In search of things past
My late mother used to have a saying that if you are too nostalgic about the past you mortgage your future. I’ve seen in life that one of the characteristics of a positive person is that he/she deletes the past and lives for the moment or the future. Thus it was then with a certain apprehension that having time to kill I revisited St Johns Wood where I lived from 1964 to 1978 and and 1983 to 2009. I went to the High Street for a salt beef sandwich at the restaurant and deli Harry Morgan. The widow of the original Harry Morgan, a dyed blonde elderly woman with fatty, floppy arms, took the business over from her late husband and it became an institution for the quality of its salt beef and a loyal clientele. It’s now a franchise, the salt beef was too dry and meagre in portion though the chicken dumpling soup known as Kreplach was delicious. With two diet cokes the bill was an expensive £30. None of the shops I remembered so fondly was there : gone was Peereira the newsagent, Gilbert’s – which my brother classified as a shop Jewish grandmothers took their grandchildren to as there was always something to please a youngster – and Panzers, best for smoked salmon, was there but not the same. The Barclays at the corner,where the manager spent most of the summer at Lords and was known as the cricketing banker, was there but gone are the days of the manager who presided over the bank as his fiefdom with personality and common sense.
My parents bought their St Johns Wood townhouse for £22,000 in 1964. It stretched my dad as up till then he rented so he was 41 when he bought his first home. Nowadays that might be the norm but then you could get on the ladder more readily. In the window of an estate agents I saw a house in the same close on the market for £6.9m.
My meeting was at Lords. You always meet someone you know and ahead of me I recognised the shuffling gait of a great cricket loving pal, a property silk with whom I passed a few moments in conversation. In the Pavilion I bumped into the self-same manager now in his eighties and was thrilled to see him.
As happens with meetings, once concluded we chatted on for some time. I had to catch a train from Victoria to the south coast but had to wait for the 4-47 which was 10 minutes late. It only had 8 carriages and there was an unholy stampede so there was no place for me. I took the 5-05 and listened to the horror stories of commuters who have to endure the worst service on the Rail Network. Next week there is a strike from Monday to Friday. They should make the rail minister , chief executive of the franchise holder Govia and leader of Unite travel from 5 pm after a day’s work and make them endure the journey which was 30 minutes late because of signal failure. Some passengers therefore stood for 90 minutes. I expect the Minister, the chief executive and leader of Unite would have their own driver.
