An Impossible Dream from the Past
I trekked over to the Marks & Spencer shop in Kensington High Street to buy a pair of trousers my only other pair now worn through at the crotch. I found a pair of black jeans to my liking for £24. Then I caught the tube to Notting Hill Gate, which I had not visited since my art residency as a fresh-faced, naive, recently-ex-student, here in 1983 : after a stint living in the painter John Walker's studio in Kew Gardens we had moved to a bedsit which was almost next door to the Royal Oak tube station. I remember often walking the short distance to Notting Hill, where we sometimes browsed the Portobello Road Market. I wanted to see if things had changed in the thirty-two intervening years. They had. I was a naive, fresh-faced fool to have thought otherwise.
I walked up from the tube entrance and found my bearings immediately. I turned right and headed up the road in the direction of Portobello Road. I turned off the main road and immediately knew where I was again.
These days, all of the shops in the area are selling tee-shirts featuring the ugly, wide-mouthed, frog-faced grimace of American starlet Julia Roberts. She was apparently the featured 'actor' in a movie, once set in the area. Nobody wants us to forget that fact, evidently.
I found the Sun in Splendour pub, at the corner of Portobello Road, where my partner at the time of my residency and I had enjoyed many pleasant afternoon drinks. In a wave of nostalgia I entered. But I found a sorry sight. The interior has been completely stripped of its old features and character to fashion an unwelcoming, barn-like effect. The man behind the bar was a tiny young Frenchman who resembled a ferret: his colleague was an obese girl with purple hair wearing a skin-tight tee-shirt featuring a unicorn - I was unclear about the level of intended irony attending this. She was seated behind the bar drying all the cutlery, one piece at a time, with a dingy tea-towel and throwing each piece into a wicker basket, five feet away from her. The horrendous clatter was insistent and relentlessly intrusive. Generic hipster music pap blared from the speakers. Tables and chairs were arranged around the edges of the barren room, which was moon-like in its complete, suffocating, lack of atmosphere. At one of these tables sat a party of cashed-up Australian bogans: a mother in her fifties, plastered with make-up and wearing a horrible, tomato-coloured dress; her two daughter, in their thirties, also pancaked in make-up; and the daughters' husbands. They were all shrieking and shouting mindlessly at each other, all quite pissed and all thoroughly obnoxious.
"Yeah!" yelled one of the daughters, as if across a wheat-field, "Ya gotta go to Oxford Street! How are you ever gunna go back to Oz without grabbing some prezzies?"
"Fucking oath!" screeched the mother, "Presley and Frankie and little Taneesha would never forgive me if I went back empty handed!" There was much shrieking from both the daughters at this. And now one of their husbands spoke to the mother, "Did Jenny tell you about the homeless I saw the other day?" He was referring to a single man, it soon became apparent, and not the whole lot of them. "He was sittin' on the footpath with 'is hand out. And as I went past I asked 'im where the nearest Maccas was, cos I was really hungry!" At this, he burst out laughing at his enormous wit and was joined in this by the rest of his horrible family.
"Can't go past Maccas!" yelled the mother.
"Yeah", said one of the daughters, "That's right!... It's so gross here with all the beggars and shit! You never see them back home."
"That's cos Oz is the best little country in the world", said the mother, "Without a doubt! God's own country."
"Too right", opined one of the husbands. By now I was beginning to think I was caught up in an appalling, dinky di, ocker movie from the 1950s, perhaps starring Chips Rafferty.
The mother now stood up and shuffled out from behind the table. "Gotta go to the dunny. Girls, are you coming to keep me company?" The daughters dutifully stood and accompanied their wretched, wobbling mother, who, as she passed the bar, pointed to the Ladies sign and asked the unicorn girl, "Are the dunnies this way, luv?"
Peace briefly descended throughout the bar as the two Aussie men fell into taciturn silence, awaiting the women to come back so that they could resume their vile 'entitled' banter.
I left the Sun in Splendour and returned home, abruptly curtailing my nostalgic wanderings and giving them up as an impossible dream from the past.
I walked up from the tube entrance and found my bearings immediately. I turned right and headed up the road in the direction of Portobello Road. I turned off the main road and immediately knew where I was again.
These days, all of the shops in the area are selling tee-shirts featuring the ugly, wide-mouthed, frog-faced grimace of American starlet Julia Roberts. She was apparently the featured 'actor' in a movie, once set in the area. Nobody wants us to forget that fact, evidently.
I found the Sun in Splendour pub, at the corner of Portobello Road, where my partner at the time of my residency and I had enjoyed many pleasant afternoon drinks. In a wave of nostalgia I entered. But I found a sorry sight. The interior has been completely stripped of its old features and character to fashion an unwelcoming, barn-like effect. The man behind the bar was a tiny young Frenchman who resembled a ferret: his colleague was an obese girl with purple hair wearing a skin-tight tee-shirt featuring a unicorn - I was unclear about the level of intended irony attending this. She was seated behind the bar drying all the cutlery, one piece at a time, with a dingy tea-towel and throwing each piece into a wicker basket, five feet away from her. The horrendous clatter was insistent and relentlessly intrusive. Generic hipster music pap blared from the speakers. Tables and chairs were arranged around the edges of the barren room, which was moon-like in its complete, suffocating, lack of atmosphere. At one of these tables sat a party of cashed-up Australian bogans: a mother in her fifties, plastered with make-up and wearing a horrible, tomato-coloured dress; her two daughter, in their thirties, also pancaked in make-up; and the daughters' husbands. They were all shrieking and shouting mindlessly at each other, all quite pissed and all thoroughly obnoxious.
"Yeah!" yelled one of the daughters, as if across a wheat-field, "Ya gotta go to Oxford Street! How are you ever gunna go back to Oz without grabbing some prezzies?"
"Fucking oath!" screeched the mother, "Presley and Frankie and little Taneesha would never forgive me if I went back empty handed!" There was much shrieking from both the daughters at this. And now one of their husbands spoke to the mother, "Did Jenny tell you about the homeless I saw the other day?" He was referring to a single man, it soon became apparent, and not the whole lot of them. "He was sittin' on the footpath with 'is hand out. And as I went past I asked 'im where the nearest Maccas was, cos I was really hungry!" At this, he burst out laughing at his enormous wit and was joined in this by the rest of his horrible family.
"Can't go past Maccas!" yelled the mother.
"Yeah", said one of the daughters, "That's right!... It's so gross here with all the beggars and shit! You never see them back home."
"That's cos Oz is the best little country in the world", said the mother, "Without a doubt! God's own country."
"Too right", opined one of the husbands. By now I was beginning to think I was caught up in an appalling, dinky di, ocker movie from the 1950s, perhaps starring Chips Rafferty.
The mother now stood up and shuffled out from behind the table. "Gotta go to the dunny. Girls, are you coming to keep me company?" The daughters dutifully stood and accompanied their wretched, wobbling mother, who, as she passed the bar, pointed to the Ladies sign and asked the unicorn girl, "Are the dunnies this way, luv?"
Peace briefly descended throughout the bar as the two Aussie men fell into taciturn silence, awaiting the women to come back so that they could resume their vile 'entitled' banter.
I left the Sun in Splendour and returned home, abruptly curtailing my nostalgic wanderings and giving them up as an impossible dream from the past.
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