Blue door blues
After delivering our three year-old to her ballet class with the excellent Mark Elie last Saturday, my wife overheard some Americans on Portobello Road bemoaning the fact that they couldn’t find the blue door.

They were thinking of the blue door behind which William Thacker lives in the film Notting Hill. Thacker, of course, is played by Divine Brown’s great friend, Hugh Grant. The house he was fictionally living in actually belonged to the film’s writer, Richard Curtis, who promptly sold it for £1.3 million.

She (my wife, not Ms Brown) took pity and explained to the Americans that although the door was no longer blue, it was just opposite the Castle pub on Lancaster Road – formerly the Warwick Castle. Don’t get me started again on what they’ve done to our Portobello Road boozers.

Before long she had a small crowd of Americans gathered round her and she moved on to describe other locations used by the soppy film. There’s a clear business opportunity – “A guided tour to the Notting Hill movie locations” which I freely offer to all my readers since I can’t even be bothered to think about doing it.

I suppose complaining is churlish since no doubt the movie increased tourism and brought dollars into the area. And, unlike apparently most of the people who live in this great nation of ours, I don’t hate the Americans.

In fact, I like them. Perhaps this is because I lived in Texas for a while and then in New York. I find that living in a place tends to make it difficult to hate the natives.

Another example of this is that 25 years after moving from Scotland to London, I don’t hate the English. I even support the English cricket team, though I do enjoy watching the English rugby team getting a good spanking.

A far cry indeed from 1966, when my family and I sat in front of our black and white televisual device during the World Cup final roaring ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ for 90 minutes. It would be hard to exaggerate the depths of our disappointment when it was all over.

But I am astonished that anyone would come all the way from the USA, braving terrorism and bad dentistry, to find that the thing they most wanted to do was see for themselves a blue door that appeared in a truly shit film that is now seven years old.

Notting Hill is always billed as a feel-good movie. As my mother-in-law used to say, I’d have felt good if the film had been better.