You cannot buy a MacDonald’s all-day breakfast in the UK – not yet. There are lots of London cafes that will oblige but let me point you in the direction of the best all-day brekker in the solar system, probably.
I never met Georg Solti. It would be tedious to list all the other famous people I have never met, so I won’t. I will tell you how I didn’t meet Sir Georg and that he insisted his first name be pronounced George.
It’s easy to take something you see every day for granted. I have lived in Barons Court since 1976, continuously since 1984, and have taken the station for granted, but it has many special features making it one of the most distinctive stations on the underground.
Last March in a post titled Wiggers you may remember that the Wigmore Hall was called the Bechstein Hall until it was seized under the 1916, Trading with the Enemy Amendment Act. However, the Steinway Hall that opened in 1875 is flourishing and I went there this week for a lunchtime recital.
For about seven years in the early 1990s I was a Name at Lloyd’s. It conferred privileges and obligations. Among the former, being able to use the Members’ Writing Room to sleep in at lunchtime. A tedious obligation was to write a cheque annually in my first few years to pay my losses.
The brutalist 1960s Economist tower is losing its eponymous tenant, The Economist, and being given an internal make-over. Externally it will look the same as it’s grade II* listed. It was a bold choice fifty years ago and attracted the opprobrium of many denizens of St James’s.
I cannot contain my irritation at the protests about President Trump being invited to come here on a State Visit. Like people who commit crime in multi-storey car parks – it’s wrong on so many levels.
After yesterday’s post about Eton it’s Winchester’s turn. I was at a dinner at my club last week at which entertainment was provided by close-harmony sextet, Cantores Episcopi. Two of them are still at Winchester and the others have left recently; at least three of them are in the picture.
Why leave the comfort of your home to go and see a film that has a storyline you are familiar with? I didn’t see Sully about the ‘plane that crash landed without loss of life on the Hudson River in 2009. I have been to Jackie, although the story is even more familiar.