I struggled at first with Dance to the Music of Time. It is otiose to allude to Powell’s circumlocutory style making Henry James’s prolix, copia verborum seem exiguous. However, I persisted and now I am hooked.
Ten Trinity Square was built around the time of WWI as the headquarters of the recently established (1908) Port of London Authority (PLA). Today it is a luxury hotel and I thought that London now is insignificant as a port but, as so often, I am wrong.
What went up Judy’s Passage? Lupton’s Tower of course. My first House (JDRMcC) was at one end so I went up Judy’s Passage a lot. These days I go through Milkmaid’s Passage. It links The Green Park with St James’s Place and is a good route to my club.
I have been given a bottle of port by a generous friend who found himself unable to walk past Berry Bros & Rudd without making a purchase. It is a twenty-year-old tawny labelled William Pickering – not a port house with which I am familiar.
Have you noticed this structure just off the King’s Road at the end of Dovehouse Street? It is a flight of stairs leading nowhere used to train firemen to deal with fires in blocks of flats. There are more beautiful buildings in Chelsea, two of which have a military heritage.
I am sure I am not alone in deploring Craig Brown’s vulgar “biography” of Princess Margaret. It is a scurrilous hotch-potch of unreliable, disloyal and deeply offensive gossip garnered from a muck heap of diaries and newspaper articles.