End piece
Around town
Jeffrey Bernard
Circumstance plus an inaccurate watch had me waiting for someone for a solid halfhour last Monday at the entrance of Earls Court tube station. If you don't think that London and its inhabitants and visitors are going down the drain try loitering in the Earls Court Road yourself. The procession of shoppers, travellers and people out strolling was a squalid pageant. Inside the station entrance there was a young man pimping for a local hotel, a wino with a face like a burst strawberry and sipping wine out of a bottle, and a young couple selling copies of News Line and looking so intensely dedicated to their cause that it made you yawn to glance at them. The road itself now seems to be lined with those self-service grocery stores that keep open at odd hours and which stitch you up for the privilege and, the pavements are blocked by bewildered looking foreign students weighed down by rucksacks and seemingly wondering whether they hadn't all made the most ghastly mistake in coming to Earls Court at all. Mind you, Earls Court to a foreigner probably
sounds fairly posh and it may well be that they think it's going to be a sort of English Versailles, but a glance into one of the restaurants where you can buy salmonella to take away must surely put them right in double quick time.
I'm wondering where the hell they all go to when they become disillusioned with Earls Court. Carnaby Street perhaps. Now that is a wow. They've got people in Carnaby Street who actually get rich selling 'rubbish, cheese-cloth shirts, coffee-table games or whatever. I just can't believe that there's anything wrong with the economy of this country when people can afford to buy silver balls suspended on string and then spend their evenings banging them together to the accompaniment of a group of recording psychopaths. Everyone to their own thing.
After Carnaby Street I imagine our tourist, his rucksack by now bursting with quality English gifts and his stomach-lining soothed by the balm of a Wimpy and cup of instant coffee, trudges on to the glamour and excitement of jolly old boozy Bohemian Soho. You can imagine their disappointment when they discover that Dylan Thomas isn't able to make an appearance in the York Minster today. Never mind, there's lots more to see before going back to Earls Court or Paddington to find a bed for the night. For one thing everyone just has to take in a few typical English pubs like Ward's Irish House in Piccadilly and then go and poison the ducks in St James's Park with Charles Forte leftovers, to say nothing of taking a snap of our famous afternoon drinking club the House of Commons. Anyone who spends their holidays trudging around Europe should still have enough stamina after all that to inspect Chelsea and the Kings Road. To think that everyone you bump into is simply oozing artistic talent is a sobering thought unless, of course, you've had a drop too much of our wonderful pressurised beers. A slow wander past more trendy jeans and cheese-cloth shirt shops will bring our sweating, numbed, rucksack bearer dangerously close to Earls Court but thankfully to the portals of the famous Queen's Elm pub. This really is a typical English tavern. Even the barmen have plays running on Shaftesbury Avenue. I once met a cocker spaniel that could paint, to say nothing of a poet who could dig bigger holes
in the road than anyone else in the McAlpine outfit, but that's by the by. What is important is the finely honed wit and badinage that issues forth from the likes of publishers, novelists and, let's not forget, actors. (They won't let you forget them anyway).
By now Hans has had a busy day and as the Earls Court Road hoves into .sight he realises that all the nerve ends inside his skull have stopped .working. A quick nibble at a knot of kebab and it's hack to bed at the Shalimar Guest House. Tomorrow could be another wonderful day and we still haven't seen the wonders of British West Bayswater.
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