Notting Hill Nonsense is now here

2007-07-29T03:52:00.000-07:00

Notting Hill Nonsense is now

HERE

2007-07-29T03:38:00.000-07:00

How green is my architect? - 29/07/07
You may not have heard of Michaelis Boyd Partners, but I can tell you that they are almost certainly the most fashionable architects in Notting Hill, which makes them the most fashionable architects in the world.

And they are green, greener than the very greenest thing you can think of, or so they say. They ‘did’ David Cameron’s new house in Notting Hill on the Kelfield Estate, including his rooftop windmill. Sadly, due to planning permission problems, it is now cluttering up his garage, no doubt next to some unused exercise machines.

Alex Michaelis and Tim Boyd are the chaps behind this very successful and undoubtedly very lucrative business. Alex lives in an eco-house on a plot (said to have cost him £750,000) just off the corner of Oxford gardens and St Marks Road, in case you fancy going for a gander. As he could only get permission to build to a height of 1.8 metres, all you’ll see is a low wall and the grass roof, which looked comprehensively dead last time I looked. You won’t be able to see the £10,000 water borehole or the swimming pool in the basement.

Though they sell themselves as green architects now, in fact they’ve made their considerable fortunes from taking the stuccoed mansions of the money-drenched southern bit off Notting Hill and gutting their interiors. I mean really gutting, so that all that is left is the shell of the original building, and rebuilding the interior in ultra-chic modernist style. Why you would want to buy a perfectly good Victorian house and then pretend that you’re living in a minimalist palace is completely beyond me.

Typical though, isn’t it. Make your millions out of the unbelievably wasteful destruction of perfectly good houses, then turn green.

Apart from their morbid pessimism, their instinctive authoritarianism and their neurotic misanthropy, I really have nothing against the greens. I just wish they would stop telling me how to live.

When I wrote a piece about the fact that there is nothing, in resource-use terms, to choose between disposable nappies and reusable ones – look here to read the full argument – I attracted as much as one piece of crank mail. It came from the delightful Angie. Here (uncorrected) is her witty and trenchant email.

“Your a complete fuckwit!
the UK environment agency has withdrawn their report on disposable nappies in order to do a proper report that takes in entire lifecycle analysis, you need to get your facts right.
you sound like a right yuppie wanker.... did you remember to get some fake mud to spray on your 4WD???”

Since I had partly based my piece on the report Angie mentions, I did check with the Environment Agency. They replied ‘We stand by the results as being representative of the position in the UK in 2002-3. However, we have agreed… to update the study to the main nappies in use in 2006.’ And now the government has announced it’ll fund no more campaigns to persuade people to change over to real nappies.

On the spray-on mud front though, Angie did have something new to teach me. I was astonished to learn that this product does exist – unless this is one of the best satirical websites I’ve ever seen. I’ll leave it to Angie to comment on whether it would add authenticity to the Fiat Cinquecento my family owns, a car so tiny we could only lower its emissions by replacing the engine with pedals.

And I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether the true purpose of this ingenious product (a snip at £7.95 for a 75 cl bottle) is to hide car number plates from the prying lenses of speed and congestion zone cameras.

I came face to face with the best argument against the greens in 1980, when their baleful movement was just getting off the ground. In the Sudan, I asked a friend if it wasn’t a good idea for his country to be more careful with its environment. At the time, we were sitting in his mother’s house which enjoyed neither running water nor electricity. His answer? ‘You in the West can never stop us from getting what you have.’

PS – If you’d like to give Angie a few pointers on grammar and punctuation, drop her a line at banksiabunny@yahoo.com

2007-07-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

Notting Hill Killer - 01/07/07
This week, I a killed a fellow Notting Hill mammal, in cold blood, as it looked into my eyes
now read on

Drawing the line - 18/06/07
It has come to my attention that a fellow called Jonathan Cruddas, who’s been in the news recently as he’s standing for deputy leader of the Labour Party, is living in Notting Hill
now read on

Breadheads - 20/05/07
Many Notting Hill locals complain bitterly about the loss of small businesses along Portobello Road, especially when they are replaced by the likes of Starbucks
now read on

Goodbye Malvern, hello Picasso - 29/04/07
An old defunct pub, The Malvern, on the edge of the 1980s estate I live on has been demolished to make way for an apartment block called the Picasso
now read on

David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
Local lad Dave Cameron, Old Etonian and British Conservative Party leader, has been caught out in a tabloid sting to rubbish his green credentials – and I’ve got some advice for him
now read on

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07
Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has given a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-07-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

Notting Hill Killer - 01/07/07
This week, I a killed a fellow Notting Hill mammal, in cold blood, as it looked into my eyes.

I’d been sitting at the kitchen table working on my laptop when I heard a high-pitched scream from the garden, which the kitchen overlooks through sliding glass doors. I went outside but could see nothing, though next door’s cat was acting oddly. Usually it runs a mile when it sees me because I persecute it with a water pistol for shitting in my children’s sandpit. But it seemed reluctant to flee.

I went back to work – when you’re paid by the item for website hotel listings, you have to keep your nose to the grindstone. That instinct that tells you when you’re being watched made me look up. A large rat was peering at me through the glass doors. Grabbing my camera I moved towards it and opened the doors. I could see that the cat had got it; there were two raw-looking flesh wounds on its haunches.

It first hid behind the plastic tank where Lisa, the giant African landsnail lives. Then it scuttled into the gap between the garden shed and the back wall of the house, cornering itself.

I decided I had to kill it. I put a piece of board across the gap where it had entered its dead end. Then I considered how I should execute it. The garden fork? No, I really didn’t fancy having it pronged on my fork. I hit upon the lawn edger, a half-moon shaped piece of steel with something similar to a spade handle and a reasonably sharp edge.

Now the rat was quite still. I looked at it. It looked back at me. I put the lawn edger in position, a foot above its neck, and hesitated.

I’ve killed quite a lot of animals in my life. When I was a kid in the Scottish countryside cruelty was certainly frowned upon but the despatch of an animal was perfectly acceptable.

We used to shoot wood pigeons with .22 air rifles. On Sundays, I would often hunt rabbits with ferrets in the allotments behind my house. We used to chase rabbits across the fields in a minivan, one of us driving, the other blasting at the rabbits with a .22. I don’t remember ever actually hitting one.

Years later, I was on a first trip with a new girlfriend, cycling along the lanes of Norfolk. We came across a pigeon with a broken wing; I said I'd put it out of its misery. Wringing its neck seemed the best option. Unfortunately, its head came off in my hand. Mind you, it was ten years before we divorced.

Though I'm normally a big fan of invertebrates, I kill slugs and snails in my garden on an industrial scale, using poison. I tried letting them be last summer and they ate about 50 percent by volume of all the things I grew.

The most unexpectedly shocking animal death I ever saw was the ritual slaughter of a sheep when I lived in the Sudan. It was the Eid Festival at the end of Ramadan and I was staying at the house of some Sudanese friends.

The elderly fellow who killed sheep came round to attend to the animal that was tethered in their yard. Two men of the household gently held the beast and the old fellow spoke softly to it and then, with an almost chilling tenderness, drew a blade across its throat.

A jet of blood erupted from its half-severed neck, its tongue lolled and its legs slowly folded under it. Much to my surprise, I felt faint and had to sit down. It soon passed; 20 minutes later, I was happily eating barbecued bits of the animal. I’d refused, probably rudely, the favourite delicacy, raw intestines.

I am very sorry to say that when I brought the lawn edger down on the rat’s neck, the blow failed to finish it off immediately. It ran frantically around its trap for 20 seconds then stopped. My second blow brought the whole sorry episode to an end.

2007-06-18T09:56:00.001-07:00

Drawing the line - 18/06/07
It has come to my attention that a fellow called Jonathan Cruddas, who’s been in the news recently as he’s standing for deputy leader of the Labour Party, is living in Notting Hill
now read on

Breadheads - 20/05/07
Many Notting Hill locals complain bitterly about the loss of small businesses along Portobello Road, especially when they are replaced by the likes of Starbucks
now read on

Goodbye Malvern, hello Picasso - 29/04/07
An old defunct pub, The Malvern, on the edge of the 1980s estate I live on has been demolished to make way for an apartment block called the Picasso
now read on

David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
Local lad Dave Cameron, Old Etonian and British Conservative Party leader, has been caught out in a tabloid sting to rubbish his green credentials – and I’ve got some advice for him
now read on

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07
Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has given a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-06-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Drawing the line - 18/06/07
It has come to my attention that a fellow called Jonathan Cruddas, who’s been in the news recently as he’s standing for deputy leader of the Labour Party, is living in Notting Hill. Cruddas, who prefers the more egalitarian Jon, is a member of parliament, not in itself grounds for disqualification from the human race. But strangely, he’s not the representative of the area he lives in.

He is in fact the MP for Dagenham, a constituency that lies some 18 miles to the east of Notting Hill. It’s a very different place to the Hill; in Dagenham, you can buy a three-bedroom house for about £200,000. You won’t find a three bedroom house around these parts for less than £1.5 million.

So why would you happily accept the votes of the people of Dagenham and then swan off and live in Notting Hill? Well, on top of the fact that no sane person would live in Dagenham if they had a choice, it turns out that this man Cruddas has another motive.

He’s picked his current address because it means he can send his children to an elite Catholic secondary school, thereby side-stepping the need for them to go to a school in Dagenham, where the majority of the pupils would be working class.

Despite the fact that Jon has got into parliament with the votes of his working class constituency, he clearly recognises how much superior are the ways of the middle class. This is despite his claim to be a hardy proletarian representing the underdog.

A flavour of the calibre of this man is that he supported the invasion of Iraq, only to recant as soon as he realised this was an unpopular stance. I doubt if he has much taste for criticism either; he signed an open letter to a national newspaper in support of President Chavez of Venezuela shutting down an opposition TV station recently.

By the way, these elite religious schools (Tony Blair sent his kids to another Catholic one; Church of England ones are also popular) are a sure-fire way to make me accelerate from calm and collected to red-faced and screaming in under five seconds. If people want to believe in religion, that’s their business. But these religious schools are 90 per cent funded by the taxpayer, one of whom is me.

As it happens, I have no desire to expose my children to the bigotry and falsehood that these schools are founded on. Yet if I did apply to get them into this so-called state school, the first question I would be asked would be, ‘what are your religious beliefs?’ When I answered, ’I’m an atheist’, my children would be automatically denied entry.

If these schools were independent of the state, I’d have no problem with them. But I very strongly object to financing them out of my pocket. If they excluded my children on almost any grounds other than the fact that I do not share their beliefs, which I consider to be deluded, the exclusion would be discriminatory and illegal.

But back to Jon, who, including expenses, earned £129,816 last year. As well as a his Notting Hill pad, he owns a house in Dagenham, one which his neighbours say he and his family are rarely seen at.

Notting Hill, one of the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods anywhere, has a strong tradition of welcoming people from all over the world, a tradition which I’m extremely proud to be part of. But we should surely draw the line somewhere. So, my message to Cruddas is, ‘why don’t you clear off back to Dagenham?’

2007-05-20T05:06:00.001-07:00

Breadheads - 20/05/07
Many Notting Hill locals complain bitterly about the loss of small businesses along Portobello Road, especially when they are replaced by the likes of Starbucks
now read on

Goodbye Malvern, hello Picasso - 29/04/07
An old defunct pub, The Malvern, on the edge of the 1980s estate I live on has been demolished to make way for an apartment block called the Picasso
now read on

David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
Local lad Dave Cameron, Old Etonian and British Conservative Party leader, has been caught out in a tabloid sting to rubbish his green credentials – and I’ve got some advice for him
now read on

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07
Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has given a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-05-20T05:01:00.000-07:00

Breadheads - 20/05/07
Many Notting Hill locals complain bitterly about the loss of small businesses along Portobello Road, especially when they are replaced by the likes of Starbucks. One example is the excellent and long-established Spanish Deli, P. de la Fuente, which closes next week. I will miss it.

I can accept that businesses come and go. The main reason that businesses disappear is the steeply rising commercial rents on Portobello Road. There’s a local campaign group, Friends of Portobello, which wants to have the street declared a business conservation area to protect small shopkeepers. Currently there is no legal basis for such an entity and, personally, I have strong doubts about insulating local traders from market forces. To me, that looks perilously like the path to stagnation.

So, in the spirit of welcoming new businesses into the area, I dropped into the recently opened Gail's Bakery on Portobello Road to give it a try.

Its stripped wood floors and exposed brick reminded me of a contemporary New York deli. Many new businesses along Portobello have a distinctly American feel, presumably to cater for our growing population of outlandishly wealthy Americans, attracted by the bloody film I suppose.

What Gail’s sells is lots of sandwiches, cakes and bread, at prices so high they make your eyes water and your wallet sob. I bought a croissant with some fancy ham and cheese in it, a piece of cheesecake and a white sourdough loaf. That came to £8.10 ($16).

Sixteen fucking dollars! For that, these had better be the best filled croissant, the most delicious cheesecake and the tastiest bread I’ve ever eaten. But were they?

No they weren’t.

The croissant was too flaky and a bit dry, like one of those ones you buy from the supermarket partly cooked and then finish in the oven at home; the cheesecake was too sweet and a bit soggy. The bread was just mediocre.

Since I am a notorious food snob, as my wife never tires of reminding me, I like a decent loaf of bread and I love an authentic croissant. I can get a delicious loaf of Spanish white bread for 65 pence a couple of hundred metres from my home at the Lisboa Delicatessen. A truly superb croissant from Mr Christian’s on Blenheim Crescent costs £1.20, not cheap, but well worth the money. So, why would I shop at Gail’s? Well, of course, I’m not going to.

But it’s not their over-priced, sub-standard food that annoys me the most. It’s the management consultant style of their miserable business that really gets on my tits. You need to visit their website to get the true flavour of that.

‘Remember when your local high street was full of independents? Today every high street is like stepping onto the set of the Truman show – it all looks the same. These Goliath-chains put small shops out of business [and] force property prices up,’ their website says.

Hang on a minute, Gail’s displaced an independent art gallery whose owner complained bitterly in the local paper about losing his site due to a massive rent rise. And they may not be a large chain yet but they’ve got another shop in Hampstead. If they don’t have ambitious plans for expansion, I’ll eat one of their horrible croissants every day for a year.

And why does a bakery with two branches have a press officer? She’s certainly been busy – Gail’s might not know how to bake a decent loaf of bread but they are expert at securing favourable press coverage; just check the website press section.

Now I’ve nothing against the two guys behind Gail’s, even although it turns out they are both ex-management consultants. But this pretence that they are some sort of tiny but perfectly-formed artisan type business is poodlefakery of the worst kind.

But the best joke is on them. You can sign up on their site to become a Very Important Breadhead, meaning you’ll get annoying marketing emails from them for the rest of your life.

They’re presumably too young to remember, but in the olden days, ’breadhead’ was the ultimate hippy insult, levelled at those who were morbidly obsessed with money.

2007-05-20T04:24:00.000-07:00

2007-04-29T04:52:00.001-07:00

Goodbye Malvern, hello Picasso - 29/04/07
Many Notting Hill locals complain bitterly about the loss of small businesses along Portobello Road, especially when they are replaced by the likes of Starbucks
now read on

Goodbye Malvern, hello Picasso - 29/04/07
An old defunct pub, The Malvern, on the edge of the 1980s estate I live on has been demolished to make way for an apartment block called the Picasso
now read on

David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
Local lad Dave Cameron, Old Etonian and British Conservative Party leader, has been caught out in a tabloid sting to rubbish his green credentials – and I’ve got some advice for him
now read on

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07
Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has given a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-04-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

Goodbye Malvern, hello Picasso - 29/04/07
There’s an old pub on the edge of the 1980s estate I live on, The Malvern; it has not served a drink for perhaps 20 years. Or there was a pub, here's what was left of the three-storey building this morning. It’s been demolished to make way for a new apartment block called The Picasso.

Many of the pubs of Notting Hill have taken a real bashing over the last decade and more. Those that haven’t become offices or flats have been transformed from convivial drinking joints to wretchedly expensive restaurants like E&O. A few, like the Portobello Star and the Duke of Wellington (known locally as Finches) have been smartened up a bit but are still reasonably normal pubs, an increasingly rare amenity in Notting Hill.

Not that all the old pubs were that convivial. I well remember being in the old Blenheim (the one that’s now E&O) when one of the customers started hitting another with a pool cue. The victim of the attack ran out of the pub only to return moments later brandishing a large knife. At that point, I left.

And there was the time in Finches when two fellows decided the time was right for a fight but held off until they had both broken the heavy bar stools over the counter to fashion serviceable weapons to hit each other with. Again, I left abruptly, without even finishing my pint.

The Malvern used to proclaim on the front that it was founded in 1787. If true, it would have been a country inn more or less in the middle of nowhere, since Notting Hill was not built until the second half of the 19th century.

Certainly, the building that existed until last week was Victorian. Its last owner was the splendidly named Riggs O’Hara (unsurprisingly, not his real name). Riggs is from an Irish-American blue collar Bronx background and came to London in the late 50s as part of the cast of ‘Guys and Dolls’ and never quite made it home. Or that's the story I heard.

In any case, he became a successful theatre director and had small parts in a few films, including a classic of its day though now largely forgotten, the Virgin Soldiers.

He bought the pub in 2003, just about the same time as I moved from Ladbroke Grove to the Swinbrook Estate, making us near neighbours for the last few years. I’d known him before when he ran a studio theatre (where he lived) in Hewer Street.

I met him in 1996 when I was involved with the sadly defunct Portobello Festival (though the Portobello Film Festival lives on) and he staged a production of Romeo and Juliet as part of it. I even performed at his theatre once myself, in a poetry slam, but that’s probably best forgotten.

The Post Office Theatre, as it was called, was housed in a former Royal Mail sorting office which he’d bought and converted, so he has some history in the property game.

His latest enterprise will, I guess, fund a comfortable retirement for him and the young child, not his own, he often takes care of. The story behind that is too complicated to go into; suffice to say that Riggs has been pushing a baby buggy around Notting Hill for the last couple of years. And thoroughly enjoying it, though he is past the first flush of youth – which of us isn’t?

But he’s definitely done well out of the Malvern. He paid just over £1 million for it and the total sales value of the 10 apartments is £4 million. Even accounting for the demolition and construction, that should leave a healthy wedge which I for one do not begrudge him.

I’ve heard a few folk moaning about the loss of the last original building on this estate which was once all Victorian houses, though they were slums. Of course, had they not been demolished in the 1970’s, they would all be worth a million quid plus now as people are obsessed with owning Victorian properties round here. I’m glad of the insanity that means modern properties have less value than 19th century ones; otherwise I couldn’t to afford to live here.

And I don’t care that the old pub has gone. It hadn’t served a customer for so long that I say it’s better for the site to have a useful purpose as housing.

And if you’ve got a spare £450,000 ($777,416.63), and you can stand to live in a block with so pretentious a name that is firmly located on a council estate, why not buy one and come live in my neighbourhood?

2007-04-15T04:02:00.001-07:00

David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
Local lad Dave Cameron, Old Etonian and leader of the British Conservative Party, has been caught out in a tabloid sting to rubbish his green credentials – and I’ve got some advice for him
now read on

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07
Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has been seen giving a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-04-15T03:28:00.000-07:00

David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
I’ve had occasion to slag off Dave Cameron before for pretending he doesn’t live in Notting Hill because he thinks it’s too posh for the British electorate. This is rich since he has another slight hurdle to jump in his drive to seem ordinary – he’s an Old Etonian. But my wife bumped into him on Golborne Road yesterday, in a shop far from posh.

Golborne Road, off Portobello Road, its famous cousin, is the shopping drag at the end of my street and it combines a street market with Portuguese, Lebanese and Moroccan cafés and halal butchers. There’s a sprinkling of upmarket shops and a complete lack of Starbucks and McDonalds – not enough footfall.

One of the shops is a peculiar grocery that specialises in boxes of washing powder the size of wardrobes, huge sacks of rice and a variety of domestic and exotically foreign condiments. It’s the kind of place you find in marginal or up-and-coming areas throughout London. And that’s where my wife bumped into him, with both of them pushing prams.

Now the question that springs to my mind is, what on earth makes this man want to be prime minister of Britain? He seems to live a fairly normal, if wealthy, life. Other local sightings have included the public swimming pool (where he was wearing a nicotine patch, no idea if he has succeeded in giving up the habit that Kurt Vonnegut, a life-time smoker, called ‘a fairly sure, fairly honourable form of suicide’), and a tiny, and decidedly not upmarket, Thai restaurant.

Suppose he does become prime minister? His life, and that of his family’s, will be changed forever. Never again will he be able to stroll down Golborne Road with his baby-buggy or go swimming in a public pool without four or five heavily-armed SAS minders. People all over the world, who have never previously heard of him, will desperately want to murder him.

But the fact that I can’t understand what is driving the man to this gruesome fate is probably the reason that he is a politician and I am not.

Even as a mere opposition politician, his life is already being made a misery. A few weeks ago, journalists from the tabloid Sunday Mirror (which supports Tony Blair’s Labour Party) stole his bin bags to check out how green he really was, which you might call fair game since he has made much of his environmental credentials. His new Notting Hill home has a windmill attached to the roof, which cynics have claimed, in the not especially windy Notting Hill area, will struggle to power a hair dryer.

Of course stealing bin bags to get stories is hardly a new idea. As long ago as the late 1960s, one AJ Weberman took to stealing Bob Dylan’s trash in a bid to find unique insights into the great man’s works. Dylan is rumoured to have retaliated by mixing dog shit in with his garbage.

But back to Dave’s rubbish. According to the Sunday Mirror: ‘Environment campaigners say the worst offence is the mass of disposable nappies. The Camerons add to Britain's £67 million annual "nappy mountain" by throwing out dozens of their 13-month-old son's disposables each week. Most are tied up in supermarket carrier bags which do not decompose either. Recycling expert Kay Wagland condemned the Camerons' use of disposables as an "inexcusable waste". She said: "He is contributing to a nappy nightmare when he should be setting an example.”’

Kay Wagland works for the Women’s Environmental Network, a miserable group who waste taxpayers’ and charitable cash on a variety of nonsensical green campaigns, including one that tries to persuade the British public to use cloth nappies. Read the truth about the nappy debate here.

So Dave, my friend, I say pack it all in and then you’ll be able to do what ever you want with your baby’s poo, as I do.

2007-03-25T05:46:00.001-07:00

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07
Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has been seen giving a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item. Astonishingly, I know Sabrina
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants.
As a frequent nappy-changer, it's a subject close to my heart
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-03-25T05:33:00.000-07:00

Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07

Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has been seen giving a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item.

Sabrina is a Notting Hill girl and, astonishingly, I know her, or at least I used to know one of her personas. She's described in many of the papers as a socialite but that was nowhere near the reason for my acquaintance (for that is all it was) with her.

I actually met her because of something jolly useful that she does in our neighbourhood, running YCTV, ‘an educational charity which advances the skills and personal development of young people between the ages of 11 to 25’, as its website says.

That’s a bit of a po-faced way of describing what they do, which is teaching youngsters, many from difficult backgrounds, how to make their own TV shows and steering them into the media industry. And there’s no doubt YCTV has helped lots of local kids.

I used to work for a government-backed urban regeneration organisation that was pumping cash into the deprived bits of Notting Hill, including groups like YCTV, and that’s how I met her, about a dozen years ago.

'Deprived bits of Notting Hill?', I hear you ask disbelievingly. Well, yes. In pockets, Notting Hill, which as recently as 50 years ago hosted some of the worst slums in London, is still immigrant enough, unhealthy enough and unemployed enough to attract government cash targeted at the underprivileged.

Sabrina always struck me as a warm and open type despite her wealth and social class, and far from being a mere socialite, she was actually trying to do something useful. The socialite tag comes from many years ago when she dated Prince Charles and was tipped as a possible candidate for wife to the big-eared, empty-headed one. Talk about a narrow escape.

Now, I've always been a fan of Sir Paul, ever since my mother decorated my bedroom with Beatles wallpaper in 1965; even then Paul was my favourite. So, if its true that he is going out with Sabrina, I for one am delighted that’s he’s found someone who is a card-carrying member of the human race, a stark contrast to his recent past.

I think Sabrina is about as far as you could get from a gruesome, one-legged, self-publicising harridan. Fair enough, if you fall in love and marry someone and they have a horrible accident, you should stick with them. But if I had £800 million in the bank, and counting, birds without all four limbs wouldn’t even get on my long-list, unless I was short of one, which I'm not. Nor would delusional bunny boilers. But we all make mistakes.

So, Paul and Sabrina, I say good luck!

2007-02-21T08:59:00.001-08:00

Notting Hill Nonsense says no to reusable nappies! - 15/03/07
I’ve been writing for another website, Spiked, about why disposable nappies are good and reusable nappies are...pants.As a frequent nappy-changer, it's a subject close to my heart
now read on

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa - 21/02/07
I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679)
now read on

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

2007-02-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

From Notting Hill to Hills, Iowa

I’ve got this marvellous free Google thing with information about traffic to this site and it gives a surprisingly precise location for each visitor. So, a warm welcome to my visitor from Hills, Iowa (pop. 679).

There are some marked differences between Notting Hill and Hills, IA. According to the US Census of 2000, of the 679 people in Hills, 658 were white. In Notting Hill’s Golborne Ward, where I live, of the 8,849 souls there in 2001, 4,957 were white.

In Hills, you can buy a four-bedroom house with two acres for $269,500 (£138,000) including a small winding creek, abundant wildlife, seasonal morel mushrooms and fruit trees. The cheapest four-bedroom house in Notting Hill that I could find is on Portobello Road and is going for £1.85 million ($3.6 million). It comes with a roof terrace just big enough to hang Kylie’s hotpants out to dry.

They have different gun laws in Hills, or the state of Iowa, as well. You need an annually renewable licence for a handgun and nothing at all for a rifle or shotgun. I sometimes think I envy the Americans their liberal gun laws. I like guns.

I was a reasonably good shot as a youth with a Lee Enfield .303 (as used by the British Army in WW2) over 1,000 yards, and I've shot with .22 rifles as well.

I’ve only used a handgun once, at a shooting range in San Antonio, Texas when I was living there some years ago. After a surprisingly short instruction period, I was let loose on the range with a semi-automatic Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol.

At first, the recoil was surprisingly strong but I quickly got used to it and was popping away with the gay abandon of gun nuts the world over. I was rather good at it. By my last blast of five rounds at 100 feet, four of them were in the inner ring and one just outside. It was enough fun to be slightly scary.

But then the story of Mike Pogue weakens my libertarian gun law instincts. He was an artist in San Antonio that I used to hang out with sometimes. I interviewed him once for a paper that went out of business before the piece was published.

Mike was a true San Antonio original, a man who found himself when he realised that being left-handed meant that his brain was wired back-to-front. He a drove a beautiful black ’58 Chevy Impala V8 Sports Coupe fast enough to scare the shit out of me when I was in the passenger seat. A self-styled ‘mean old hippy’, he liked to hang out at titty bars, smoke pot, drink beer and shoot guns. And he was a talented artist.

Then, around summer 1998, his pretty young wife left him and, later, started dating Mark Horner, the principal trombonist with the San Antonio Symphony. Mike’s reaction was to drive round to Mark’s house and shoot him dead on his doorstep with .45-calibre handgun. Then he jumped back into the Impala, parked outside his home and turned the gun on himself.

So, even although handguns are undoubtedly great fun, maybe it’s best if we keep them illegal.

2007-02-09T04:39:00.001-08:00

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740, and yet to be surpassed
now read on

Blue door blues – 22/01/07
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
now read on

Roast parsnips and sweet potatoes with rosemary
This is one of my favourite vegetarian recipes though it’s also good as an accompaniment to a chunk of charred meat. You can substitute, or add, just about any root vegetable you care to
now read on

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice
now read on

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems
now read on

Chicken liver paté
One of my favourites as a starter and chicken livers are cheap – currently 99p for 400 grams at Sainsburys. This recipe is from my late mother-in-law who was a fantastic cook
now read on

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething
now read on

Smoked haddock with courgettes in whole grain mustard sauce
Smoked haddock is cheap and delicious; if you want to be fancy, most supermarkets sell a slightly superior version without food dye, but I don’t guarantee that the extra cost is worth it
now read on

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06
How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?
now read on

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06
What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy
now read on

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06
Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys
now read on

Recipe: Chicken Chorizo
The beauty of this recipe is that you can count on the chorizo to give the dish a rich and intense flavour. If chorizo (Spanish sausage) is unobtainable where you live, my advice is to move
now read on

2007-02-09T04:23:00.000-08:00

Winter Wonderland - 09/02/07
Wednesday, I woke up at 4.30 AM and, for London, there was a good covering of snow, crisp and even, if not deep. When the sun came up, it was still snowing but melting as it fell. It brought to mind the big chill of 1963, the coldest winter since 1740 and yet to be surpassed.

That year, snow lay constantly from Boxing Day until early March. Since I was a kid of seven, (see picture) it was paradise. Endless snowball fights in the playground; when we got bored of chucking snowballs, we started hurling chunks of ice at each other. That could really hurt and even draw blood.

The River Tweed, which runs through Kelso, was frozen enough for skating, curling and exploratory trips to otherwise inaccessible islands. It's the only time that’s happened in my life. Somebody had pushed an enormous garden roller on to the ice to prove it was safe. On January 13th a temperature of 3 Fahrenheit (-16 centigrade) was recorded at Eskdalemuir, Kelso’s closest weather station.

I loved the winters as a child. I had a fairly rudimentary sledge, some planks nailed to solid runners. It was a heavy beast and the snow was so deep that it filled my wellies as I trudged up the hill, dragging the sledge behind.

One boy I was at school with, Forsyth, came from a rich family that owned a department store, R.W. Forsyth’s, on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. He had one of those fancy-dan sledges made with steel and wood that incorporated a steering system. To steer my sledge, you stuck your legs off the back; its only accessory was a piece of string for pulling it.

One day, Forsyth sledged off down the slope ahead of me. Part way down he came off, leaving his sledge in the middle of the run. I crashed into it at full speed, smashing it to bits and then carried on down the slope minus my sledge, which was undamaged. I got the worst winding I’ve ever had and the bruises on my thighs went through an unlikely rainbow of colours for the next fortnight.

I have a memory that my Dad had to pay for Forsyth’s sledge, which just proves there’s no justice in the world, although his family’s store did close down in 1981.

But we don’t know what winter means in the UK. I spent the winter of 1993/94 with my first wife in Brooklyn, a winter that even seasoned New Yorkers conceded was especially harsh. We decided we’d had enough of constant snow and temperatures that, even in the middle of the day, never rose above 20 Fahrenheit (– 6 centigrade) so we booked a flight to Puerto Rico.

Since we were going to the airport door-to-door by taxi, we wore light clothes. As we got into the cab, a blizzard started and the driver got lost in the whiteout. On the last stretch of freeway to JFK, the driver confirmed my suspicion that he had no idea how to drive in the snow by losing control of the car.

We were only travelling at about 15 mph and glided slowly across four lanes of highway to the hard shoulder, coming to a halt by thumping sideways into a transit van that was already stranded there.

Two of the car-door windows had fallen out in the crash so we continued to JFK with wind and snow howling around the back of the cab. We arrived at the airport just in time to hear the announcement that it was closing for the day.

There were no cabs to be seen, so we had to take the subway back to Brooklyn's Park Slope in in our beach clothes, surrounded by people in fur coats looking at us as if we were stark staring bonkers.

2007-01-22T08:22:00.000-08:00

Roast parsnips and sweet potatoes with rosemary.
This is one of my favourite vegetarian recipes though it’s also good as an accompaniment to a chunk of charred meat. You can substitute, or add, just about any root vegetable you care to.

500g parsnips
500g sweet potatoes
300g tomatoes
Four fresh rosemary sprigs
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Peel the root vegetables and cut them into chunky chip shapes.

Put a little olive oil in the bottom of a baking tray or open casserole. Half the tomatoes and place them skin down on the olive oil. Season them and put the sprigs of rosemary on top and dribble some olive oil over them.

Put the vegetables on top, season them and dribble more olive oil over them. Cook in a medium oven for about forty minutes or until the vegetables are done and beginning to brown on top.

Remove from the oven and eat.

2007-01-22T07:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-16T10:56:00.003-08:00

Notting Hill Nonsense Human Being of the Year 2006 – 20/12/06
To be honest, I had no plans to make such an award. But a candidate so deserving has emerged this week that I now feel I have no choice.

Step forward Mr Johnny Ekperigin, managing partner of Julie’s Restaurant, a Notting Hill favourite for the last 30 years frequented by everyone from Princess Margaret to Kate Moss. Obviously, I don’t go there.

Why is Johnny the winner of this prestigious award, which, admittedly, I only made up this morning? Because he was up in front of District Judge Mary Connelly at West London Magistrates Court and was found guilty of three offences under Section 15 (1) (B) of the Food Safety Act 1990.

What did he do? He falsely described normal food as organic and so hit my funny bone in several places at once. First, he took his rich and gullible customers for a ride. Second, he showed that organic food’s one possibly genuine claim to superiority, it’s distinctive taste, is an illusion (none of his customers complained. I demolish the organic lobby’s claims about health benefits below). Thirdly, anything that makes the organic industry look stupid, and a bit crooked, is fine by me.

And Mr Ekperigin may have been up to it for a while. In a retrospectively hilarious item in The Evening Standard’s Food Spy column in July 2005 a staff member at Julie’s was reported as saying: 'Johnny's introduced a huge range of organic produce on to the menu. He visits the farms often and likes naming the animals, but the problem is he's got too attached and gets very emotional when he sees his customers eating them.' Perhaps he was crying with laughter at the stupidity of his customers.

The prosecution was pursued by the ever vigilant staff at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Environmental Health Department, and it’s the first prosecution of a restaurant on such charges in the UK, though a couple of butchers have previously been caught out.

The sharp-eyed officers noted that menu items such as Julie’s sausages with olive oil mash and cranberry onions (£13.50), sage, mustard and balsamic roasted chicken with shallots and pumpkin (£15) and spice-crusted rack of lamb with caramelised pear and blackcurrant jus (£17) were all described as organic.

So they then checked the purchase records and found that the meat concerned was not organic at all. They calculated that Julie’s saved £4,186.44 on chicken alone during the 52 day period that they checked.

Julie’s say they use organic produce wherever possible – so Johnny may well have saved his restaurant a packet. But don’t worry, the money is coming out of the pockets of the likes of Jeremy Paxman, Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue.

Vested-interest groups like the Soil Association, which basically earns its income from people’s misplaced faith in organic, regularly, and falsely, claim that organic food is better for you than normal food.

I’m not the only one who calls this claim balderdash; so do the French Food Safety Agency, the Swedish National Food Administration, the Consumers’ Association and the UK Food Standards Agency. The Advertising Standards Authority has forced the Soil Association to withdraw some of its claims in the past.

Then again, organic sounds nice and cuddly and green. But the fact is that if we stopped using pesticides and fertilisers, crop yields would nose-dive and half the world would be starving. Funnily enough, another customer of Julie’s was Ireland’s most famous short-arse, Bono, who claims to know a bit about poverty and hunger.

Organics is a niche market for rich folk. I buy free range meat, especially chicken, when I can because it generally tastes better – though whether I’d spot the difference in a blind tasting is another matter. But I don’t believe for a minute that it’s healthier and boy, does it cost more.

Finally Mr Ekperigin told the court: "It was purely a mistake and I had taken my eye off the ball." Johnny, Johnny, my friend, I say you’ve nothing to be ashamed of!

2007-01-16T10:56:00.001-08:00

Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems.

‘So I said to him, surely you can get hold of a bagasand.’
‘Right, yeah.’
‘I mean it’s got to be better to pony up a bagasand than lose your flat, right?’
‘Oh yeah, right.’

The ‘pony up’ gave me the clue that it was money; even a first-generation Scottish immigrant like me knows that much. Of course, he was saying ’bag of sand’ which I brilliantly worked out is rhyming slang for ‘grand’.

Going down the pub round these parts is not what it us to be. For a start, there’s fewer pubs. When most of Notting Hill was built, in the later part of the 19th century in response to the arrival of the Hammersmith tube line with a stop at what was then called Notting Hill Station but now is Ladbroke Grove, there was a pub on practically every corner.

This reflected the fact that for many people, crammed into overcrowded conditions, the pub was the only living space they had; homes were strictly sleeping quarters. Not to mention the fact that the inhabitants of this great nation of ours, then as now, liked a drink or two.

You get a flavour of the dire overcrowding from the the 1911 census when the population of Golborne Ward (the little bit of Notting Hill I live in) was an astonishing 27,180. The 2001 census put the population at just under 8,000.

Many pubs have been demolished or converted into flats and offices. Others have been gutted and turned into miserable gastropubs a la Clerkenwell, or worse, DJ venues. I know I’m old, but why do you want to go to a pub where the music is so loud you can’t talk?

The Warwick Castle (now The Castle) on Portobello Road used to be my favourite. I was part of the pub quiz team there in 1994 when we won the Guinness West London region league. One of our team members could only play away fixtures because he was actually banned from the Warwick. Another could only appear when there were no teams of angry Hells Angels scouring the neighbourhood for him because he owed them money on a drugs deal. Eventually, they got him. He was in hospital for a month.

In the face of stiff competition, Steve Ogsden was probably the most outstandingly weird fellow on the team. Steve Underground he was known as, since he worked for London Underground, or Steve Underpants because he once came into the Warwick Castle with yesterday’s pants still unwittingly tucked into the bottom of his trousers. They slowly emerged over the course of the evening.

Steve was a decidedly unpopular fellow, mainly because of the extreme right wing and racist views he purported to hold. I used to think he was deliberately winding us up.

He claimed that he’d been out in Rhodesia as a youngster during the civil war and had fought for the Selous Scouts, a special forces unit in the Rhodesian Army fighting the black nationalists. Nobody believed him. So, to prove it, he brought in a book about the Scouts and pointed to a grainy black and white photograph of a Scout platoon, insisting that one of the characters in it was him.

The quality of the photo was so poor, it was hard to dispute this – one skinny white lad in baggy khakis looks much like another. But one of us, Pearce, noticed he was holding his rifle left-handed – and Steve was right-handed. ‘They’ve printed the negative back to front,’ Steve said, without missing a beat. Pearce was just as quick-witted. ‘So that means the rest of your 12-man platoon were all left handed then.’ He never mentioned the Selous Scouts again.

I once saw him, completely pissed, fall backwards from a high barstool and land smack on his head with a thump like a wooden mallet hitting a coconut, a blow that might have killed another man. He stood up, shook his horrible, long greasy hair and carried on drinking. Another time, legless again, he puked into his pint glass then passed out. Twenty minutes later he woke, took a long draught from the glass, puked again then sank back into oblivion.

He was an early internet adopter and made friends with a variety of American gun nuts. In January 1998, on a visit to one of them in Texas, in circumstances I’ve never been quite clear about, he died on a hospital operating table of a heart attack. He was only 42.

They shipped his body back and there was a funeral at Kensal Rise Crematorium. One way to guarantee a good turnout at your funeral is to die relatively young. That didn’t work for Steve; I wasn’t kidding when I said he was unpopular.

There was me and about six others, plus his wife, who was wearing an implausible blond wig for the occasion. Then, at the last minute, 10 others arrived, all colleagues from London Underground. And you’ve guessed it – every last one of them was black.

2007-01-16T10:55:00.003-08:00

Chicken liver paté
One of my favourites as a starter and chicken livers are cheap – currently 99p for 400 grams at Sainsburys. This recipe is from my late mother-in-law who was a fantastic cook.

400g chicken livers
75g butter
Glass of red wine
Three shallots, thinly sliced
Clove of garlic, chopped
Olive oil
Handful of bay leaves
Salt and pepper

Rinse off the chicken livers under the cold tap. Cut out any gristle – don’t go too mad, a bit won’t do any harm. Chop them up roughly.

Put the olive oil in a heavy frying pan on a low heat and add the garlic and shallots. Leave them on the heat until they are softened then add the chicken livers, the red wine and some seasoning. Fry until the livers are cooked through but not dried out.

Put the mixture in a bowl and add the butter. Give them a whack with your handheld blender or put the lot in your food processor. Either way, you want to create a consistent paste without turning it into a runny mush.

It will be a little runny at this stage, but that’s OK – it needs to set. Now spoon the mixture into a shallow bowl and arrange the bay leaves across the top of the pate. Cover in silver foil and leave in the fridge overnight. The next day, you’ll find that the consistency is perfect and the bay leaves make it slightly aromatic, in a good way.

2007-01-16T10:55:00.001-08:00

Tits on a Saturday - 07/12/06
A dreary wet Saturday morning, early, and I’m up with the girls to give my wife a well-deserved lie-in – the baby has been teething. I settle them in front of CBeebies (the father’s friend) then sit in the kitchen staring blankly out on our tiny garden through the large hole we punched through the back wall a year ago. We also fitted sliding glass doors. I’m suddenly cheered by the appearance of three blue tits; probably a cock, a hen and one of this year’s fledglings by the look of them.

The blue tit, parus caeruleus and its cousin the great tit, parus major, are frequent visitors to the garden, but it’s a treat to see three at once. Then they’re joined by a female blackbird which is taking advantage of the fact that the heavy rain has been bringing lots of earthworms to the surface of the lawn. It makes short work of three or four of the little wrigglers in as many minutes.

The tits dart around the shrubs and young trees, fig, magnolia, mallow, buddleia, olive, searching every crevice for invertebrates. They also take advantage of the feeders around the garden.

I’ve got a nest box up on the wall at the bottom of the garden but there have been no takers, though I saw a great tit poking its head in a couple of times last Spring. The neighbours had four bloody cats during the nesting season, though they seem to have got rid of two of them now. The cats probably spooked the tit.

I hate cats. When I holidayed on the Greek island of Symi a few years a go, the local kids shot the feral cats with air rifles, like the vermin they are; the cats, not the kids. That’s illegal in this country and I have to tell you that there is little prospect of the Protection of Animals Act 1911 being repealed; far from it. The new Animal Welfare Bill, making it even more naughty to be cruel to animals, comes into force next year.

That gives companion animals, as we must now call pets, more rights than, for example, humans caught up in our grisly and shameful asylum seekers system.

I finally got my own garden three years ago when a local population increase made the one bedroom flat I’d lived in on Ladbroke Grove for 20 years altogether too small. Now, we are the proud owners of 50% of an ex-council three-bedroom maisonette off Golborne Road, probably the best street in Notting Hill.

The great thing about the house is that it has back and front gardens so I’ve finally been able to become a gardener. I did have a small balcony on the Grove, but container gardening is not the same. Both my gardens look bleak and bare at this time of year, but next spring I’ll put up some photos and some gardening notes.

While we’re on the topic of Notting Hill property, I see that David Cameron’s new house still has scaffolding up. I heard it was supposed to be ready for November, so it’s comforting to see that being a top Tory doesn’t mean that the builders won’t shaft you.

And I see that the security services have told him he can’t have his wind turbine because it will make his home too easily identifiable to terrorists. Well, I know where he lives – cash offers only please.

2007-01-16T10:51:00.003-08:00

Smoked haddock with courgettes in whole grain mustard sauce

Smoked haddock is cheap and delicious; if you want to be fancy, most supermarkets sell a slightly superior version without food dye, but I don’t guarantee that the extra cost is worth it.

Serves two
Two smoked haddock fillets
Two or three courgettes
Olive oil
Tablespoon of whole grain mustard (this is worth spending money on – cheap supermarket own-brand is filthy)
Small carton double cream
Finely chopped flat leaf parsley
Pepper
Some grated cheddar
(You don’t need salt for this recipe – the haddock is salty enough)

Cut the courgettes length ways about the thickness of a pound coin. Lay them in layers in a flat ovenproof dish, dribbling (there’ll be no ‘drizzling’ on this blog) some olive oil and grinding a little pepper on each layer.

Mix up the cream and the mustard in a bowl and add a little pepper and the parsley. Place the haddock fillets on the courgettes and dollop on the cream and mustard mixture, spreading it across the fish and courgettes.

Stick in a mediumly hot oven until it’s browned and bubbling – about 15 to 20 minutes. Take it out of the oven and add the grated cheese. Cook for another couple of minutes and serve.

2007-01-16T10:51:00.001-08:00

Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06

How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?

One of my favourite things in Notting Hill is the Grand Union Canal. It's a fantastic wild life haven, a joy for walkers, runners and cyclists and a great place to take the kids to feed the birds. But now a bureaucratic fiasco by something called the Rural Payments Agency is threatening all of that.

The RPA’s only job is to pay EU subsidies to British farmers, about £1.6 billion each year under a new system introduced at the start of 2006. You may well have views about handing out large wads to farmers, but put that to one side for now.

The fact is, the agency has completely failed to get the money out with non-payment, partial payment and over-payment being the order of the day. And that’s using a computer system that rose in price from £18 million to £37 million. Every other EU country has managed to hand the dosh over to their farmers without problems.

This failure means that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, now has to pay a fine of at least £63.5 million to the EU. So far, so good in the topsy-turvy world of British and Euro bureaucrats.

But DEFRA has had to find the money to pay the fine from somewhere, so it has decided to cut funds to the British Waterways Board, which, amongst other things, runs our canal system. And it, the Waterways Board not DEFRA, has made a very good job of it.

Canals throughout the country have enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade, reversing a decline going back to the mid-19th century when railways superseded them. The Grand Union Canal running through Notting Hill has benefited greatly from this so that now it’s an almost bucolic place to take a stroll rather than the fairly scary wasteland it used to be.

But these cuts of £7 million per year, which have already resulted in 180 job losses, now mean that we may well see the canal reverting to its previous state. Funnily enough, £7 million is the amount that has been paid in performance related bonuses to RPA staff in the past 18 months. What would they have been paid if they’d actually done their jobs?

Plus Johnston McNeill, the RPA boss sacked in March, is still being paid his £114,000 salary even although someone else has been doing his job for over six months. What, I wonder, has this McNeill fellow got on David Miliband, the gormless twat who is the minister in charge at DEFRA?

And the icing on the cake is the carry-on that apparently was the daily life of the civil servants up in Lancaster House in Newcastle; the ones who were supposed to be paying the money to the farmers.

In June it was reported that they had been hiding cups of vomit around the office to fester (‘cup-a-sick’); playing pranks involving faeces, female sanitary products and mucus; indulging in drug-taking and sex in the toilets; and jumping naked from filing cabinets. Four staff were eventually sacked and five disciplined.

Fair enough, it sounds like kind of a fun place to work. But I really think they should have got the bloody payments out to the farmers before they started shagging each other in the loos. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about one of my favourite Notting Hill places going down the pan.

2007-01-16T10:50:00.001-08:00

How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06

What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy.

‘Communal gardens?’, I hear you say. Do rich folks have communal gardens? A word of explanation. In the wealthy, stuccoed terraces of Notting Hill, there are large garden areas between the rows of houses.

In most neighbourhoods these would be public parks. But that’s not good enough for the fancy-pants millionaires around here. So these gardens are private and the only way you can get into them is by buying a property with access rights attached.

But on with the story. A couple of years ago, Ms Paula Lawton, 63, of Elgin Crescent saw Mr Christopher Fleming-Brown, 46, and also of Elgin Crescent, kicking a football with his five-year-old son in the Elgin Arundel gardens. Having witnessed what to her mind was a clear breach of the 1863 Town Gardens Protection Act, she launched a private prosecution against him.

Ms Lawton, a former Sunday school teacher and medical administrator, lives alone in a £450,000 one bedroom garden flat (no, I have not put in too many noughts). Mr Fleming-Brown is a city banker and lives with his wife and family in a £2.5 million, five-bedroom house.

The case ended up in West London Magistrates Court last November. A judge there ruled that the city banker and his lad had not been playing football since there were only two of them – not two teams.

The former Sunday school teacher appealed and pursued the case to a hearing this week at the High Court before Lord Justice Waller, sitting with Mr Justice Treacy. They said that the previous judge had been wrong; there had been a game of football, even if only two people were involved. But they threw the case out anyway, as not being in the public interest. And it turns out that, in any case, the garden bylaws have been changed to allow parents to play ball games with their children.

In language unusually intemperate for a solicitor, Andrew Gregg, who acted for Mr Fleming-Brown, said of Ms Lawton: ‘In my view she's an interfering little busy body and the court should not have put up with it. The case was an absurd waste of public money.’

Ms Lawton said: 'I'm just protecting my garden. It is worth protecting. This is an ornamental garden and not a recreation ground and football ruins the grass. I tried to speak to Mr Fleming-Brown and I wrote him letters but he ignored me totally. I am pleased the High Court recognised that two people constitutes a game of football even if they overturned my case.'

I don’t know what I find funniest here. I’m delighted that you can be a millionaire banker, but get sued for having a kickabout with your kid. And I’m thrilled that living on Elgin Crescent, after forking out a king’s ransom for your house, you’ve got Paula Lawton for a neighbour. Allegedly, she is engaged in multiple legal proceedings against various neighbours.

I suppose I could get angry at the fact that Lord Justice Waller, sitting with Mr Justice Treacy saw fit to have the costs of the case, estimated at £50,000, paid from the public purse rather than awarding them against Ms Lawton. But that would seem churlish.

I mean, fifty grand divided between all of us seems a small sum to pay for this hilarious insight into the daily lives of the rich up in Elgin Crescent.

2007-01-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06

Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys.

It’s just been through a major refit and what a palace of plenty it is! They've got everything from virgin olive oil made of real organic virgins to a kit for gluing my wayward crown back into my gob.

We take these temples of consumerism for granted now, but with the thirtieth anniversary of my 21st birthday just round the corner, I can remember when shopping was a completely different and much more miserable experience.

Now we’ve got the widest choice (eight different kinds of mushrooms for god’s sake), the cheapest prices and the highest quality of food ever, ever in recorded history. I mean, I didn't see an avocado until I was 23 and that was on a French-owned oil rig in the North Sea. Halved and served with a dollop of prawn cocktail in the little hole. Delicious.

Of course the Greens hate them, mainly because they’re popular and successful I suppose. But they should try living in an undeveloped country with no supermarkets for a while. I have. It’s shit.

Then again, I’ve got no reason to love the supermarkets; they put my Dad out of business back in the 1980s. He was an independent grocer in a small Scottish town, and for many years a very successful one. He sent me to Fettes College, an Edinburgh secondary school, on the back of it.

But once a supermarket hit town, he just could not compete on price or choice even although he changed his business so that it was more of a delicatessen.

And that’s the point; the supermarkets bulldozed all the small grocers into the black hole of bankruptcy because they gave shoppers what they wanted and they still do. My Dad was lucky. He owned his shop, occupying arguably the best retail site in town, and sold up; it's a Victoria Wine now.

Tescos, Asda, Sainsburys and the rest still have to compete hard and sometimes they completely fuck up. For example, Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys has started to sell womenswear. A friend of my wife’s said, ‘If I was sleepwalking and I woke up naked in Sainsburys, I would buy something to wear. Otherwise, I can't imagine buying any of that stuff.’ Admittedly she’s Italian, but you get the point.

2007-01-16T09:27:00.000-08:00

Recipe: Chicken Chorizo

The beauty of this recipe is that you can count on the chorizo to give the dish a rich and intense flavour. If chorizo (Spanish sausage) is unobtainable where you live, my advice is to move.

Serves two
Four free range chicken thighs
Two cooking chorizos, mild or spicy to taste, sliced to twice the thickness of a pound coin
Some decent tomatoes, roughly chopped
One clove garlic, finely chopped
Three shallots, finely sliced
Glass of red wine
Two bay leaves
Olive oil

Brown the chicken thighs in some olive oil in a large frying pan. Put the thighs to one side and cook the garlic and shallots in the pan until golden. Add the chorizo and cook for a few minutes more.

Throw in (yes, throw in) in the tomatoes, the bay leaves and the glass of wine. Simmer gently for 15 or 20 minutes until the tomatoes are done.

Now take a flattish ovenproof dish, pour in the tomato and chorizo and place the chicken thighs on top, skin up. Sprinkle a little salt on the thighs - that will make the skin crispy. Cook in a mediumly hot oven for about an hour or until it looks ready.

Serve with some small baked potatoes and something green, like George Monbiot's head.