’s unfinished masterpiece reveals his anger at the guttering of his candle; and Verdi’s dynamic near-opera seems a long way removed from the graveside.

The intense passion that burns through the music of ‘The Spanish Palestrina’  Tomas Luis de Victoria sets him apart from that master, and from the other outstanding polyphonist of the 16th Century Roland de Lassus. The Requiem Mass, written for the funeral of his patron Maria of Austria in 1603, is without question his supreme masterpiece. Here, the mesmerizing beauty of the Agnus Dei sung by the Tallis Scholars directed by Peter Phillips.

Difficult to think about perhaps this country’s greatest composer Henry Purcell without profound regret. Regret at his early death at 36; but particularly a regret that the strictures placed upon him by the demands of church, court and theatre were unsuited to his unique genius. In a way, he would have been better off working abroad, where fully-composed opera and incidental music, was properly appreciated. Yes, The Fairy Queen and King Arthur contain wonderful music; but are they any more than quasi-operas, with an unfinished feel to them? Purcell died in the same year as Queen Mary, 1695. Here, the magnificent Funeral Sentences, starting with the solemn March, leading to Man that is Born of a Woman, In the Midst of Life, and the final Canzona. Not a Requiem in name or form, but music of surpassing beauty.

Skip forward 140 years and across the channel in France Hector Berlioz was pumping-up the orchestra to a previously unimagined size in delivering his Grande Messe des Morts – in fact he specified that the number of performers should only be limited by the size of the hall. Nearly everything was tripled or quadrupled, timpani required 10 players, four brass bands should be situated at the four points of the compass, off-stage – and the hundreds of singers should be located ‘throughout the space’. Having a care for your speakers, here is one of the few contemplative moments in the score, the relatively serene Hostias, scored for just 8 Trombones, 3 Flutes, Strings, and Male Voices.

Staying in France we find most people’s idea of consolation in the Opus 48 of Gabriel Faure, composed when he was organist at the Madeleine Church in Paris in 1887. The enduring impression in this marvellous work is of a stainless beauty and truth – and in the section here, In Paradisum, a very rare serenity. Strictly speaking this section, along with Pie Jesu and Libera me, renders this work non-liturgical. Nevertheless it was performed at the composer’s own funeral, and I shall be leaving instruction with my children to follow this example as my body is carried through the streets of Peckham by a plumed black horse.

Finally, it feels much like the soundworld of Victoria five centuries ago as we listen to the opening Requiem Aeternam from the Russo-German Alfred Schnittke. I would urge all dabblers to acquaint themselves with the 14 sections of this wonderful work, written in the shadow of his mother’s death, in 1974. No sign of his well known ‘polystylism’ here, although the score calls for an electric guitar – but it is worth remembering that liturgical music was strictly banned in Brezhnev-era Russia but, somehow, this masterwork emerged into the light.

On the second day of London Fashion Week, here’s an exclusive insight into the mythically glamorous world of the ready to wear fashion show:

A  How to get a ticket and what to expect

Even if you’ve previously been to a designer’s show, you’ll generally still have to re-apply each season – and separately for every show you wish to attend. If you’re duly granted a ticket, you should expect to queue outside for at least half an hour to an hour before being allowed to enter the fashion show venue. In London this equates to standing either in icy winds, pelting rain or blistering sunshine. Then you’ll be subjected to the inevitable security guard once over – you may as well be a mad axe murderer.

Next comes the fight for a seat. If your ticket isn’t numbered, your seat is likely to be occupied by a fashion student by the time you arrive. Having to stand behind the seated rows is the ultimate ignominy. And, once in your allocated place, you may be sitting or standing around for quite some time. Shows on the LFW ‘schedule’ usually run much later than off-schedule shows.  Expect them to start at least half an hour late (up to two hours late isn’t unheard of…).

If you’re not c’leb enough to have been loaned a dress by the designer and you’re worried about what to wear, choose black – just in case you accidentally end up in the front row, or get photographed by a teenage fashion blogger. It’s best to keep a straight face throughout the show. Show absolutely no expression of emotion, or any indication of an opinion about what is on the catwalk. Dark glasses a la Anna Wintour are a useful accessory.

After the show, be ready to race to catch the LFW bus, or hail a taxi as soon as the show finishes – especially if you need to trek to the other side of London through horrendous traffic (and roadworks) to get to the next show.

B  Other considerations

The funding, effort and talent that goes into creating the shows and designs is enormous, but you may find that the magic of a five minute production is about as memorable as an orgasm. Never mind, as the shows can be viewed on the internet almost immediately after the event (without the bother of waiting around, or someone’s head obscuring your view). These days anyone really important – eg A list celebrities and large corporate customers, will probably already have had a sneak preview of the collections they’re interested in. And the likes of Sam Cam, P Middy and Sir Philip Green will be VIP’d in at the last minute, avoiding the queues altogether. It’s also worth noting that, unless you happen to be an A list celebrity or an influential journalist, no one actually cares whether you are there or not. If you’re a buyer, you can see the clothes and accessories modelled and actually get to touch them at showrooms and the LFW exhibition, so it’s unnecessary to queue for hours.at the shows. Many independent boutique owners and private buyers with not inconsiderable spending power (the lowest in the fashion-food chain) are already wise to this.

Note that front row goodie bags are better than second row. Don’t expect to get a goodie bag in the third row, or if you are standing. In any case, goodie bags and press packs are often pilfered by students if you don’t take your seat promptly. Free drinks and nibbles are few and far between – so grab them quickly if they’re on offer. And don’t expect to be invited back stage, or to the after party, unless you are a front row sort of person.

C  Who you’ll be sitting next to in the front row

1)    Reality TV stars and aspiring models – think TOWIE
2)    Daughters and (occasionally) sons of celebrity rock stars/actors etc
3)    Old school fashion journalists like Suzy Menkes and Colin McDowell (a dying breed)
4)    Teenage fashion bloggers (Tavi et al)
5)    Fashion students
6)    Department store/designer website and Far Eastern buyers
7)    BFC (British Fashion Council) bigwigs and event sponsors
8)    Friends and family of the designer
9)    Those helping out at the event (hairdressers, PRs, fashion students and friends)
10)  Anyone who’s pushy/precious//Italian-looking enough.

Unsurprisingly, private salon events are now considered more exclusive and desirable to attend than the shows…

Today we’re pleased to welcome Luke Honey to the Dabbler. You can find Luke writing about food, drink and the finer things in life over at his blog The Greasy Spoon. We start by revisiting a west london institution redolent of the swinging sixties…

Hands up who remembers The Gasworks?  Twenty odd years ago, I started my glamorous career in the so-called Art World – as a porter at a well-known auctioneers to be found in the grotty fag-end of The King’s Road, London; humping antique brown furniture from lorry to saleroom, and stacking shabby Victorian paintings against the brick walls of the warehouse. A favourite after-work refuge was The Gasworks restaurant (a last gasp of the myth that was Swinging London), in that no man’s land between Chelsea and Fulham- a former haunt of Princess Margaret, the Rolling Stones and, if the internet is to be believed, Noel Gallagher.

Where on earth do I begin?  This was a London institution, where eccentricity became a creed. Outside, it looked a bit like a private house, with its green painted stucco, latticed windows of stained glass, garish window boxes, and niches filled with ponderous busts and Neo-Classical statues. The proprietors were- how can I put this politely?- different. Shells (Cheryl?) of Wagnerian proportion, fag in mouth and forthright opinion, ruled over her kitchen, offering a choice of rack of lamb (some lover-ly lamb, dearie?) or duck ‘all orange’.  Jacks (her husband) was a thin, dapper man with a trimmed grey beard and silk stockings. Rumour had it that he had previously held some sort of vague career in the antiques business. He liked to join you for an after dinner cigar- this had more than a whiff of Reggie and Ronnie about it.

The dining room was reminiscent of an Edward Gorey illustration or a Pinewood set from that early 70′s meisterwerk, “The Legend of Hell House”.  Here was the perfect place to lie on a chaise longue, sip a gin and tonic and admire the Victorian bric-a brac: pornographic chess sets, oil paintings of dubious antiquity and provenance, heavy gilt frames, doubtful portraits in the manner of Greuze, and wall-mounted taxidermy; all set off by a long, polished mahogany dining table, high-back ‘Jacobethan’ chairs and a massive chandelier.

Choice was not a word in The Gasworks’ vocabulary: champignons en croute (a nice bit of tinned mushroom poised daintily on a slice of toasted Sunblest) or avocado pear; rack (‘racked’ being the operative word) of lamb or assassinated duck; some sort of gateaux horror topped with UHT cream from a spray-on aerosol. Indeed, The Gasworks seemed to be almost obsessed with the trend setting avocado: their seemingly endless supply was stacked up high in the corridor which led to the bogs, which, in turn were lined to the ceiling with amusing nineteenth century erotica.

I held my 30th birthday party there  (I was less interested in food, then), and as that night finished in the wee wee hours (Jack locked the front door at midnight) and the alcohol flowed, my memory is decidedly hazy. Pearl, the long-suffering waiter, rather sweetly made me a little chocolate cake with the word ‘Love’ piped on the top in very shaky handwriting.

If they approved of you for some reason (as a wannabe auctioneer, I was in ‘the biz’, Guv), everything was just dandy. If they didn’t (and this could change on a daily basis, as when my brother in law had a bit of mutton bone pointed directly at him, and told that he was ‘evil’), you couldn’t even get past the oak studded door. An earnest European couple in immaculate Loden coats, enticed, no doubt, by the cosy Englishness of the bow windowed exterior and the enchanting prospect of avocado vinaigrette, had the door slammed in their faces and were told to ‘get lorst, and don’t even think of comin’ back!’.

But a few months ago I did go back. From the outside, everything looked the same: Jack’s black Rolls-Royce corniche (fitted with darkened glass and vanity numberplates) was still parked opposite, and the house looked immaculate. But most ominously, the menu had been taken down. We threw gravel at the upstairs windows, but the net curtains remained firmly closed, and we didn’t even get a twitch. Sadly, it looks like Jacks and Shells are no longer plying their trade. I do hope they haven’t gone to the great gasworks in the sky, and are enjoying their retirement. That fast changing corner of SW6 won’t be the same without them. Even without the duck.

When he saw the title of a Dabbler post earlier this week, Frank Key found himself whisked back into the past…

They were just three words, but when I read them on Monday, a childhood memory came flooding back in vivid detail. Sandcastle And Robot, wrote Daniel Kalder… sandcastle and robot… sandcastle and robot….

All of a sudden I was six years old. We were on holiday, at the seaside, en famille, sur la plage… there is a reason why I lapsed into French. For I remember, as if it were yesterday, planting a paper flag atop the highest point of my – admittedly cack-handed – sandcastle when, emerging from the sea on to the sand there came a robot. It was huge, whirring and clanking, like a robot in a 1950s B-movie. It was plodding relentlessly towards my sandcastle. And it was a French robot.

I knew it was French because when it came and stamped my sandcastle flat under its thumping magnetic feet, it made a grating metallic noise of unmistakeable Gallic contempt. Small and spindly, I sprang at it and beat my tiny fists against its hard, shiny panels. I bruised my knuckles on a rivet and burst into tears. The robot clanked onwards, towards an ice cream kiosk.

The sun was shining and the waves sloshed against the sand. I sat, weeping and trembling, my morning’s work undone by a big French metal automaton. The joys of my childhood holiday lay in tatters, never to be regained. I had learned a hard lesson.

Curiously, no one else in my family witnessed this tragedy. Neither my papa nor my mama, nor my siblings, nor my aunts and uncles, nor the dozens of cousins there with us that day had any idea what I was babbling about as I wailed my tale of woe. They claimed I must have been daydreaming. Urgently, with a quivering rivet-bruised hand, I pointed towards the ice cream kiosk, over on the promenade near the bandstand and the pavilion… but the French robot had already passed on, clutching a choc ice from the kiosk in its big metal hand, making its implacable progress into the town, and beyond, on to the Downs, to harrow and ravage everything in its path.

The following day my game of crazy golf was disrupted by a giant plodding whirring clanking Belgian robot, but I cannot quite recall how that panned out.