This was the second part of a culture vulture odyssey day out with Janie, visiting the British Museum, the (then brand new) Tate Modern and then the V&A.
I recall that we were both taken with the new Tate Modern generally. I recall the sense of hugeness and we both especially remember the Louise Bourgeois giant spider piece in the Turbine Hall.
This Richard Holliday piece from The Standard pretty much sums it up.
In Janie’s diary for Sunday 14 November, but not mine, the following reminder – presumably based on me saying to Janie, “let’s not forget to listen to…”
The Attractive Young Rabbi. Barry Grossman. 11:30 Radio 4.
Tracy-Anne Oberman was also a NewsRevue (or more specifically, SportsRevue) alum, so this series was definitely a tribute to our NewsRevue “Class of ’92”.
There’s Barry in the Guinness World Record photo, with specs, holding the award.
I enjoyed listening to The Attractive Young Rabbi again. It is quintessentially BBC Radio Four comedy.
Postscript: Barry Grossman Writes…
Thanks Ian, except you and Janey [sic] must have missed it because it was actually on Friday, the 12th of November.
And there were no i-players, BBC Sounds or internet archives in those more innocent times. Perhaps you taped it on your reel-to-reel tape recorder the size of a house and listened to it on the Sunday.
I responded to Barry as follows:
Weird but clearly true that the broadcast was on the Friday not the Sunday, yet the note is unquestionably written in the Sunday section of Janie’s diary.
My guess is that Janie wrote the note there because the Friday page was completely crammed with patient appointments. The Saturday block is covered in notes about something completely different and unintelligible. So the only space for an additional note on that page was the Sunday block.
Quite right that there was no public domain technology to help us listen at an alternative time, but Janie did have a midi hi-fi thing in the maisonette that would enable you to record onto cassette from the radio. I was out visiting clients that day, but she would have been able to press the record button on her midi gadget at the appointed hour. My guess is that the note was a reminder to do that.
No gargantuan reel-to-reel tape recorder available at that time – that device lives in the flat and the flat was being refurbished that autumn. Probably just as well – Janie was reluctant enough to press a “record” button on a bog-standard midi system. My reel-to-reel would have seemed like something out of Mission Impossible to Janie…
As part of a “week off” that Janie and I took in London to see exhibitions and shows, the centrepiece of our Thursday was a trip to the Tate to see the Jackson Pollock exhibition.
The exhibition had been much hyped in the media, with previews and reviews.
Here’s a smattering from the papers.
Bel Littlejohn in The Guardian with tongue firmly in cheek, I shouldn’t wonder:
As part of a week off at home, we did a fair bit of cultural stuff. A rare visit to the theatre on the Monday did not work as well as the dinner afterwards…
…but this day going around galleries was memorably good.
We loved the Kandinsky watercolours, but the critics hadn’t been so keen on them, preferring Kandinsky for oils and criticising the way the exhibition had been curated. Richard Dorment in The Telegraph, for example.
Still, Ogblog is not about what those expert geezers think but it is about what we felt. I recall Janie and I really liking that exhibition, so much so that we set off later than intended for the Barbican, where we had chosen to see two exhibitions – in particular David Bailey’s The Birth Of Cool Photographic Exhibition.
We loved these pictures. Who cares what the critics said. Well, actually I think the critics lined up in favour of this one.
I hadn’t quite acquired my “Bard look” in 1999, but nevertheless we interrupted our brace of weekend visits to the Barbican to see large scale concerts with a visit to the local cinema in Ealing to see Shakespeare In Love.
It was one of those films that you had to see at that time because everyone was talking about it.
These days, he says writing 25 years later, we tend to avoid films that everyone is talking about.
Anyway, we enjoyed this one, even the silly bits. We did not imagine we were having a history lesson.
We went to the Dorcheter Hotel for lunch at the Oriental Restaurant. We had been dying to try the place and had been tipped off that the lunchtime offering was a much better deal than the evening meal.
My then-mate-to-be, Alastair Little, doing the celebrity chef bit. I don’t think we went to that bit – Janie and I didn’t tend to go to the big showpiece parts of such events – we just liked going around, picking up ideas and sampling things..
I’m not sure whether it was this occasion or another visit to one of these fairs, but I recall a very beautiful “English rose” of a young woman marketing Kentish wines, persuading me to try her wares. At that time (or at least this particular wine) was very ordinary wine at an above ordinary price. I have a strong memory of trying to find kind, encouraging and positive words about the wine without seeming interested in actually purchasing the stuff. She smiled sweetly throughout the exchange, so I am quite sure I got away with it.
Michael and I had been commissioned to do a bit of work for Bloomberg. Janie and I decided to enjoy a weekend in New York ahead of my assignment. Janie flew out with me on the Friday, returning to London on the Sunday redeye. I then joined up with Michael and we worked in New York for several days.
Janie and I stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, scoring a manageable price at that time – especially as expenses was picking up five of my seven nights.
We chose to eat at Smith & Wollensky’s (see headline picture) the first night, having read a rave review about it in one of Janie’s travel mags. What that review didn’t teach us was the extent to which a high-end steakhouse in NYC was a “jacket & tie more or less assumed” place, which I discovered only after we arrived in smart casuals.
One local asked Janie if we were Irish as he was leaving, perhaps based on Janie’s physiognomy but perhaps also our casual look. One friendly but drunk gentleman, while walking past us as he departed, stopped and asked me if I realised how expensive the restaurant was. I told him I did. Thing was, back then, an expensive New York restaurant seemed quite modest in price by London standards.
Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA)
Janie and I did some culture-vulturing on the Saturday, spending quite some time at MoMA, partly looking at the excellent general galleries but also taking in some special exhibitions, e.g. a Jasper Johns retrospective.
We went on to a Nan Goldin exhibition at The Whitney, which had been much heralded on both sides of the pond:
By mid-late afternoon, we really were both wilting, so we returned to the hotel for siesta, before venturing out again, this time for dinner at the 2nd Avenue Deli:
Actually we eschewed the popular “salt beef on rye” style of deli food depicted for a more traditional Jewish deli meal, harder to come by in London, including a truly excellent cholent, which Janie, now a self-appointed aficionado of such dishes, claims to be the best she has ever tasted. I believe it was accompanied by (or perhaps we separately ordered) a kishke or helzel, which, obviously, will have helped the fatty-gooiness of the occasion make an especially strong impression. We also tried p’tcha (calves foot jelly), which is one of those mistakes people tend to only make once.
Still, it was a very special evening and I am pretty sure we slept off our endeavours/over-indulgence at length that night.
The next day we took it easy, simply strolling and finding a suitable-looking mid-town eatery for a traditional New York Sunday brunch, before I helped Janie get a cab to the airport for her “red-eye” journey home that evening.
New York cabs were still a hit-and-miss affair, probity-wise, back then. The authorities had fixed the price of a fare from Manhattan to JFK, so I gave Janie the appropriate fare plus a generous tip, explaining to her that she could and should simply exhaust her supply of dollar money on that journey. The cabbie tried to enforce some monstrous sum showing on his meter, which was the very thing the authorities had sought to prevent with the flat fare rule. Janie simply explained what had been explained to her and the initially angry cabbie relented. Janie has not sought a rapid return to New York City since.
I have a feeling I met up with Michael at the Harvard Club that evening. I recall having some superb sashimi with him there – for some reason (perhaps brainiacs tend to like sashimi) the place had employed a top sashimi chef at that time, which didn’t go with the decor but did go down very nicely indeed.
Then for several days it was mostly work.
I recall one midweek evening being entertained for dinner at John Aubert’s elevated apartment on the New Jersey side of the Hudson Bay with a glorious view of Manhattan.
One midweek evening comprised an early evening cocktail party at the Harvard Club, organised by Michael for his wider circle of friends and acquaintances, followed by dinner with a closer-knit small group. Very New York.
On my last night, the Thursday, Bloomberg arranged a dinner for us and several of the seniors involved in our project at a seriously up-market, kosher restaurant in mid-town. Several of the attendees had such dietary needs. It was, to date (25 years on), the one and only meal I have ever had that might be described as both haute cuisine and glatt kosher.
Not a pickle in sight
Michael stayed on Friday for an audience with Michael Bloomberg himself, while I took the wimps (daytime) flight back to London, arriving late evening to find that Janie had, in my absence, changed all of the carpets in Sandall Close. Let’s tread carefully around that one.
Strangely, I remember going with Janie to an open day for one of her chiropody suppliers, Footman, in Mitcham.
It was a bit weird.
I think one of the reasons I tagged along was because we wanted to see the movie Much Ado About Nothing and the sensible show time that Sunday was to go straight on from Janie’s trade show.
“But I thought Janie doesn’t like Shakespeare?” I hear you cry. Well, that wasn’t quite so set/established by then and in any case so many people were telling us that we needed to see this movie because the Beatrice and Benedick bit of the plot reminded people of our relationship.
Yawn.
Kenneth Brannagh & Emma Thompson? Do me a favour. Who were we and/or our friends trying to kid?
Not a bad movie though, in that British costume drama/turn a classic into a rom-com sort of way.
