According to Janie’s diary, she came to the Canal Cafe with me on the Thursday evening (24th) to see NewsRevue.
We’d both booked the Friday out, so my guess is that the idea was to sort out the food for Saturday’s dinner party together on the Friday.
Janie’s order is written on the Friday page and is Lebanese food, so this party will have been a smaller scale version of the New Years do a few months earlier:
We’ll have gone to Mrs Saad’s place in Notting Hill/North Kernsington together to place the order – and what an order for six people. My guess is that this was one of those occasions when Janie and I ended up eating Lebanese left-overs for a week afterwards…
…worse things can happen.
Look at the order/notes:
The veal and pork mixed mince is my prescription for cha chiang. Did we serve the odd Chinese dish as well? Or perhaps the deal was that I would cook a noce meal on the Friday ahead of the party-style feast on Saturday.
It was Janie’s birthday after all – our first of those together.
Janie’s diary also mentions Jill the aromatherapist visiting us at the house on the afternoon of her birthday/birthday bash.
In those days, I was seeing John Chaney at Lampton Place for massage during the week.
The visit from Jill (Wootton) was probably the first time Janie and I had a massage-type therapy treatment together.
Bless.
We both remember Jill moving away and giving up maassage/aromatherapy quite soon after we started working with her. It seems that Jill is now (2019/2023) a hypnotherapist and psychotherapist instead.
As for the dinner party; it is clear that we got Mrs Saad to deliver the food and I am pretty sure it is safe to say that the evening was a great success.
Looks like a lot of food – that can’t have been just for six of us. I’ll guess that the guest numbers went up without additional names being written down.