I have covered several castles and stately homes in the last few weeks, including Glamis, Castle Howard and Scone (pronounced Scoon), where Larry and I chased each other around a maze covered by an overhead drone (not pronounced droon or related to Brigadroon, although the outfits were similar). I have shivered at the punishment area on HMS Victory and been moved to tears by the banality of a nit comb among artefacts dug up from the sea 500 years after the Mary Rose sank. At the Highland Games in Dundee, I discovered how huge is a real Scotsman’s caber, and on the River Tay I was wrapped in the grip of a gorgeous gillie. who showed me his flies. “Mmmm . . . I’m not absolutely sure I got that,” I murmured into his Barbour, “could you possibly show me it again?”
I’ve been dazzled by elderly couples dancing effortlessly at a Scarborough Spa ballroom and plied with rum at 11 o’clock in the morning by ten Tudor-clad brethren in an Elizabethan Guildhall in Warwick. I have driven a Morgan car through the rain-spattered hills of Malvern and been shown how to whittle a hazel switch into a chrysanthemum in the New Forest. I’ve reviewed the troops in a Napoleonic reenactment on the Western Heights and fried up samphire on a frozen beach at Dover. As my three-year-old granddaughter said recently, “Momo, my brain is standing up.”
I also surveyed the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Colville Mews, Notting Hill. This is where I send foreigners in Hyde Park when they ask me for directions to the Princess Diana ceremonial wet patch. It is a hidden treasure and we filmed there a day before some of its six million original wrappers and packages were moved to Lancaster Grove. Honestly, when you arrive at your your own childhood — in grocery — it is a Proust madeleine moment. “Omo!” you yell, “Five Boys bar! Vimto!” And you don’t just see them, you taste them and smell the shop your Mam sent you to, with five bob, to buy them.
Then on to the secret theatre in Alexandra Palace. It is a 2,000-seater — as big as Drury Lane, built for spectacles and hardly ever used, with the best views of London in London from its terrace. The jolie-laide building, that only an architect’s mother could love, built to rival the Crystal Palace in south London, burnt down only a month after its grand opening. My late husband Jack Rosenthal and I watched it smoulder up again in 1980, from our Muswell Hill bedroom window, biting each others’ nails with anxiety.
Our Swiss au pair was courting a fireman from Hornsey fire station and we knew he was in there somewhere. I believe it was a 50-car “shout”, which is about as big as a shout gets in London, and Ruth’s fireman got out just before the roof of the great hall fell in. From his story and others Jack created the play, London’s Burning, which turned into a series which turned around the public perception that a fireman’s work is just playing poker and pole-sliding. “Everything is copy,” wrote the late screenwriter Nora Ephron.
Off to St Ives now for Barbara Hepworth’s garden and a tiny, well-preserved 19th-century Jewish cemetery, then to Crosby beach to fondle scores of life-sized Anthony Gormleys, and Swan Upping with the Queen’s Marker on the glorious Thames.Continuous joy, continuing my education and making it look as if I’d had one.
I’ve been dazzled by elderly couples dancing effortlessly at a Scarborough Spa ballroom and plied with rum at 11 o’clock in the morning by ten Tudor-clad brethren in an Elizabethan Guildhall in Warwick. I have driven a Morgan car through the rain-spattered hills of Malvern and been shown how to whittle a hazel switch into a chrysanthemum in the New Forest. I’ve reviewed the troops in a Napoleonic reenactment on the Western Heights and fried up samphire on a frozen beach at Dover. As my three-year-old granddaughter said recently, “Momo, my brain is standing up.”
I also surveyed the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Colville Mews, Notting Hill. This is where I send foreigners in Hyde Park when they ask me for directions to the Princess Diana ceremonial wet patch. It is a hidden treasure and we filmed there a day before some of its six million original wrappers and packages were moved to Lancaster Grove. Honestly, when you arrive at your your own childhood — in grocery — it is a Proust madeleine moment. “Omo!” you yell, “Five Boys bar! Vimto!” And you don’t just see them, you taste them and smell the shop your Mam sent you to, with five bob, to buy them.
Then on to the secret theatre in Alexandra Palace. It is a 2,000-seater — as big as Drury Lane, built for spectacles and hardly ever used, with the best views of London in London from its terrace. The jolie-laide building, that only an architect’s mother could love, built to rival the Crystal Palace in south London, burnt down only a month after its grand opening. My late husband Jack Rosenthal and I watched it smoulder up again in 1980, from our Muswell Hill bedroom window, biting each others’ nails with anxiety.
Our Swiss au pair was courting a fireman from Hornsey fire station and we knew he was in there somewhere. I believe it was a 50-car “shout”, which is about as big as a shout gets in London, and Ruth’s fireman got out just before the roof of the great hall fell in. From his story and others Jack created the play, London’s Burning, which turned into a series which turned around the public perception that a fireman’s work is just playing poker and pole-sliding. “Everything is copy,” wrote the late screenwriter Nora Ephron.
Off to St Ives now for Barbara Hepworth’s garden and a tiny, well-preserved 19th-century Jewish cemetery, then to Crosby beach to fondle scores of life-sized Anthony Gormleys, and Swan Upping with the Queen’s Marker on the glorious Thames.Continuous joy, continuing my education and making it look as if I’d had one.
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