Windmills on My Mind

Exploring Wimbledon Common, it’s hard to miss the windmill. Some things never change. In 1799 an enterprising cove sought permission to build a windmill but he was refused because he didn’t submit plans.

In 1816 a carpenter satisfied the planners and the mill operated until 1864 when the miller’s landlord, a dastardly Lord Spencer, evicted him. Lord Spencer’s view was however much land you have, a little more never hurts. He wanted to enclose the Common and would have succeeded if his bourgeois neighbours hadn’t protested vigorously – so stridently that in 1871 the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Act was passed, thanks be to God. I’d intended to visit the windmill for a post but that will have to wait.

Yesterday I came across a memorial that you easily might miss. It commemorates Raymond Jackson who died in Wimbledon in 1997, aged seventy. He went to the Willesden School of Art. If the name is unfamiliar it’s ‘cos it closed in 1959. He was a judo black belt but if you are my age you may remember him as the cartoonist in The Evening Standard, JAK. His work still hangs on many a lavatory wall and, on my watch, in at least one boardroom. He had a commercial streak, drawing pictures that he could sell.

I’m writing in the garden in a Panama, to stop my helicopter pad getting burnt, with a well-iced G&T, listening to Evensong on BBC Radio 3 on catch-up. Robert and Bertie are out foraging for wild garlic to supplement supper: tuna, cannelloni beans, pepper and garlic salad. Life’s tough under lockdown. If you want escapism watch (again, probably) The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).