Tag: Stuart Harris

The June 2024 Social Whirl Part Two, Plus Jazz In the Crypt With Emma Rawicz & Dave Preston, Mid June

It’s been a long week

Lots of pleasant events in my diary in one mid-June week:

  • 18 June – MCC real tennis club night;
  • 19 June – lunch with Stuart Harris after session with accountants;
  • 20 June – real tennis follwed by a bit of Middlesex v Surrey at Lord’s followed by Jazz in the Crypt at St John Smith Square…or should I say Sinfonia Smith Square;
  • 22 June – dinner with Simon & Timothy… & Ella.

Club Night

The last tennis club night of the current season – we’ll resume in September – had seven of us engaging in various doubles battles until the last four of us standing were worn out.

Lunch With Stuart Harris

The next day, I met up with my very first former tennis doubles partner – albeit “lawn” rather than “real” – Stuart Harris. (No relation).The tale of our great seminal tennis tournament victory in 1974 can be seen by clicking here or below.

I Didn’t Just Learn Tennis In The School Easter Holidays Of 1974, I Smashed It

Following a most enjoyable Zoom, we decided to meet up properly for lunch. Fitting that Stuart suggested John Lewis’s 5th floor restaurant, as that location was well suited to Cavendish Square accountants and was also faintly reminiscent of Pratts restaurant at the John Lewis store in Streatham, where my dad used to like to take me for tea on rare, cherished occasions during my childhood.

It was great to catch up with Stuart again after all these years. We had lots to talk about and a couple of hours flew by. Stuart’s jokes have not got better over the decades, whereas mine have. That’s one of my jokes, btw. Why isn’t anybody laughing?

LOrd’s For Tennis & T20

Real tennis was fun. Then I had some time to kill, not least because the T20 match was to be a late kick off due to the football Euros match. I got some reading done on the pavilion sun deck while holding some suitable seats for me and Janie. Janie arrived in such good time for the match that we were able to eat first. Good idea, really, as we’d neither of us had lunch.

Yum

Middlesex did its usual “flatter to deceive” bit, looking good for the first 15 overs of the Surrey innings.

Janie and I were not heavily invested in this match, as we had long-since planned to abandon ship in favour of SJSS and a jazz evening there.

Jazz In The crypt with emma raWicz & Dave preston

Emma Rawicz is seen as one of the brightest young jazz talents around. Saxophone too – Janie’s favourite. She, together with her friend Dave Preston, another bright young thing in the jazz world – guitar in his case – were to do a jazz impromptu set of their latest stuff.

No second innings at Lord’s for us – off to collect Dumbo who drove us across London to St John’s Smith Square.

But wait…

…there are balloons and signs of a party as we arrive. The place is no longer named St John’s Smith Square – it had that very day been rebranded as Sinfonia Smith Square. Get it right.

Thus, instead of the promised St John’s Smith Square crypt jazz concert, we saw a Sinfonia Smith Square crypt jazz concert.

Here’s a link to the Sinfonia Smith Square stub for that concert.

It was very good.

Here is a video of the two of them, plus a pianist on this occasion, playing one of the cool jazz pieces they played for us: Vera:

Emma comes across as a warm-hearted young woman, who spent more time plugging Dave Preston’s latest album, Purple / Black…

…than she spent plugging her own latest material. The album Chroma, seeing as you asked:

We really enjoyed the concert and for sure will now be looking out for Emma and Dave – yes we feel as though we’ve done enough to be on first name terms with them both.

Dinner With Simon, Timothy & Ella at their place

Simon & Timothy have a recent addition to their family: Ella. One of the purposes of our visit was to have dinner and a good chat with Simon & Timothy. But the main purpose, obviously, was to meet Ella and take her the present that we have been accumulating for her since we learnt of her imminent arrival – our spent, balding tennis balls.

“Ella” depicted by a lookalike actress

Naturally we didn’t take photographs of young Ella – Simon and Timothy don’t want her to turn into a vain, lens-loving gal…

…in any case, she’d probably just eat the photos. Apparently Ella will try to eat almost anything. She certainly made a good attempt at one of my elbows while I was eating and made headway with the first of the 15 balls we took for her. That collection of balls is not expected to last long. Janie and I will need to play yet more tennis.

Simon cooked a splendid meal:

  • asparagus soup;
  • roast chicken with roasted vegetables;
  • strawberries and cream.

Very English summer, which, coincidentally, is the way the weather seemed to be turning that weekend. At last.

It was a very enjoyable evening which flashed by all too quickly.

Two Weeks Of Easter Holidays In My First Year At Alleyn’s, Mid April 1974

Escaping from the Colditz prisoner of war camp…but only for fun

Tennis continued to loom large in my Easter holidays story, although it is clear from my diary entries that others were losing interest, making the visits to the tennis club rarer:

OK, OK, I’ll translate it. Just hold on a tick.

Sunday, 7 April 1974 – Yomtov [Pesach, aka Passover], so no [Hebrew] classes. Not a good day.

Monday, 8 April 1974 – Bought paints. Painted soldiers. Another bad day!!!!

Tuesday, 9 April 1974 – The Black Arrow [1973] cartoon in morn. Afternoon tennis coaching. No classes, so later tennis.

Wednesday, 10 April 1974 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court cartoon. Tennis very good Gary and Mark were there only -people are losing interest.

Thursday, 11 April 1974 – very uneventful.

Friday, 12 April 1974 – Good Friday – Dad home. Good fun. Dad had fun too! Shopped for suits.

Saturday, 13 April 1974 – took a rest. Uneventful day.

I managed to find the Connecticut Yankee film on YouTube, but not The Black Arrow one from the 1970s:

I’m trying to work out who Gary and Mark (the last lads standing with me playing tennis) might have been. I’ll guess that Gary was Gary Sugarman who lived in our road. Gary did have a brother whose name escapes me – possibly Mark. I don’t remember a Mark in our street or entourage from thereabouts.

Stuart Harris (my partner in crime from the glory of the tennis tournament the week before) might remember.

I Didn’t Just Learn Tennis In The School Easter Holidays Of 1974, I Smashed It

I love my note for Good Friday that I had fun and that dad had fun too. There is something rather charming about that, though I say so myself.

Let’s move on to the next week:

Sunday, 14 April 1974 – No classes. G[randma] Anne afternoon. Pesach over – bread delicious.

Monday, 16 April 1974 – Easter Monday. Morning dull. Afternoon British Museum. Elgin Marbles – sound guided.

“Hey you – frieze!”

Tuesday, 16 April 1974 – tennis morning. Afternoon uneventful.

Wednesday 17th April 1974 – nothing much at all. World At War good.

Thursday, 18 April 1974 – G[randma] Jenny afternoon. Nothing else.

Friday, 19 April 1974 – tennis morn. Afternoon barber. Timeslip, I Dream of Jeannie, good.

Saturday 20 April 1974 – Alan [Cooke] for day, Sinbad, played Colditz, Andrew [Levinson] too, v good day.

My guess is that the Sinbad we saw must have been this one – click here.

https://youtu.be/B6F3VpHXfic

I certainly didn’t own the Colditz game, so that must have entered our house with Alan or Andrew. Either of you care to own up to owning it? Escape From Colditz was its full name – click here to read all about it. I vaguely remember the game.

“V good day” is a rave review. Thanks, fellas!

Postscript: Cookie Confesses

A message from Alan Cooke which I think unequivocally solves the “source of Escape From Colditz” query:

The Cooke household certainly owned ‘Escape from Colditz’. It was an unusual board game as it required one player to be the German Security Officer who essentially had to thwart all the others.

The rules were a bit vague in some areas allowing vibrant ‘discussion’ in family play 😉

Alan Cooke, 22 April 2024

I Didn’t Just Learn Tennis In The School Easter Holidays Of 1974, I Smashed It

Stuart Harris & Me In My (Or Should I Say My Parents’) Garden, 1976

I wrote a “Fifty Years Ago” piece last week about my first tennis lesson:

Fifty Years Of Tennis, Starting At Woodfield Grove Tennis Club, 30 March 1974

I remembered that Andy and Fiona Levinson were involved and several other kids of our age from the street and local area. The following week’s diary is revealing in several additional ways.

I’ll transcribe the diary entries in full at the end of this article, because I want to focus on a couple of key facts that leap out of the page at me.

The first obvious point is that tennis gets a mention in every entry, except the Sunday one which was dominated by (Hebrew) classes and family s*it.

But the item that screamed off this page at me, inducing mixed emotions of joy and embarrassment, is the entry for 3 April:

Wednesday 3 April 1974. Morn uneventful. Afternoon tennis: Gary [Sugarman] Stewart [sic – actually Stuart Harris] and John [almost certainly Davies], M singles & doubles tournament – SH & I won!

The reason for my embarrassment is that I maintained, for best part of half a century, that I had never won anything at hand/racket sports.

True, there was the match that I had misremembered to be the crowning moment of my youthful play, a winning quarter-final against Johnny Eltham at Fives in 1975…

An Uneventful Day Playing Fives, 9 June 1975

…an event rather ingeniously commemorated by Rohan Candappa – if you click the above link you can read about it.

Then an interval of best part of half a century, until, in 2022, real tennis success in The Lowenthal Trophy at Queen’s …

Finally…Unprecedented Success At Tennis, The Queen’s Club, 11 May & 27 May 2022

…when I again asserted, it seems wrongly, that I had never previously achieved tournament success.

Yet, it seems that my very first tournament, at Woodfield Grove Tennis Club, was, in fact, a winning one.

Just imagine the scale of that tournament and what it must have meant to all concerned. At least four participants (four are named in my diary piece). Further, the tournament was won by a couple of genuinely local boys.

Stuart Harris, my partner in crime for that tournament victory, is not a relative of mine. Our street, Woodfield Avenue, was blessed with a Harris family at each end.

Ours, the smaller Harris family, just me and my parents, at the north end of Woodfield Avenue. Stuart’s family, with multiple children, at the south end of the same road. Stuart’s dad was named Nathan, known as Naff. Stuart’s family were referred to as “The Naff Harrises” to distinguish them from our family, which might thus have been described as “The Tasteful Harrises”, but were probably known as “The Peter Harrises”…or possibly an adjective I would prefer not to learn about after all this time.

Parenthetically [did you see what I did there], calling my family “The Peter Harrises” would subsequently do no good at all, when another unrelated Peter Harris moved in next door to my parents’ house. A nightmare for the postal and delivery services ensued.

The headline photo shows me and Stuart larking around in The Tasteful Harris garden a couple of years later. Sadly, we have no pictures of me and Stuart in action, pulling off our stunning tournament victory that day in 1974, but I did commission DALL-E to reimagine the scene using AI technology and I think it has done quite well:

That tournament success seems to have preoccupied me so much that I simply scrubbed out the following two days. Presumably the celebrations went on deep into the night and then into the next night…

…or perhaps I was starting to lose interest in diary writing for a while, as evidenced by my seven month “sabbatical” between late April and late November that year.

Anyway, I shall use this diary discovery to try and reconnect with Stuart after all these years (I think I have found him) and we’ll see if any amusing memories and/or law suits ensue from him.

Postscript: Stuart Harris And I Are Indeed Now Back In Touch With One Another

Stuart, amongst many other things unrelated to this piece, points out that there was a Stewart in our street: Stewart Starkin, who quite probably was part of our tennis-take-up group that Easter. Indeed, re-reading my diary entry I strongly suspect that the name Stewart does indeed refer to the other Stewart and SH refers to Stuart Harris. That means that there must have been at least five of us in that tournament, which puts the victory on an even more impressive footing, don’t you think?

Here, For The Record, Is That Entire Diary Week Transcribed.

Sunday 31 March 1974 – Classes in morn. G Anne, Ida trouble [that means a family row]. VERY BAD DAY.

Monday 1 April 1974 – Tennis v good in morn. Afternoon OK. Andrew [Levinson] for badminton.

Tuesday 2 April 1974 – Tennis instruction v good. Classes good. Donuts for class notes. [Some form of sweetmeat bribery to do our studies, if I recall correctly]

Wednesday 3 April 1974. Morn uneventful. Afternoon tennis: Gary [Sugarman] Stewart [sic – actually Stuart Harris] and John [almost certainly Davies], M singles & doubles tournament – SH & I won!

Thursday X

Friday X

Saturday 6 April 1974 – Tennis morn. Afternoon uneventful. Seder v good – sung Ma Nishtana – v enjoyable evening.

Oh boy, was I hooked on the tennis early.

Here is another 1976 take on the dynamic duo that won that Woodfield Grove trophy in 1974 – the pictures below taken the same day as the headline picture: