London

The past is never past … and reappears unexpectedly

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
Bob Dylan

A wander through the foggy ruins of time …

We had been having conversations at home about Jewish people I had known when I was young – we’ve had a lot to talk about on things like this in this hate filled times – and I recalled that there were not many to speak of. In those days, in the early and mid-1960s at Moseley Grammar School in Birmingham, there were, as I remember it, only three Jewish boys in the school. There may have been a Jewish teacher, but I’m not certain. Though Moseley was non-denominational, it was very much C of E in plain clothes. The Jewish boys and us Catholics – not meant of those either too –  would enter the daily school assembly after the routine prayers and hymns, and we were excused from scripture lessons even though these studied the same Old Testament.

Now, we often talk about memory here at In That Howling Infinite. Memories of our pasts, our younger selves, do not arrive with trumpets. They present themselves all of a sudden, unannounced and often sideways: through a stray remark on the couch of an evening; through a conversation about people once known; through one of those odd moments when the mind, unbidden, opens a door long thought shut and a forgotten face enters the room.

And Nicholas Molnar walked through that door …

On impulse, i went searching for one of those Jewish lads, one I had been friends with during my final years of Grammar School; and google brought up an obituary written by loved ones who bring you up to date, informing me that while I was busy becoming older, so was he.

It was written by members of the the Forres Friends of Woods and Fields, environmental and community garden group based some 40 km east of the northern Scottish town of Inverness, and it paid tribute to the their founder and chairperson who had just passed on. It got me wandering through my backpages

We were born in the same year, 1949, and arrived at Moseley at roughly the same time, around 1960, remaining there until the summer of 1967 (though I stayed another year). The son of German/Austrian parents who had escaped from Nazi Germany, Nick was small of stature, with curly hair, a prominent nose, and friendly, laughing eyes – an expression that always seemed on the verge of amusement. He was very bright, academically gifted, and a natural actor.

School drama productions in those days had a peculiar and often unimaginative tendency to cast according to what teachers thought somehow “fitted”. Nick, being Jewish, often found himself cast in Jewish roles. Looking back now, one raises an eyebrow at the assumptions involved, but at the time it seemed merely how the world worked.

I remember him particularly in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Wolf Mankowitz’s dark comedy The Bespoke Overcoat, a poignant and comic reimagining of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, itself a story carrying echoes of Jewish life and exile. These were esoteric two-handers (not quite what one would expect in grammar school drama production*) with one of the other Jewish boys – Chris Field, another outstanding student and gifted actor. The pair of them together had an ease on stage that some people spend a lifetime trying to acquire.

I cannot recall how we became pals. Nor do I remember much about the details of our friendship. But I often visited his home – in Moseley, I think, not far from our school – probably during school holidays.

I do recall that he bought a canoe and took to paddling Brum’s many canals. “Canoe, canal,” he would often refrain. At the time I thought it quite eccentric.

He then bought a second-hand Lambretta scooter. Those scooters possessed a strange glamour, belonging to a brave new world of Mods and movement and urban freedom – and, indeed, rebellion. A couple of my schoolmates had one and sported those long-tailed parkas that later featured in Quadrophenia. I envied them for the speed and freedom and would have loved to do likewise, but that required means and parental permission, and I had neither.

And then our schooldays drew to an end and we put off schoolboy things and ventured out into the wide world – the great divide that so often arrives at the end of adolescence: university, cities, the widening world.

Nick went up to university in London. I am fairly sure it was the LSE, or somewhere very near it in central London. I hitched down to visit him and stayed in his bedsit –  an atmosphere peculiar to student life where one exists in a halfway house between adolescence and whatever comes next.

Was it once or several times? I cannot recall. But I have an image of scooting through wet, wintry streets on the back of a Lambretta.

And he took me to what I recall as the Soviet Bookshop, though it may well have been Collet’s in Charing Cross Road. We had both developed a left-wing outlook on the world, and London at that time possessed a whole ecology of ideas. One could drift through central London moving from second-hand bookshops to political shops to cafés where everybody seemed convinced history itself had reached a point of imminent transformation.

Young people have always believed they stand on the threshold of a new age, but the late sixties had a particular confidence in this regard. Revolutions seemed possible. Societies looked malleable. One felt that history had become less a thing to study than a thing with which one might personally engage.

This was the life, I thought, mindful that I too would soon be taking that road.

Within a year I had left Birmingham for Reading in Oxfordshire and my own particular diversions, and, distractions. Unlike my upper sixth peers, I spent an extra year at Moseley, an unplanned and strange sabbatical during which I hitchhiked around Britain and nurtured my interest in history and politics. In what looks now in retrospect as one of life’s strange coincidences, in the Spring of 1967, I traveled the A98, the long road linking Aberdeen to Inverness – passing through Forres. I slept on the roadside somewhere near the Culloden battlefield and woke in the morning covered in snow.

Though London featured prominently, creatively and romantically in my university years, and I lived there from 1971 until 1978,  and though Nick and I may often have been in close proximity – I returned to that Russian book store several times , buying Lenin’s polemical pamphlets for my uni studies, Russian Revolution posters, and even, inspired by seeing Jethro Tull live, a balalaika (which I never learned to play) – I was never to see him again.

Until he walked through that door in our conversations here in the Tarkeeth forest – in the form of an obituary.

We lost touch – around 1968 –  as people sometimes do. Lives branch quietly. Then suddenly fifty or sixty years have passed and one discovers that entire lives have unfolded beyond one’s sight.

The strangest thing is that memory often preserves people at a fixed age. In my mind’s eye Nick remained perpetually young: climbing onto his Lambretta in his mod anorak, wandering through London, talking undergraduate politics, dropping me at the Tube station for my hitchhike back to Birmingham for school on Monday morning, and then heading off toward some unknowable future.

There is something poignant and bittersweet in discovering that the person you met a lifetime ago had not vanished after all, but had simply carried on further down the road, a.road that, for all its geographical, cultural, and social differences, might have been running parallel to my own.

Riffing on Nick’s biography – a life of service to community and environment as described below in the Forres Friends tribute –  I too became involved in student politics and protests in 1968 and 1969, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War in London, though I later parted company with politics in pursuit of more hedonistic things. I too travelled after graduation – my destiny lay in the Middle East and along the famous Hippie Trail to India and back.

My journey eventually carried me to Australia, where I now live out my latter years in a wildlife reserve and conservation area in the forests of northern New South Wales, caring for the bush while my wife tends our large vegetable garden. En route I have been an accountant, a folk singer, and an activist in Australia’s interminable forest wars.

People often imagine lives changing direction dramatically. We speak of transformations and reinventions. Yet perhaps character is more like a river than a sequence of disconnected events. It bends; it narrows; it widens; but somehow remains recognisably itself.

I had gone looking for a boy I once knew and found a life instead – a rich, generous, deeply lived life that had unfolded beyond my sight. We began with a door opening and a familiar face walking back into the room, but behind that remembered face lay an entire unseen life. There is a curious sadness in such rediscoveries. I found Nick again after all these years, only to discover that he had already rounded the bend and passed out of sight.

As Bob Dylan’s lines at the head of this memoire tell us, it is a reminder of how finite life is …

Paul Hemphill, May 2026

* But then again, maybe not. The young teacher who looked after school drama was of a bohemian bent, and in extracurricular drama classes, he introduced us sixth-formers to the plays of the “Angry Young Men” (a prominent group of working- and middle-class British writers and playwrights who emerged in 1950s postwar Britain), including Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton, and organised outings to the old Birmingham Repertory Theatre (back then, in its Stevenson Street location) to see contemporary plays.

In Tall Tales, small stories and eulogies, see more about my London in the nineteen sixties and seventies:  A Window on a Gone World … London days; Something about London; Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days;; and Ciao Pollo di Soho – the cafe at the end of the M1

In That Howling Infinite has also written more generally about the nature of nostalgia. See: Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment (There is a précis of this below), and Blue remembered hills (2) – the history we hold within us

Forres Friends of Woods and Fields founder Nick Molnar passes away peacefully

Garry McCartney, The Northern Scott, 09 December 2025

A hard-working member of the community with a passion for the environment has passed away.

Forres Friends of Woods and Fields (FFWF) founder and chairman, Nick Molnar, 76, is survived by his wife and fellow volunteer Pippa, brother Michael, sister Nina and their families.

Nick (right) in the early days of the Chapelton polytunnel funded by the Berry Burn windfarm Community Fund.
The early days of the Chapelton polytunnel funded by the Berry Burn windfarm Community Fund.

FFWF chairman, Mick Drury, confirmed he also leaves the charity’s 26 diverse acres of land to be continued to be used for local community food production as well as a space to reconnect with nature.

The town has lost a core member of the community,” he said. “Nick was known for his warmth, helpfulness and involvement with a range of local projects. He had a lifetime’s commitment to the land and to building community.”

Nick was born in 1949 in Hertfordshire to German/Austrian refugees from the Nazi regime of the Second World war, spending most of his childhood in Birmingham.

He studied anthropology at university in London, taking part in student protests in 1967. After graduating, he travelled the world.

Nick then lived in Camphill communities in Norway, Ireland, England and Perthshire – supporting people with additional needs through work on the land. Camphill communities are residential communities and schools that provide support for the education, employment, and daily lives of adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems, or other special needs.

Nick sowing in the Chapelton polytunnel.

 

Over the last five years, FFWF has been Nick’s life’s work, particularly after establishing its community garden at Chapelton.

Mick said: “His commitment and hard work have left a lasting legacy. A core group of volunteers meet there to work together weekly, harvesting for their own needs and making regular donations to Moray’s foodbank.”

The group’s summer open days are very popular now – Nick was always on-hand to welcome attendees and build new relationships.

“He’d always be out supporting the town’s apple and tattie days,” added Mick. “At home, he and Pen would be busy preserving soft fruits, making pickles and chutneys, sauerkraut and kimchi.”

Nick at the growing field and garden near Chapelton Farm.
Nick at the growing field and garden near Chapelton Farm.

Nick’s love of traditional skills and crafts of the countryside led to him trying his hand. Scything was a particular interest, and he was arrested for scything genetically modified crops on the Black Isle in 2001 when a test site was established there.

He was a keen reader and had a great interest in folk music, learning to play the violin in recent years.

Nick passed away at home just over a week after suffering a serious stroke. He was supported by his family, by Kate Clark from the Pushing up the Daisies bereaved charity, and with the “wonderful” assistance of the district nurses.

He was given a quiet send-off at Chapelton, with piper Rory O’Connell and a private green burial. There will be a life celebration for Nick in the new year. Messages of condolence are asked to be sent to forresfriends@gmail.com.

“We are blessed to have known Nick,” finished Mick, “and we will miss him greatly.”

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About Forres, Findhorn and Camphill

Forres is an historic market town in Moray in northeast Scotland, situated approximately 25 miles (40 km) east of Inverness and about 12 miles (19 km) west of Elgin, nestled between fertile farmland and the coast of the Moray Firth. Just 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Forres, a journey of little more than ten minutes by car, lies the small coastal village of Findhorn, set beside Findhorn Bay and opening onto the North Sea. Although distinct places, Forres and Findhorn have long existed in each other’s orbit: one a traditional Highland town with ancient roots, the other a village internationally known for its ecological and communal experiments.

Within this landscape sits Forres Friends of Woods and Fields (FFWF), a community woodland and garden project founded in 2020 by my old school chum Nic Molnar, who served as its founder and chair. The organisation brings together practical environmental work with a strong sense of community life, creating shared spaces where volunteers plant and grow food, manage woodland, support biodiversity, and learn sustainable land practices. Yet projects such as this are about more than gardens and trees. Their ethos is equally social: people gathering for a few hours of work, conversation, and companionship – “a blether and a cup of tea,” as the organisation itself cheerfully puts it. In that sense, FFWF reflects an older village ideal recast in modern form: a communal space where practical labour and human connection become intertwined.

The broader region also carries the influence of the Camphill Communities, an international movement founded in Scotland in 1940 by Karl König and fellow refugees from Nazi Europe. Based on principles of shared living and mutual care, Camphill sought to create communities in which people with learning disabilities and additional support needs lived and worked as equal participants rather than as institutional recipients of care. Farms, gardens, workshops, schools, and shared homes became central features of community life. The Moray region around Forres and Findhorn later developed into one of Camphill’s most significant centres, helping establish the area’s reputation for social innovation, community-based living, and environmental engagement. The underlying principles of König’s Camphill school were derived from concepts of education and social life outlined decades earlier by anthroposophistRudolf Steiner(1861–1925). Today there are over 100 communities worldwide, in more than 20 countries, mainly in Europe, but also in North America and Southern Africa

Findhorn itself added another layer to this local culture through the emergence of the Findhorn Foundation, whose experiments in ecological living and sustainability attracted international attention from the 1960s onward. Together, these overlapping influences –  the traditional town of Forres, the intentional and ecological communities of Findhorn, the Camphill movement, and local initiatives such as Forres Friends of Woods and Fields – have created a small corner of Scotland that is geographically modest yet unusually rich in ideas about community, stewardship, and shared ways of living.

Précis: Blue Remembered Hills — a land of lost contentment

Nostalgia is one of those curious human afflictions that sits somewhere between memory and myth. The Greeks called it nostos: the longing for home, the ache of return. Homer built The Odyssey around it. Houseman called childhood “the land of lost content”. We all know the feeling: that sudden gust of memory carrying with it a place that perhaps never quite existed in the form we remember it. A song, a smell, a taste, a street corner glimpsed through rain –  and suddenly one is standing again in those “blue remembered hills”.

The trouble is that nostalgia can be both consolation and deception. Memory does not preserve the past like amber trapping an insect; it edits, softens, rearranges and, occasionally, invents. It is less a historical archive than a film editor’s cutting room. We tend to remember not the world as it was, but the world as it felt. Childhood roads seem wider when revisited, old houses smaller, old certainties larger. Looking backward is a little like looking in a rear-view mirror: objects appear closer than they really are.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Quite the opposite. Nostalgia often provides continuity in a world moving at bewildering speed. Long-term memory can become a kind of inner refuge, perhaps even biology’s consolation prize for ageing. As we move through life, the past gradually acquires sovereignty over the present. The older we get, the more we discover that Hartley was probably right: the past really is another country. More disconcertingly, we begin to realise it has become home.

Yet nostalgia also has its darker uses. It can become what South Park hilariously called “memberberries”: seductive little fragments of selective memory that rot the brain with sentimental half-truths. “Remember when things were better?” they whisper. Remember when streets were cleaner, people knew their place, children behaved, and chips came wrapped in newspaper? The problem is that these memories often airbrush out the less attractive features of the era: poverty, prejudice, corporal punishment, rigid social hierarchies, casual cruelty and exclusion. There is a tendency to remember cohesion while forgetting whom that cohesion excluded.

And nowhere is this more visible than in those sprawling Facebook nostalgia communities now largely colonised by us boomers. They are fascinating anthropological sites – digital village greens where people gather not to discuss wars, elections or grand historical events but milkmen, street sweepers, bin men, old sweets, cassettes and television programmes long vanished into history.

At first glance it all appears harmless enough: a warm bath of collective memory. Yet beneath pictures of “proper bin men” and school playgrounds often lurk deeper currents of anxiety and resentment. The mundane becomes symbolic. The old milkman becomes shorthand for social trust; the local high street for community; black-and-white photographs of tidy streets for a world supposedly more ordered and comprehensible.

What many are mourning, however, may not be the world itself so much as their own place within it. We do not merely miss old streets or old songs; we miss younger versions of ourselves inhabiting them. We miss possibility. We miss novelty. We miss being twenty and imagining that life was still unfolding rather than slowly arranging itself into memory.

The political danger arrives when nostalgia stops being reflective and becomes restorative — when longing for the past becomes a demand to reconstruct it. The right has often understood this instinct well. It does not necessarily need to persuade people of a compelling future if it can offer an idealised yesterday. “Take back control”, “make things great again”, “return to traditional values”: all are variations on the same emotional melody.

But return tickets are unavailable. The past cannot be restored because it never truly existed in the form imagined. There were never really “good old days”; there were simply days – complicated, contradictory and viewed through younger eyes.

None of this means memory should be discarded. Far from it. There is immense pleasure in basking in les temps perdus. I happily indulge in musical rabbit holes and Facebook reminiscences myself. Songs especially are magical portals because music does not merely remind us of the past –  it briefly resurrects it. A song can collapse fifty years in three minutes.

But I would still choose today.

For all its noise and absurdity, for all the algorithms, grievances and existential clutter of modern life, today contains wonders unimaginable to my younger self. Medicine keeps people alive who once would not have survived. Knowledge sits literally in our hands. Distances have collapsed. Possibilities have expanded.

The trick perhaps is to hold memory gently: to enjoy nostalgia without becoming captive to it. To remember that we are, as Maria Popova put it, all our previous selves stacked inside us like Russian matryoshka dolls –  not discarded versions, but incorporated ones.

The little boy still exists somewhere in the old streets and schoolyards and songs. He is still playing in the enchanted forest with Pooh and Christopher Robin.

The first 100 Days on the wagon

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Haven’t had a drink. It’s all right, but time does pass slowly. When you’re drunk, you’re never bored. Did you know that? You may bore other people. But the moments slip by in such a satisfactory manner
Charles Collingridge, brother of Prime Minister, to journalist Mattie Storin, House of Cards (1990), episode 3

The end of a fifty year old relationship

Back in the day, we were young, fun, and quite often, sozzled.

I’ve been a heavy drinker more or less since the seventies, an almost life-member of the just-one-more club. Not recklessly, not always dramatically – though there have been embarrassing beanos I’d rather have forgotten – just faithfully, habitually, the way a generation learned to take the edge off, to mark time, to soften the day, or just because it was what you did. What began as a rite de passage in the late sixties, at folk clubs and at a weekly get-together with school chums became routine in the union bar, and became part of the lifestyle in the seventies.

The first time I visited Australia, in the summer of 76-77, one of the things that impressed me the most, apart from the sun, the beaches, and the Warringah Mall was drive-through bottle shops – oh, and the wine in plastic bladders, the old vin plastique. It wasn’t very good wine – but never mind the quality, feel the weight! As years went, booze was inextricably woven into both downtime and social gatherings. The reality that Australian wine got much better oiled the wheels of inebriation. Celebration or commiseration, to toast good news and to drown the blues. Whether traveling – even in the abstemious Middle East, where there is no drinking culture and where it often haram – or on the property, five o’clock was booze o’clock and time for a sundowner – or two.

Alcohol was never a crisis in my life; it was a companion, a punctuation mark, an easy and unassuming way of moving from one hour to the next without too much friction. Never enjoyed alone, except when writing or composing, and rarely during the daytime hours apart from social occasions. It was woven into evenings, into conversation, into music and writing, into courting, into the social grammar of a life that otherwise often ran on discipline, routine, and contemplation.

But let’s not kid ourselves. However civilised it looked, however bounded it remained, it was still a dependency, addictive in its own quiet, culturally sanctioned fashion. Alcohol is a poison, metabolised as such, and it does no one no good in the long run. It may take its payment slowly, but it always takes it. That is why it had to stop – not because it had ruined anything yet, but because it worked too well, too reliably, and the trajectory was obvious to anyone prepared to look- though we often avert our gaze and carry on.

In these declining days, when every new ache and pain is endured with unease, every blood test, every medical scan is a game of health roulette. And alcohol plays its pernicious part. As if I didn’t already know, the World Health Organisation says there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, and experts tell us that we should be drinking zilch. My doctors too. Multiple studies link alcohol to seven types of cancer.

And then there’s what it does to the brain. I’ve joked in the past that I must’ve been very bright back in my prime because I’ve still got my marbles. But I know full well that I’m no longer a sharp and as perceptive as I once was. “Is my memory waning?”, I ask myself? My longterm memory is fine – but might that just that be the old nostalgia-muscles kicking in?

Folk of a certain age often joke about walking into a room and then wondering why they went there. I do that too – though not often. Sometimes, I’m unable to recall the names of people I ought to have remembered. My internal hard drive is invariably able to chase them down – without resort to Google – but it’s nonetheless a cause for concern. My mother died slowly with dementia. It diminishes you beyond recognition. She was not a drinker, but. Never touched the stuff.

I’ve contemplated cutting back often, and I’ve made many desultory attempts to do so. As the old quip goes, “giving up is easy – I’ve done it many times!” But I’ve never considered actually quitting. Giving up, or drastically cutting back on alcohol, is a conscious decision – and thenceforward, a continuous one. Perhaps my decision came at a time when I was ready to step back.

I gave it up one day without ceremony. No declaration, no conversion. No identity shift announced to the world. Well, not quite … I was given a big push – and maybe that’s what’s making it work this time around. I was given a guided tour of  a CT Scan of my grey matter, and … to quote the late Warren Zevon, “Guess what? It ain’t that pretty at all!” The doctor dived deep into my scan, told me what he’d seen, and declared that for me, there could be no safe limit. As I walked out of his rooms, I said “I need a drink”, and we headed straightaway to the Plantation Hotel. And that glass of Italian Pinot Grigio was the end of the liquid line.

When I first embarked on sobriety, I hadn’t a clue whether or not I would succeed. And I was shocked that it was easier than I’d expected. There were no cravings (though I drink more tea and coke) and when month one came to an end, I was ready to step into the next and then the next. It’s like deciding to lose weight, learn a language or change jobs (and I’ve done all this too). You decide that you are going to do it, then you try really hard to stick with it. There’s no magic wand.

Apart from one standard drink a week, on Tuesday or Wednesday, that was that. Initially I kept count – of that one day, and even of the drinks. So much fizz, this many Pinot Grigio, so many Shiraz. Counting turns pleasure into ledger; once you count, you’ve already conceded that something has changed.

For starters, my palate is changing. Fizz does nothing for me now. A former favourite tastes as though it’s had petrol added. The whites have been a pleasant change after the zero-alcohol placebo interregnum in which everything tastes faintly of apples (there are tons of zero or low-alcohol options out there. Some are awful and taste like weird-flavoured fizzy water, but I have my favourites too). The reds, interestingly, still carry a spike, a kick of spice. Something happens – but it’s only the mildest hint of getting stoned – no re-angling of thought, more a slight tilt, the barest of edges being taken off the now. Whatever it may be, red wine is most often my weekly onesie, so I no longer keep count.

When I took that first glass of red, I let it stand for a while to room – an old habit, but also to make sure it was at its best. But before I’d even picked up the glass, the oddest thing occurred. As I looked at the waiting glass, I felt a flicker of guilt. Not moral guilt, exactly. Not shame. Something quieter and stranger: the nervous system recognising a former solution now marked with an asterisk. A sense that this familiar alteration of being no longer had my clear permission. A fleeting return, perhaps, to the scene of the crime. Like meeting up with an old pal after many years and realising that you no longe4 have much in common.

100 days on, and I’m not tempted to tell a story of revelation. No clouds have parted. Nothing has been cured. But something has shifted, and it’s the sort of shift that only becomes visible in retrospect – by subtraction rather than addition.

When I tell people, most ask me how easy or hard it was and is. I say it’s been hard – but not too hard. Particularly come fizz o’clock when my wife and I we do our evening walkabout and enjoy our sundowner – but I tell them it does become easier as the days and weeks progress. They often casually ask if I’ve noticed any difference since ditching the drink. I keep it brief, so as not to bore them with the details – but the following is my own private dossier.

The changes have not been theatrical, but they have been real. I’ve lost weight; my skin is clearer; my sleep is deeper. I feel that wake more clear-headed now, ready, I guess, for the day ahead. I have more energy. I relax more easily. I  always experienced anxiety, but I sense that its incidence has lessened. Though I still habitually have to find something, anything to get hung up about, it doesn’t feels as pervasive and debilitating. And, I imagine, I’ve become more tolerant of the follies and frailties of others. Or maybe more laid back and lackadaisical.

When I wake at 3am, that existential hour of angst, and the mind instantly revs into restless motion, I don’t lie abed in a state of mental turmoil. Nor do I stir this early as much and as often as I once did – mind you, I turn the bedside clock on its face these days so I’m not as conscious of the hour. If I do wake early and find that I can’t go back to sleep, I write – as I am doing right now. But I sense that not drinking has made me realise how much alcohol contributed to my anxiety. Those occasional tremors and twitches we put down to what might be early onset Parkinson’s might not have been that at all. [In In That Howling Infinite, see It’s 3am and an hour of existential angst ]

I sense a steadiness now. The mental landscape feels different – perhaps clearer, perhaps simply less crowded. Am I more present in the world? Sometimes I think I am. Though I can still inattentive – including towards others – and absent minded. Better able to hold several things in mind at once? Possibly. It could be down to using a chatbot when writing, but I feel that I haven’t been this productive in years. But that doesn’t make me more articulate. A few years back, I senses that I was not longer as up to public speaking as I was if yore – and that has not changed. I put that down to the ageing process – but it could be something less benign. Does the world itself look altered – a little brighter, a little sharper? Perhaps. Though, to be fair, I did have cataract surgery a week after my last drink, which complicates the metaphor.

What is undeniable is time. There seems to be more of it. Whether it’s been created or merely reclaimed is hard to say. Perhaps it’s the same quantity as before, just less of it leaking away – into fog, into fatigue, into the dull, unexamined bargain of later. Evenings are longer now. Much longer. The day closes more slowly without that familiar hinge that once snapped it shut. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this. I pace myself with a new found evening ritual: zero beer at five or six – the onetime “booze o’clock – followed by a zero Prosecco, with its hint of apple – but at least it has a bit of a bead – then a mineral water or a coke – sugar-free but a caffeine hit. Then it is teatime, with a mineral water to sip and maybe a zero wine – and at last, between nine and ten, a cup of tea and some fruit. It’s interesting how much liquids leaven the longing.

What’s been interesting is what hasn’t happened. I’m told fresh renouncers experience tremors, night sweats, vivid dreams. I haven’t. There’s been no drama of withdrawal. If anything, my nervous system seems to have settled rather than rebelled. Alcohol, it turns out, was not supporting my sleep or steadying my nerves; it was quietly fragmenting both. Removing it didn’t provoke crisis. It removed interference.

These aren’t miracles, but they aren’t imaginary either. And once you begin to notice the benefits, they become their own quiet incentive. Resolve stops feeling like deprivation and starts to feel like momentum.

What remains is the effort. Not physical exhaustion so much as a kind of existential tiredness – the absence of the old accelerator, accelerant, even. Alcohol had been doing a great deal of invisible work: easing transitions, softening edges, carrying me through the long middle stretch of the evening. It marked the end of work, licensed drift, permitted a mild, socially acceptable derangement of thought. As I noted above, I rarely drank alone, except when writing or composing; rarely during the day or working hours, except on social occasions. This was not chaos. It was tuning. A dimmer switch, not a blackout.

And that, precisely, is why it counts as dependency. The brain learned the sequence: evening, glass, “clocking off”, altered state. Reliable, repeatable, intoxicatingly reinforced. Functional addiction is still addiction. Calling it civilised doesn’t change its chemistry. Without it now, that work has to be done consciously. Nothing is anaesthetised. Nothing is rushed through.

There’s a certain grief in that. Grief for ritual, for the reliable companion that marked the end of the day. Grief, too, for a sanctioned way of stepping briefly sideways out of the self, without explanation. There’s a certain ennui too – sometimes with sharp edges. It can feel as though fun has gone missing, or at least changed address. And yes, I miss getting stoned: not smashed, not obliterated, but lightly, productively altered – the associative looseness, the permission to wander.

This isn’t romanticising damage. It’s mourning coherence. Alcohol once bundled ritual, companionship, permission, and altered state into a single, efficient act. Removing it unbundles those functions, and the nervous system doesn’t yet know where to rehouse them. Which is why I suspect this is the real work: not abstinence, but redesign.

I worry, of course, about damage already done. Particularly when I think about how much I actually did consume on a daily basis. Looking back now, I no longer lie to myself about it and admit that it was a fucking lot! After so many years, it’s reasonable to hope the body can still repair what it can. The signs so far suggest it might. The improvements have been quiet and cumulative rather than theatrical. These are the kinds of changes that accrue slowly – and, importantly, tend not to reverse. Reasons to be relatively optimistic then?

What I know for certain is that I can’t simply relent and surrender the hard-won effort – physical and mental – of getting to this point. This isn’t abstinence by accident. It’s something maintained daily, by attention. Ritual and habit will re-form; that’s my nature. But for now, it requires intention and attention rather than habit, awareness rather than drift.

No great revelation, then. Just a steadier hand on the tiller, a longer fuse – or perhaps fewer things lighting it – and a growing sense that less of life is slipping away unnoticed.

The truth is, stopping drinking can be an issue when hanging out with people who still enjoy their evening tipple. It’s helpful to know this in advance if you’re contemplating doing the same. Interactions are now based around a whole new version of what makes us tick. When someone says they are not drinking, the word “boring” appears in a speech bubble above their head. It’s an assumption we tend to make, but I am hoping I can prove the naysayers wrong because it’s OK, amazing actually, being sober.

Written by Paul Hemphill between November 2025 and February 2026.

The following supplementary sections were compiled with the assistance of an AI language model. In That Howling Infinite has deep reservations about the use of  chatbots – see, for example, The promise and the peril of ChatGPT, and but blimey! they are useful and uber efficient.

I asked ChatGPT why I felt a certain guilt and hesitation when having that weekly drink?

After interrogating the published literature, the chatbot replied:

It isn’t really guilt It’s not shame about drinking, not fear of relapse, and not a sign that anything is out of control. What you’re feeling is quieter than that: a brief internal hesitation. Alcohol once had a role in your life. It wasn’t just a drink; it functioned as a regulator. When things felt tense, flat, overwhelming, or sharp, it adjusted the tone. It softened edges and shifted mood. That use may not have been dramatic, but it was real. At some point, you made a conscious decision to step back from that role. You examined it and reduced its authority. Maybe you didn’t ban it outright, but you stopped treating it as the default solution. That was a deliberate, adult choice.

Now when you pick up a glass, even casually, your nervous system pauses. Not because you’re about to spiral. Not because you’re craving more. Not because you’ve failed. It pauses because something that used to be automatic is no longer automatic. The body remembers patterns long after the mind revises them. Dependency in this sense wasn’t only chemical; it was procedural. It was a learned sequence: when pressure rises, do this. When the present feels too sharp, adjust it this way. That sequence still exists in memory. So when you pour, hold, and sip, your system runs a quick internal check: are we choosing this, or reverting to an old move? Is this pleasure, or regulation? The flicker you call guilt is that check-in happening in real time.

Ritual adds another layer. Pouring a drink is structured. It creates a small frame around a moment and signals transition — the day is ending, the evening is beginning. Rituals stabilize us; they give shape to time. But if the original purpose of the ritual changes — if it’s no longer needed for emotional regulation — the gesture can feel slightly off. The act remains, but its old meaning doesn’t fully apply. That mismatch creates unease.

So what’s happening is simple. You changed the contract with yourself, and your nervous system is making sure you meant it. This isn’t weakness; it’s self-trust developing. In the past, the drink required no reflection. Now it does. That pause is evidence that the behavior is no longer automatic. Change often feels like this before it settles. Old habits don’t disappear in drama; they fade through moments of awareness. The body checks in. The mind answers. Over time, the friction lessens. The feeling isn’t moral failure. It’s an old coping mechanism becoming optional, and the fact that you notice it means you’re conscious of your choice. And that’s a quietly healthy place to be.

What’s Actually Happening

Next, I asked my pet chatbot to parse what I’d written above and to explain what was going on in my body and in my mind. Its response was fascinating and illuminating. It wrote:

What’s striking about this period is not the drama of withdrawal, but its absence. That absence is itself informative. It suggests that alcohol, over time, had stopped functioning as a sedative and had become a source of background interference – subtly fragmenting sleep, compressing attention, and lending artificial momentum to the day.

Start with sleep. Alcohol is often mistaken for a sleep aid because it hastens unconsciousness. What it reliably does, however, is fracture sleep architecture. REM cycles are shortened and disrupted; cortisol rises in the early morning hours; the nervous system is nudged toward vigilance just when it should be standing down. Remove alcohol, and the result is not necessarily more dreams or vivid imagery – often the opposite. Sleep deepens, becomes less narratable, less memorable. The absence of the 3am anxiety, the end of clock-checking, suggests a circadian rhythm no longer being chemically jerked out of phase.

This is not REM rebound so much as REM normalisation. The mind does not perform theatrics; it gets on with its work.

Circadian rhythm follows. Evenings lengthen not because the clock has slowed, but because the body is no longer negotiating with itself. Alcohol compresses time by dulling perception and accelerating fatigue. Without it, the day unfolds at a more even tempo. There is less urgency to escape the evening, less unconscious bargaining with “later.” Time feels reclaimed because it is no longer being quietly traded away.

Physically, the changes are cumulative rather than spectacular. Lower baseline anxiety suggests reduced cortisol load. Fewer irritation spikes point to a nervous system no longer oscillating between chemical sedation and rebound arousal. Skin improvement reflects vascular and inflammatory changes rather than vanity; weight loss hints at metabolic recalibration. None of this arrives as euphoria. It arrives as steadiness.

Mentally, the shift is subtle but consequential. Alcohol narrows attention while giving the illusion of focus. Without it, attention broadens. Several things can be held at once, not with brilliance, but with tolerance. The mental landscape feels altered not because it has been transformed, but because it is no longer being continuously nudged off balance. What emerges is not sharpness so much as room.

The fatigue that remains – the existential tiredness – is not a failure of repair but the cost of re-engagement. Alcohol had been doing invisible labour: smoothing transitions, easing social friction, advancing momentum. Without that chemical assistance, effort becomes evenly distributed across the day. Life asks to be met directly. This is tiring in a way sedation is not.

Perspective shifts follow physiology. The world does not become brighter; it becomes clearer. Edges sharpen not because reality has improved, but because one is no longer slightly elsewhere while moving through it. Presence increases by degrees, not declarations. Emotion flattens in places, but also steadies. The fuse lengthens, or perhaps fewer sparks reach it.

None of this constitutes revelation. It is adjustment – systems returning to their own tempo after years of external modulation. The body is not celebrating; it is recalibrating. The mind is not announcing a new identity; it is learning how to occupy the old one without chemical assistance.

If there is a single through-line, it is this: alcohol had been quietly negotiating with time, attention, and effort on my behalf. Removing it returns those negotiations to me. The work is greater. The rewards are quieter. But less of life now passes by unattended

Here’s a clear-eyed, unsentimental checklist of what many people notice after giving up alcohol after decades of use. Not everything happens to everyone, and the timeline isn’t tidy – but this is the landscape.

1. The First Weeks: The Body Re-negotiates

What to expect
• Poor or fragmented sleep (counter-intuitive, but common)
• Night sweats, vivid dreams
• Sugar cravings; appetite swings
• Fatigue that feels existential, not just physical
• Headaches, gut grumbles, reflux shifts
• Mood volatility: flatness, irritability, sudden melancholy

What’s actually happening
• Your nervous system is recalibrating after decades of alcohol-mediated sedation.
• GABA and dopamine systems are under-firing; cortisol can spike.
• The liver, pancreas, and gut microbiome are changing pace.

Look out for
• Withdrawal symptoms beyond mild (tremor, confusion, heart racing) → medical advice immediately
• The false conclusion: “This proves booze was helping me.” It wasn’t. This is readjustment.

2. Weeks 4–12: The Emotional Weather Front

What to expect
• Clearer mornings – but emotionally thinner afternoons
• A strange grief (for ritual, for identity, for the “old companion”)
• Boredom with sharp edges
• Anxiety that feels newly naked
• Moments of startling clarity (“So that’s what I was avoiding”)

What’s happening
• Alcohol was not just a drug; it was a regulator of feeling.
• You’re now encountering emotion without chemical mediation – for the first time in decades.

Look out for
• Over-romanticising past drinking
• Replacing booze with compulsive sugar, scrolling, or righteous self-discipline
• Social withdrawal out of awkwardness rather than choice

3. Months 3–9: Cognitive and Physical Shifts

What to expect
• More stable energy (not euphoria – steadiness)
• Improved memory and verbal fluency
• Less background anxiety; fewer spikes
• Better digestion, skin, blood pressure
• Weight changes (either direction)
• A recalibrated sense of time (evenings feel long)

What’s happening
• REM sleep improves.
• Neuroplasticity increases.
• Inflammation decreases.
• Your baseline is quietly rising.

Look out for
• Impatience: “Is this it?”
• The urge to declare the project finished
• Moral capture in reverse (becoming evangelical or brittle)

4. The Identity Question (Often the Hardest Part)

What to expect
• A sense of being socially “out of phase”
• Re-evaluation of friendships
• A quieter confidence – but also social self-consciousness
• The loss of an easy shorthand for intimacy

Key realisation
You didn’t just stop drinking. You stopped being someone who drinks. That identity shift takes longer than detox.

Look out for
• Believing fun is gone rather than different
• Mistaking sobriety for austerity
• Confusing clarity with certainty

5. One Year and Beyond: The Long View

What many report
• Fewer regrets
•  A calmer moral centre
• More reliable moods
• Better resilience to shock and grief
• A sense of having reclaimed time

But also
• No miracle cure
• Life remains tragicomic
• Pain still visits – just without anaesthetic

6. Practical Guardrails (Worth Having)
• Medical check-in (liver, BP, glucose -baseline matters)
• Sleep hygiene (don’t expect instant improvement)
• One or two sober rituals you enjoy
• language for saying “I don’t drink” that doesn’t invite debate
• At least one person who knows the whole story

Final Note (Not Sentimental, Just True)

After fifty years, alcohol is not merely removed; it leaves a negative space.
That space can feel eerie before it feels free.

But many discover – quietly, without fireworks – that what returns is not youth or joy or certainty, but something rarer: presence without rehearsal.

Liquid Assets: Britain and Australia Compared

Compared to Britain, Australia’s drinking culture is less about the pub as a fixed social institution and more about alcohol as a social lubricant woven through the grain of everyday life. Both societies drink – deeply, historically, sometimes unwisely – but they narrate that drinking differently, and in the telling they reveal something about themselves.

Britain’s drinking culture is, in its classical form, pub-centred, ritualised, and faintly class-coded. Once upon a time, it was centred on the local, but nowadays this is more often  seen in television dramas, Drinking is public and scheduled; it has hours and habits. One goes out to drink. The pub is both setting and container, a space that brackets excess within custom. Even intoxication feels regulated – permitted, but on a leash. The building holds it. The ritual absorbs it.

Excess exists, of course – William Hogarth drew it, temperance preachers thundered against it, and social realists filmed it – but when British culture foregrounds alcohol, it tends to moralise or satirise. Gin Lane is not a celebration. Nor, for that matter, is the kitchen-sink drama. More often, drinking simply sits in the background of the national story. The pub is infrastructure: as assumed as rain, as unremarkable as queueing. Britain drank as much as anyone – often more- but it did not always feel the need to mythologise the fact.

Australia is different. Here alcohol travels. It moves from pub to barbecue to beach to backyard to footy to festival. It is less ceremonial and more ambient – less an event than an accompaniment. Drinking does not structure leisure; it accompanies it, like a soundtrack humming under the scene. Climate plays its part. So does the mythology of mateship, egalitarianism, and a lingering suspicion of restraint (especially if that restraint looks imported or officious). To drink is to belong; to refuse can still read as faintly antisocial, a quiet opting-out of the circle.

This mobility produces a culture more diffuse and more permissive. Where Britain historically contained drinking within the architecture of the pub, Australia lets it spill across open spaces – geographical and symbolic alike. The result is that alcohol becomes not merely a habit but a marker of identity. In Britain people go out to drink; in Australia, drinking often comes along for the ride.

There is a sharper edge to this. Australia’s long struggle with binge drinking, alcohol-fuelled violence, and the normalisation of getting “smashed” – particularly among young men – has required interventions that would feel oddly alien in Britain: lockout laws, public health campaigns, regulatory skirmishes over closing times. Britain, too, has known its laddishness and its Friday-night casualties, but the conversation there increasingly circles moderation, dry months, craft beer over quantity. Australia still wrestles with the idea that having a good time might not require obliteration.

Yet the deepest difference lies not in units consumed but in cultural emphasis. Alcohol features more visibly – more symbolically – in Australian historical imagination than in Britain’s, even when the raw consumption figures do not justify the disparity. In Britain, the pub is a setting. In Australia, the pub and the bottle become characters.

From convict songs and bush ballads to Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, from the sly grog shop to the corrugated-iron bar, drinking is bound up with survival, loneliness, defiance, rebellion against authority, and the fragile solidarity of men (usually men) scattered across a vast continent. Alcohol functioned as social glue in isolated, male-dominated frontier societies; as informal currency; as meeting point; as small theatre of resistance to discipline and hierarchy. The drink carried narrative weight. It meant something.

Britain, by contrast, rarely needed to turn alcohol into allegory. It was too embedded, too infrastructural. One drank and moved on. When the bottle demanded attention, it did so as problem or parody, not myth.

So the divergence is this: Britain drank deeply; Australia wrote about it. Britain drank within a culture; Australia fashioned a culture of drinking. One anchored excess to institution and habit; the other wove it into atmosphere and identity. The difference is subtle until the night grows long. Then it shows – in the stories told the next morning, in whether the pub remains the frame or the whole scene dissolves into open air.

Liquid assets indeed: in one country, stored in barrels behind the bar; in the other, poured into the national imagination, where they continue to circulate – warming, bonding, sometimes burning – long after last orders should have been called.

This is no AA Tract

In my conservations with ChatGPT on the subject of the renunciation of liquor, two prior conversations, it seemed like the chatbot had been rifling through the textbooks of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not that I criticise it for that. I get it. I challenged it with this suspicion, and the following was the chatbot’s reply;

I understand why it sounds that way – but what it was doing wasn’t rifling through AA so much as circling the same human terrain AA mapped early and named bluntly.

AA didn’t invent dependency, ritual, permission, or the idea that substances become solutions rather than pleasures. It just systematised them in a moral-spiritual register that’s become culturally dominant. I was working from a phenomenological and neurological lens, not a confessional one – closer to William James than Bill W., closer to habit, embodiment, and meaning than to surrender or sobriety as creed.

A few clarifications, because this matters:

1. This is not an “alcoholic narrative.”
Nothing you wrote resembles loss of control, compulsion, or denial. What you’re describing is post-use reclassification. The substance has been downgraded from instrument to object. That transition produces unease even in people with no addiction history whatsoever. AA language often colonises that space because it’s one of the few vocabularies we have – but the experience itself is broader, older, and not diagnostic.

2. AA talks about morality; you’re talking about permission.
AA frames the problem as moral failing corrected by spiritual realignment. Your description is about authority over state change. Who gets to authorise alteration? The self, the habit, the past, the ritual? That question belongs as much to philosophy and cognitive science as to recovery culture.

3. Ritual ≠ relapse.
AA tends to collapse ritual, memory, and desire into a single danger zone. What I was describing is subtler: ritual persisting after necessity has passed. That’s not pathology; it’s what happens when meaning lags behind behaviour. Cultures deal with this all the time – retired uniforms, obsolete ceremonies, ghost gestures.

4. The nervous system doesn’t speak Twelve Steps.
Bodies remember patterns without subscribing to ideologies. When a former regulator reappears, the system flags it. AA interprets that flag as temptation or warning. I read it as adaptive caution – the organism noting that a previously high-leverage tool is back in view.

So yes – there’s overlap, inevitably. AA has been loud and long-lasting, and it’s soaked into the language. But what we’ve been doing is closer to descriptive anthropology of the self than to recovery doctrine.

If AA says, “This is dangerous; abstain,”
what you’re saying is, “This used to mean something. It doesn’t mean that anymore. Why does the gesture still echo?”

Those are very different questions – and yours is the more interesting one.

 

 

Let Stalk Strine – a lexicon of Australian as it was once spoken (maybe)

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

How’s your ebb tide?
Do you sign on the dotted lion?
Is your tea nature Orpheus Rocker?
Who is Charlie Charm Puck in ‘Waltzing Matilda’

Back in London in the early seventies, when Earl’s Court in Kensington was such a mecca for itinerant Australians that it was known in London and in Australia as Kangaroo Valley, I was acquainted with many expatriate and transient Aussies. Indeed, I married one I’d met at the School of Oriental and African Studies where we were both studying.

Breaking free of the cultural confines of their conservative country, many young Aussies overcame historian Geoffrey Blainey called “the tyranny of distance” by flying across it or joining the famous Hippie Trail from Southeast Asia to what many still referred to as “The Old Country”. Some became household names, including actor Barry Humphries, writer Clive James, art critic Robert Hughes, journalists John Pilger, lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, fashion designer Jenny Kee and sociologist Germaine Greer, and bands like The Easy Beats and The Bee Gees, who were actually Poms returning home, and the Seekers. By far the most controversial were the editors of Oz Magazine, Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and Martin Sharpe, the defendants in the infamous Oz Trial of 1970, at the time, the longest obscenity trial in British legal history, and the first time that an obscenity charge was combined with the charge of conspiring to corrupt public morals. See The Australians who set 60s Britain swinging 

Most, however, were just ordinary folk, and they were so ubiquitous in London that they were often the butt of jokes (mostly good natured) and comedies, as personified in the cringeworthy uber-Coker Barry McKenzie which featured in Nicholas Garland’s comic strip in the satirical magazine Private Eye and Bruce Beresford’s dubious directorial debut, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. 

I was fascinated and highly amused by the Aussie’s accents and their many hilarious colloquialisms, including “I’m as dry as a dingo’s conger” and “flat out as a lizard drinking”. To assist my communication with these antipodean strangers, I purchased a little lexicon assembled by Professor Afferbeck Lauder of the University of Sinny. I was assured that this was exactly how Strine was spoke by dinkum Strayans.

When I emigrated DownUnder a few years later, I found that very few natives spoke proper Strine – though there was The Paul Hogan Show – that the Australian accent was perpetually evolving due to the country’s exposure to outside cultural influences – especially American and British – and its increasing multiculturalism.

Rereading Let Stalk Strine recently, I found was a little like opening a time capsule or deciphering a text of Chaucerian English, though vagrant traces of the old vernacular linger still in such “Australianisms” as nukelar, envimint, gomint, and, of course, Straya. But even the use of words such as these is not widespread, and usually confined to interviews with National Party politicians and Pauline Hanson.

The book is still available, and although air fridge Strines and new Strines no longer speak the lingo, it is picture of the strine wire flife half a century ago.

Here are some of my personal favourites. They’re still pretty grouse after all these years.

There’s “baked necks” and “egg nishner”, “garbled mince” and “nairm semmitch”, the public speaking opener “laze and gem…”, and the nursery rhyme Chair Congeal. There’s idioms like “fitwer smeeide” and “fiwers youide”, translated as “if I were you, I would” and “if I were you, I’d…” as in “fitwer smeeide leave him. He saw-way sonn the grog” and “fiwers youide leave him anode goan livener unit”. And there’s the prefix didjerie as in “didgerie dabout it in the piper” and “ didgerie lee meenit or were you kidding”, and, of course, “he plays the didgerie do real good”.

My personal favourite, relevant, apt even, to this day is “Aorta”.

To quote the author, it is “the personification of the benevolently paternal welfare state to which all Strines – being fiercely independent and individualistic- appeal for help and comfort in moments of frustration and anguish. The following are typical examples of such appeals. They reveal the innate reasonableness and sense of justice which all Strines possess to such a marked degree: “Aorta build another arber bridge. An aorta stop half these cars from cummer ninner the city – so a fella can get twerk on time”. “Aorta have more buses. An aorta mikey smaller so they don’t take up half the road. An aorta put more seats in ‘em so you do a tester stand all the time. An aorta put more room in ‘em. You can tardily move in ‘em air so cradled. Aorta do summing about it.”

For more on Australia in In That Howling Infinite, see Down Under

Al Stewart’s Soho (needless to say …)

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Soho feeds the needs and hides the deeds, the mind that bleeds
Disenchanted, downstream in the night
Soho hears the lies, the twisted cries, the lonely sighs
Till she seems lost in dreams
Al Stewart, Soho (needless to say) (1973)

Whenever I recall London’s Soho in the sixties, I always think about my bedsitter days in the city in the early seventies and also, British singer-songwriter Al Stewart’s over-orchestrated but quite excellent debut album of 1967, Bedsitter Images. 

My bedsitter images

My bedsitter images

You could say that I knew Al Stewart’s London ‘ere I first knew London. I bought the album when, as a sixth former, I first saw him perform at the famous Jug o’ Punch folk club in Digbeth, Birmingham, run by The Ian Campbell Folk Group.  I’d go there regularly with my schoolmates – we saw some great singers, including a young Joni Mitchell in the summer of 1968 – it was love at first sight, and I bought her first album there too: Songs from a Seagull). Al may have autographed his record – I can’t recall. It was stolen from my bedsit room in Reading in 1970 along with many of my favourite discs – including that one of Joni’s.

Maybe it’s about what here in Australia – borrowing from our indigenous compatriots – we might call “spirit of place”: the association with the streets within a hop, skip and an amble from Old Compton Street out into Shaftsbury Avenue and that bookshop in Charing Cross Road, the opening verse of the second track Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres, and that flat in Swiss Cottage, a suburb I used to frequent in the seventies when several of my friends lived there. You can listen to the whole of album below.

In a trawl through my back pages (OK! Enough with the Bob Dylan already!), wrote of my early encounters with Soho:

”As a sixth former, I’d often hitch to “swinging” London for the weekend, to explore the capital and visit folk and jazz clubs, kipping in shop door-ways and underground car parks under cardboard and napping wrapped in newspapers, and eating at Wimpy bars and Lyons teas houses”.

And naturally, I discovered Soho, a bright, colourful and disreputable warren of narrow streets behind the theatre-strip of Shaftesbury Avenue, with its mix of cafés, trattorias, delicatessen, book shops and strip clubs – and Carnaby Street, internationally famous by then as the fashion mecca and the “place to be” of “Swinging London”.

“… the motorway from Birmingham to London was a road well-traveled. In my final year at Moseley Grammar, I’d often hitch down to London for a weekend with pals who’d gone there before. We’d hang out at cheap and cheerful Pollo’s Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street in Soho and the Coach and Horses across the road, and go to Cousins folk and blues joint in a cellar in nearby Greek Street, and the 101 Jazz Club off Oxford Street. Bunjies folk cafè and Ronnie Scott’s jazz club were just around the corner. After a meal or a pint, I’d often catch the last tube to the end of the line closest to the M1. I can’t recall how many times I headed off into the night; and there were always drivers on the road at the witching hour. I guess many folks “get the urge for going”, as Joni sang back then, “and they had to go …” And in those generous times, people were happy to offer a lift to a wayfaring stranger – gentle souls who would not leave strays stranded by the dark wayside; lonesome folks seeking company and conversation in the dark night of the soul; curious people wondering why a young man would hitch the highways in the middle of the English night”. There’s more in  Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1.

Pollo. The café at the end of the motorway

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, walking the streets of Soho in the rain. Warren Zevon

There was something vicarious in ithe seedy, needy, greedy vibe of the priapic songs on Al’s follow up albums. An old friend and Al Stewart fanboy who has now passed on called them aural masturbation. Although there were many “love chronicles”, the title track of his second album, Al also wrote about melancholy middle aged suburban couples, historical events and more, with the odd foray into poetic mysticism, self-reflection, and also, nonsense. And some excellent instrumentals – he is an imaginative and flamboyant guitarist. My flat mates and I were all fans of Al back then, and went to most of his gigs when he played in London. Here’s one of our favourite ‘history’ songs:

In the early seventies, when a girlfriend started going out with Al, I actually got to know him for a brief while. Indeed, once, when he played in Birmingham Town Hall, me and a couple of pals drove up to my old hometown to see him, and after the show, invited him back to my folks’ place for a late night fry up. My mom reckoned he need fattening up. And afterwards, she and Al sat in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about pop music. “I love Cat Stevens”, mom said. “Oh, I much prefer the Incredible String Band”, said Al. “Oh, they’re very weird, but Paul like them!” She said. Then they got talking about Mick Jagger. And my dad, in the sitting room, said to us others gathered there, and referring to Al’s stature, said “there’s not much to him is there!”. Strange but nice how you recall these little things. The folks have passed on a long time ago …


Afterthought – Clifton in the Rain

Whilst I always associate Al Stewart with London and Soho, my favourite song is set in a Bristol suburb. Released in 1970, it is gentle, lyrical, and paints a beautiful picture of English weather – and it features the gorgeous Jaqueline Bisset.

The rain came down like beads
Bouncing on the noses of the
People from the train
A flock of salty ears
Sparkled in the traffic lights
Feet squelched soggy leaves across the grain
I took my love to Clifton in the rain

And all along the way
Wanderers in overcoats with
Collars on parade
And steaming in the night
The listeners in the Troubadour
Guitar player weaves a willow strain
I took my love to Clifton in the rain

Jacqueline Bisset
I saw your movie
Wondered if you really felt that way
Do you ever fear
The images of Hollywood
Have you felt a shadow of its pain
I thought of you in Clifton in the rain

There’s a nice retrospective on the Troubadour Folk Club in Bristol here:

English actress Jaqueline Bisset

Something About London

Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1

Blue remembered hills … memories of an old pal

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again
From The Shropshire Lad. AE Houseman

A few days ago, a Facebook message popped up out of the blue from England. It was from the niece of a friend – the daughter of his sister Jean. Heather wrote that they’d like to hear some stories of our time together. Predictably, as it so often is in these declining years, memories came flooding back.

Dave Shaw died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in in the town of Pershore, Worcestershire, on Saturday 5th January 2013 at the age of 64. He was farewelled at his beloved Pershore Abbey, an historic church I knew well from many visits to his home, on Wednesday 23rd January. I hadn’t seen him since my visit to England in the summer of 2005, and I learnt of his passing by accident. My mother passed away in Nottingham at the end of January, and as Dave would often drop in and visit her when he passed through Birmingham, I rang him up to tell him of her death. I tried his home many times without answer, so I reckoned I’d contact Pershore Council to get in touch with him. My google inquiries ended up at The Evesham Journal, a local Worcestershire newspaper. And that’s when I learned that he had gone.

The following is an expanded version of a piece published in the Evesham Journal on1st February 2013

Our back pages

Dave was my oldest friend –  from when we entered Moseley Grammar School in Birmingham in September 1960.

Moseley Grammar School, Birmingham

Through the Sixties, we came of age together, shared music, frequented folk clubs, did pub crawls through Birmingham, went to Birmingham City football matches (we were Blues fans and not supporters of Aston Villa, the other Brummie team) and hitchhiked to CND rallies and folk festivals. When we left Brum in 1967 and lived in other cities, we visited each other often and always remained in touch. Although I moved to Australia in 1978, I travelled to Pershore every time I returned to England and caught up with him and his family. One time, Dave came out to Australia. There’s a couple  of pictures here of that trip, featuring Dave, myself, my ex, Libby, and her sister Mary Jane, who was once a famous singer here in Australia but, sadly, took her own life in 1990. It must’ve been about 1982 as Libby and I separated the following year.

But let’s go back to the days when school chums became friends, the time when you began to address your mates by their christian names and not by surname, as was customary in grammar schools back then. Back to the Sixth Form when we began to “put off childish things” and as much as we could in our provincial and underage circumstances, “got with” the sixties zeitgeist and engaged with the wider world. We read the poetry of the American Beat Poets, our own Mersey Poets and John Lennon. We listened to the music, and particularly Bob Dylan. During school holidays, four of us, Dave, Peter Bussey, Malcom Easthope and myself, would go to the Jug o’ Punch in Digbeth run by the celebrated Ian Campbell Folk Group, to drink bitter, sing along to folk songs and listen to the likes of The Dubliners, Al Steward and Roy Harper, and, sigh, a young, gorgeous and melodious Joni Mitchell. We’d meet once a week at the Golden Eagle in Hill Street to talk politics and poetry, and read our own juvenile verse, before heading off to other pubs in the Birmingham CBD.

In those days, it was cool for teenagers to ride motor scooters – if they could get their parents permission. Several of my pals owned one, including Dave who’d bought a second hand lambretta. I recall this today because it reminded me of one of our better-heeled chums who had a brand new model. His dad was a publican, and one time, he threw a party at his father’s pub in Coventry and a mob of us got a lift there from another student who’d actually owned a car – a rare thing in those days. It came back to me today how that party ended for me and Dave. We both got very drunk, I tripped and sprained my ankle, and as we were driven back to Brum, I was sprawled in the back seat, and Dave, sitting beside me, chucked up. That wasn’t the last time I injured myself whilst inebriated. I can’t recall Dave getting as rat-arsed again. 

Later, we graduated to cannabis, and would toke at each other’s homes on weekends – one time, we hired a rowboat in Stratford on Avon and spent a stoned afternoon on the river. So Wind in the Willows. One lovely early summer’s day in 1969 when “we happy few, we band of brothers” camped out in my room at Reading uni, and dropped acid by the lake in nearby Whiteknights Park. It was a strange, trippy day, during which there was a police bust on my hall of residence, and we watched in amaze as people rushed down to the lake and threw many unidentified objects therein.

Fast forward to the eighties …

Though settled in Australia, I visited England often, and always took time out to catch up with Dave in either Birmingham or Pershore. When I was performing at folk clubs in 1987 and 1988, he acted as my local contact person. He also introduced me to his old friend Stan Banks, who’d served in World War II a bomb aimer and photographer on the night raids over Germany. On retirement from school teaching, Stan dedicated himself to the peace movement – which was how Dave came to meet him. Stan shared with us many enthralling and harrowing tales of his flying days.

Dave and I shared a common interest in the environment, cultural heritage and wildlife and we would exchange news on our endeavours. When we’d visit Pershore, he’d always take us out on a ramble or a drive to some out of the way place with an archaic name and take in a few nice country pubs on the way. On one visit, he gave me an instruction sheet for building boxes to shelter micro-bats. We have five of them around our home in northern New South Wales, and several of them are occupied all year around.

Green and progressive in word and deed, and dedicated to Pershore, Dave served as a Town Councillor for twenty-two years. Whenever we’d walk around town together or enter shops and pubs, folk would be always coming up to talk to him. At his funeral, the flag atop the abbey was flown at half-mast for the first time ever whilst fellow councillor Chris Parson praised him as “a giant of a man” – which I found apt but amusing considering Dave was short and slight of stature.

The feature photograph of him with his binoculars and bird book outside the glorious Pershore Abbey is a beautiful way to remember him.

Norman Linsday Gallery and Museum, Faulconbridge, NSW

Dave meets the Boyd Family, Palm Beach, NSW

When Heather read this story, she wrote:

“That is absolutely beautiful! Thank you so much, I hope you had as much pleasure from writing that as I did reading it. I laughed out loud and cried. Lovely. My mum will love this. ❤️ p.s I knew all along he was a stoner!! And with that asthma too? What was he like? I miss him a lot. X”

I replied:

“A lovely bloke. A gentle, laid back soul who was always in a calm, good mood. I recall a time when he visited me in London just as I was about to head off to the Middle East. I’d just had a typhoid shot and  was as sick as a dog – and he’d come all this way to see me off. He was so cool about it. What will be will be. Que sera sera! Did you know he was fluent in Spanish. It was one of his passions. He had Portuguese too, and I believe some Russian. I went through a “Russian phase” too in the early seventies, but ended up in the Middle East instead, by accident, and learned Arabic. Still learning. It’s effing difficult if you don’t have a gift for languages, but it keeps the old brain active.

Heather:

Sounds just like the Dave I knew. I am glad I found one person who he went to the Blues with him as I always wondered. Did you know we put some of his ashes at St. Andrews? Yes he was a language genius wasn’t he? Yes he was a language genius I think. Apparently he could get by in about 9 languages but he was very humble about it.

The ‘sixties … memories of London and Ireland

Dave is referenced many times in In That Howling Infinite, though, for privacy reasons, not by name. I also dedicated one of my poetry books to him: Tabula Rasa – Early Days. Below are a couple of extracts that are specifically talking about Dave.

“As I wrote in a recent trawl through my back pages, Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days: “… that motorway from Brum to London was a road well-traveled. In my final year at Moseley Grammar, I’d often hitch down to London for a weekend with pals who’d gone there before. We’d hang out at cheap and cheerful Pollo’s Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street in Soho and the Coach and Horses across the road and go to Cousin’s folk and blues joint in a cellar in nearby Greek Street, and the 101 Jazz Club off Oxford Street. Bunjies folk café and Ronnie Scott’s jazz club were just around the corner. After a meal or a pint, I’d often catch the last tube to the end of the line closest to the M1. I can’t recall how many times I headed off into the night; and there were always drivers on the road at the witching hour. I guess many folks “get the urge for going”, as Joni sang back then, “and they had to go …” And in those generous times, people were happy to offer a lift to a wayfaring stranger – gentle souls who would not leave strays stranded by the dark wayside; lonesome folks seeking company and conversation in the dark night of the soul; curious people wondering why a young man would hitch the highways in the middle of the English night. Yes, Café Pollo was indeed a significant landmark of my London days:. From Ciao Pollo di Soho – the cafe at the end of the M1

“In the summer of 1969, my brother and I and an old chum spent several weeks in an Enniscorthy that looked and felt like it had not changed since Aunty Mary’s day – so well portrayed in the academy award nominated film Brooklyn. Dressed as we were in hippie garb and sporting long locks, we cut incongruous figures in the pubs and at the local hop, and were so unsuccessful hitchhiking around the county that we walked many a long Irish mile. We hiked to Killane, Sean Kelly’s country, and inspired by the song, climbed upwards though heath and hedge to the top of Mount Leinster. We stayed at 13 Patrick Street and spent a lot of time sitting up on Vinegar Hill, beneath its round tower, looking down on the River Slaney and the town beyond. My brother was a keen photographer, and he took the following picture”. Thats Dave on the left, and me on the right. From The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir 

“On Vinegar Hill o’er the pleasant Slaney”

And a final vignette, also featured in Song of the Road,from 1970, I think: 

”One glorious English summer I arranged to meet up with my late pal Dave Shaw in Cambridge, where he was attending a summer school at the University, and go to the celebrated Cambridge Folk Festival. I clocked off from my work on the motorway, got home, just ten minutes away – I said we were close! – showered and packed, and headed to the Clock Garage roundabout and put out my thumb. I took the M1 to London’s North Circular, and cut across to the A10 (there was no M11 in those days) and, And, my stars were alignment on this night ride, arrived at Dave’s digs in time for breakfast.I don’t remember much of the festival bill, but American folk diva Odetta was singing, and also, our idol, Roy Harper, England’s high priest of angst.

I had to leave Cambridge around Sunday lunchtime, after Roy’s last set, to return to Brum for work on Monday. Rather than head back down to London, to save time – a quixotic idea when you are hitching – I decided to cut cross-country to connect with the M1 at Newport Pagnell – in those days before GPS and route planners, a cheap, creased road map from WH Smith was the best we had, plus a good sense of direction, fair weather and loads of luck. And such are the movements of the cosmos, that my one and only only ride took me to, yes, what was then the bucolic village of Newport Pagnell. It was one of those summer evenings in England, when the days are long, the air warm and languorous, and the light, luminous. Birds were singing and church bells were ringing for evensong, and in my mind’s ear, I’d like to imagine that cows were lowing and sheep were bleating. One could almost feel an ode coming on. So there I was, once more, at the services on-ramp, hitching a ride to Birmingham , and hopping aboard an old Land Rover for what was the slowest and noisiest ride ever – which took me almost to my door”.

Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1

The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir

Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days

“When we were younger, time appeared to move more slowly than in our later years. It is in our nature to imagine and indeed, re-imagine our salad days as the best of times and the worst of times. But looking back through our back pages, these years was perhaps no better or worse, no more significant or seminal than any era fore or aft. Like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, memories always seem a lot closer and bigger. When I’ve revisited roads and streets where I grew up, playing or sauntering or rolling home with a skinful in the pale moonlight, they are no way as wide, long or spacious as they are to the mind’s eye. Vivid memories can distort time, making you feel that that weren’t that long ago”. From Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment 

Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment

The Rite Stuff – the coronation’s pomp and circumstance

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

… remember in this country of yours that every man, woman and child who sees you will remember it with joy – remember it in the words of that 17th century poet who wrote these lines, “I did but see her passing by and yet I’ll love her till I die”.
Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies to Queen Elizabeth, Melbourne, 1963.

Watching a coronation is the constitutional equivalent of visiting a zoo, and finding a Triceratops in one of the enclosures.
British historian Tom Holland

The United Kingdom is alone in Europe in marking the accession of a new monarch with a coronation. Indeed, no monarchy can lay claim to a longer lineage – one reaching back it is said to the Bronze Age and rooted in history and religion, and also magic and superstition. Inside Westminster Abbey, ­audiences will be encouraged to follow six phases of what is essentially a medieval rite, some of it dating back to Anglo-Saxon kingship: the recognition, oath, anointing, investiture (which includes the crowning), enthronement and homage. Britain is indeed the only ­European monarchy to retain a religious ceremony.

So, anyone expecting that the upcoming coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla would be a thoroughly modern affair suited to the 21st Century is likely to be disappointed.

One significant innovation, however, is that millions of other Commonwealth citizens attending coronation events and watching on television will be asked to cry out and swear allegiance to the King with the public given an active role in the ancient ceremony for the first time in history.

King Charles III’s coronation service – the first for a British monarch in 70 years – has been modernised to include the first-ever Homage of the People and will also include faith leaders from Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist communities to better represent the make-up of modern Commonwealth countries. A new homage was written to allow “a chorus of millions of voices” to be “enabled for the first time in history to participate in this solemn and joyful moment”, Lambeth Palace – the office of the Archbishop, announced. The Archbishop of Canterbury will call upon “all persons of goodwill in The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of the other Realms and the Territories to make their homage, in heart and voice, to their undoubted King, defender of all … a great cry around the nation and around the world of support for the King” from those watching on television, online or gathered in the open air at big screens.

…. our strength in ages past

As these two highly entertaining and most informative articles makes clear, whilst the guest list is much shorter than that of past right royal enthronements, in the interests of public health bad safety, we are told.  There will be no silk stockings and knee breeches for the King or any of the peerage; the number The length of the ceremony has been shortened, for economy and impatient news cycle. The banquets and street parties have been exhorted to eat quiche, a nod to HM’s vegetarianism. The old times are by no means a’changin’. But, rites and rituals historically and hysterically archaic and arcane will prevail as will the imprimatur of the deity, the unctuous sanction of the demographically diminished Church of England and the rights and privileges of the theoretically hereditary aristocracy are upheld in time-honoured, anachronistic fashion.

The first is written by Australian constitutional expert Anne Twomey who has taken time off from her busy day-job explaining defending the coming referendum on the Indigenous and Torres Strait Island Voice to Parliament.  the second, by Observer columnist Catherine Bennett describes the amazing and unforetold apotheosis of soon to be Queen Camilla, Charle’s longtime paramour.

But first, a brief forward from celebrated/celebrity Anglo-Australian barrister and author Geoffrey Robertson. He is no fan of royalty, and is possessed of a sharp pen and a wit to match:

“In London, plans for the coronation of the King and Queen of Australia proceed apace. The ceremony is entirely unnecessary because Charles has been our lawful king from the moment of his mother’s death. This event has no meaning in law; it is merely a superstitious rite whereby God is supposed to anoint the King to run the Church of England, a church to which, according to our last census, only 9.8 per cent of Australians adhere. [Indeed, some 40% of Britain’s profess to having no religion, whilst Christianity accounts for a large diminishing proportion of believers in a celestial deity]

But sadly we will not see the most important bit, the spiritual centre of the ceremony, which the palace has decided must be censored. This is the divine appointment itself. Suddenly, in a Pythonesque moment, into the abbey will rush a team of Knights of the Garter carrying a large tent, which they will erect to cover the King and Queen, the Queen’s hairdresser, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Inside, unseen by the public, the King will change into a white shirt and be anointed with holy oil – on his head, his breast, and his hands – ladled from the coronation spoon. The holy oil has already been mixed in Jerusalem, with the traditional ambergris eliminated reportedly because the King supports “save the whales”.
The Queen is then anointed on her head, and the royal hairdresser steps forward to clean her up. The King quick-changes back into his purple robes, and the divinely appointed monarchs step out of the canopy and back into view for Charles to swear the coronation oath, “to maintain the Protestant Reformed religion and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England”. The King is at last allowed to sit on his throne (it’s only built for one) holding his orb and sceptre, to “receive homage” from the audience. It is uncertain whether Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will manage to swear to be “your liegeman of life and limb and of earthly worship, to live and die against all manner of folks, so help me God”.
Amen!

Meanwhile, down under …

On Saturday, when the Archbishop of Canterbury conducts the coronation at Westminster Abbey, he will not just be crowning Charles as the King of England, but the King of Australia as well – though we Aussies will not be granted a three day holiday for the occasion like our British cousins.

Australians should never underestimate Charles III’s deep emotional connection to this country.

When the late Queen was crowned in 1953, she promised “to govern the peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of [Her] Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs”. These were the nations which at the time were British dominions, and constituted what is still called “the Realm”, i.e. the countries which recognised the sovereign as their head of state.

The words of the coronation oath that Charles will take are briefer. As there are now 15 Realm nations (of which Australia is one), it has been decided not to list them all individually. His majesty’s promise will be to govern “the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, [His] other Realms and the Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining”.

And thereafter, to reprise, we will be exhorted to pledge homage “in heart and voice, to our undoubted King, defender of all … “

On matters monarchical, read also in In That Howling Infinite, The Crown – the view from Down Under; Beyond Wolf Hall (1) – Revolution Road, Beyond Wolf Hall (2) – Icarus ascending, and Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff 

Expect arcane pomp during King Charles III’s coronation

Anne Twomey, The Weekend Australian, 22nd April 2023

What can we expect from Charles’ coronation? Picture: AFP

The right to brandish a wand, bear a golden spur or produce a right-handed scarlet glove is more likely to conjure associations with Hogwarts than Westminster Abbey. Yet these rights have been bitterly fought over by British families for centuries, leading to a tense wait for the email summons to fulfil their dynastic destinies at the upcoming coronation.

The Sovereign’s Orb was made from gold in the 17th century.
The Sovereign’s Orb, made from gold in the 17th century.
St Edward’s Crown will be used to crown the King. It was made for King Charles II in 1661, as a replacement for the medieval crown which had been melted down in 1649.
St Edward’s Crown, used to crown the King was made for King Charles II in 1661
to replace the medieval  one melted down in 1649 under Oliver Cromwell.

For King Charles III, it will be quite the dilemma. Does he cut out the historical rights and duties of ancient British families to perform particular services at the coronation, such as the King’s Champion, so he can present a modern, relevant monarchy to the world? Or would doing so set the monarchy adrift from the history that justifies its existence?

It seems he is taking a halfway approach, with some of the eccentric pomp and drama surviving, while other roles have been swept away into the dustpan of history.

The golden spurs

One of the most fought-over roles has been to carry the golden spurs and present them to the King, touching them against his ankles.

The gold, leather and velvet spurs symbolise knighthood, and they were altered in 1820 for King George IV.
The gold, leather and velvet spurs symbolise knighthood

Spurs were first presented at the coronation of Richard the Lion­heart at Westminster Abbey on September 3, 1189. They symbolised his chivalry and his valour as a knight. John Marshal was accorded the honour of presenting them, and this honour has been passed down to his descendants.

The chronicler of Richard’s coronation recorded that there were “evil omens” at the service, including a bat that swooped around the king during the ceremony and a mysterious pealing of bells. Richard survived another decade until dying from battle wounds in 1199.

But the evil omen may have attached itself to the bearer of the spurs, as his line of descendants was sometimes disrupted, with one heir suffering summary execution after having been accused of sorcery in the 14th century and another being killed in a tournament. Second marriages and failures to produce male heirs resulted in disputes about which branch of the family had inherited its coronation rights.

Queen Elizabeth II on her Coronation Day, 1953 by Cecil Beaton.
Queen Elizabeth II on her Coronation Day, 1953 by Cecil Beaton.

In the 19th century, the role was dominated by the redoubtable Barbara, Baroness Grey de Ruthyn, a notable fossil collector and geologist, who carried the spurs with aplomb at the coronations of George IV, William IV and Queen Victoria. But her two marriages and a surfeit of daughters who were co-heirs led to a messy chain of inheritance, with four families fighting for the coronation honour ever since.

These disputes were resolved before each coronation by a court of claims, where barristers armed with large scrolls of family trees would battle it out before eminent judges. In 1902, the court held that none of the three claimants had proved their right to carry the spurs at the coronation of Edward VII, and left it to the king to decide. He diplomatically decided that Baron Grey de Ruthyn could carry one spur and the Earl of Loudoun could carry the other. The same division was applied at the coronation of George V.

But in 1936 the coronation court of claims inconveniently found that three claimants had established their claim – Lord Hastings, the Earl of Loudoun and Lord Churston. King George VI, probably wishing he had three legs, found he could not divide two spurs into three and appointed Lord Hastings and Lord Churston to carry one spur each. The same decision was made in 1953 at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

So who would win the right to carry the golden spurs at the coronation of King Charles III? The elderly Lord Churston died in February and the role instead has gone to Lord Hastings, a retired actor and farmer, along with the Earl of Loudoun, an Australian who lives in Wangaratta in Victoria. Each will carry one of the golden spurs.

As the Earl of Loudoun presents his spur, he might indulge a passing thought about how it could have been him on the throne. Some historians have argued that King Edward IV was illegitimate and that the throne should therefore have been passed down a different line to the current Earl of Loudoun.

But while his family still claims the right to present the golden spurs at the coronation, it does not make any claim to the throne.

Coronation of George IV in Westminster Hall: The Champion's Challenge, 1897. Picture: Print Collector/Getty Images
Coronation of George IV in Westminster Hall: The Champion’s Challenge 1897. 

The King’s Champion

If the earl did challenge the King’s right to the throne, he could have to face in mortal combat a retired accountant and farmer, Francis Dymoke, who is the King’s Champion. This role, which he traces back to an ancestor who aided William the Conqueror, is actually attached to the ownership of his family home, the manor of Scrivelsby. Anyone who owns the land is the lord of the manor and is therefore the King’s Champion.

It would be interesting to see how a real estate agent would price this unusual land attribute, but as the Dymoke family has held on to the land for many centuries the role of King’s Champion has remained in the family.

Originally it entailed wearing full armour and riding a horse into the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall. The champion would throw down a gauntlet three times in a challenge to anyone who disputed the king’s title. If the challenge was accepted, there was an obligation to fight to the death. The sight was so impressive, however, that no one ever challenged the champion, although one wonders whether any “sovereign citizens” today might take up the gauntlet.

British Bangladeshis welcome the King and Queen on a visit to Brick Lane in February. Picture: Reuters/The Times
British Bangladeshis welcome the King and Queen on a visit to Brick Lane in February

The greater challenge for the champion was to find a horse that could back out of Westminster Hall without facing its rear-end towards the king, knocking over any tables or defecating over the diners. The last champion to perform this feat at the banquet hired a circus horse that had been trained to walk backwards. But it is claimed that as soon as the horse heard applause from the guests, it assumed it was in the circus and started performing circus tricks, much to the consternation of the man in armour seeking to maintain his balance and the solemnity of the occasion.

As the banquet is no longer held, this picturesque role has ceased. But the King’s Champion was instead given the duty of carrying the Standard of England in the 1937 coronation and the Union Flag at the 1953 coronation.

While the current champion filled in his online form to claim his place, the most recent announcement by the Coronation Claims Office (which replaced the coronation court of claims) made no mention of a role for the King’s Champion. Perhaps the champion’s day is done, or maybe he will get back on the horse.

Queen Camilla. Picture: Imageplotter/Alamy/The Times
Queen Camilla. The Times

The scarlet glove

Another duty that attaches to the ownership of land is to provide a scarlet glove for the King’s right hand and to support his arm while he holds the royal sceptre during the coronation ceremony. This duty attaches to the lord of the manor of Worksop. From the coronation of Charles II, the owner of the land was the Duke of Norfolk, but in 1840 part of the land was sold to the Duke of Newcastle.

There was a dispute about whether he owned the right part of the land to claim the glove duty, but in 1902 the court of claims decided that he did, and the duke’s family fulfilled this role in the coronations of 1902, 1911 and 1937.

But by 1953 the duke had passed ownership of the land to a family company. The court of claims decided that only an individual, as lord of the manor, could provide the glove and support the king’s arm, so the Duke of Newcastle was excluded.

The manor of Worksop was later sold and it is unknown who owns it and whether they have made a claim to exercise their glove duty. If a prominent footballer, Russian oligarch or a pop singer is seen propping up the King’s elbow during the coronation, you will now know why.

Wands

Elizabeth II holds the royal sceptre at her coronation in 1953. Picture: Topical Press Agency/Getty/The Times
Elizabeth II holds the royal sceptre at her coronation in 1953 

The most dramatic moment at the end of the funeral rites for Queen Elizabeth II was when the Lord Chamberlain broke his wand of office and placed it on the queen’s coffin as it was interred.

But a coronation marks the beginning of a reign, so there are plenty of wands, rods, batons and sticks on display, including St Edward’s staff.

So far, we know that the Lord High Constable of Scotland, the Earl of Erroll, has won his right to carry a silver baton tipped at each end with gold.

The Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross.
The Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross.
The Sovereign’s Ring, left, and Queen Consort’s Ring.
The Sovereign’s Ring, left, and Queen Consort’s Ring.

The Lord Mayor of London, who traditionally carries the crystal mace, will participate. In addition, the Usher of the White Rod (as distinct from the Usher of the Black Rod, who is a parliamentary officer, and the Ushers of the Green Rod, Scarlet Rod, Blue Rod and Purple Rod who serve the royal household) has been invited to attend.

As for the white wand, it is traditionally wielded by the Lord High Steward of Ireland, but the Coronation Claims Office may have exercised the modern-day equivalent of the disarming spell Expelliarmus, leaving him wandless. We must await the coronation spectacle to find out.

Anne Twomey is a professor emerita at the University of Sydney and a constitutional expert.

As Charles is bestowed with mystical powers, so much for a secular coronation

The Guardian, 16th April 2023
The Church of England is doing its best to turn the new king and queen into latter-day deities

In 1996 more than half of England’s bishops thought Camilla and Charles should never marry. When, in 2005, they did, in a register office, 73% of those polled were opposed to her becoming queen. Although the late queen then denied Camilla the bespoke name checks in Anglican worship enjoyed (until their withdrawal in 1996) by Charles’s first wife, she did enjoy inclusion in regular state prayers for “all the royal family”, followed by her 2022 orison upgrade, one that can still shock unwary congregants out of a spiritual reverie: “Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee to bless Camilla the Queen Consort.

Now, after a transformation that might in more primitive times have been considered miraculous, the Church of England invites us in its new booklet, Daily Prayers for the Coronation of King Charles III, to celebrate Camilla’s “calling to a life of public service”. Church of Ireland liturgists beseech – or challenge – God, in another Camilla prayer, to “make her an example of virtue and godliness”. If this dismays Diana loyalists unable to forget the rottweiler years, Camilla’s acolytes could reasonably argue that a similar delay in St Augustine’s calling only added to his appeal. There may be hope, yet, for Prince Andrew.

Whatever the final shape of the coronation, traditionalists who fear – as recently reported – that Charles wants some all-faithsy sort of variations on the old template, should surely take heart from the conviction, as testified by feats of prayer-composition alone, with which the Church of England has assumed ownership of the rite. (Not forgetting the king’s probable awareness that a more modest or ecumenical coronation would likely come at considerable cost in Camilla homage.)

While the palace states, vaguely, that the ceremony “will reflect the monarch’s role today”, a letter from the archbishops of Canterbury and York reminds clergy that the ornate enthronement is a religious event: “through it we receive from Jesus”. Though, in a more easily observable transaction, it also receives from the king, in visibly enhanced status, while his mystical authority is, in return, supplied by the clergy in a style that might have verged on the obsequious at the Restoration.

In today’s new coronation prayer we are invited to pray, for example, on behalf of “thy chosen servant Charles our King and Governor”, “that we and all his subjects (duly considering whose authority he hath) may faithfully serve honour and humbly obey him”. A prayer for journalists, in particular, to remember, next time they are denied information on whatever finances he hath concealed.

Repeated arguments for a much edited or secular coronation, citing dwindling Christian belief as well as protagonists less obviously creditable than was Elizabeth in 1953, appear to have dented neither the church’s coronation ambitions nor the palace’s matching enthusiasm for spiritual choreography and knick-knacks. Only the Koh-i-noor has been sacrificed, to be sensitively replaced at the religious ceremony by the largest diamond in the world, the South African Cullinan. With decorative crosses over them, such jewels “remind us”, the prayerbook explains to the untutored, “that Jesus Christ is king over all”.

A royal guide to the “sacred regalia” confidently ignores the possibility that the non-religious, now outnumbering Christians in England and Wales, might find its inventory of treasures, if not absurd, roughly as meaningful as museum labels speculating on the importance of some prehistoric grave-good. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t like my own eagle-shaped chrism-dispenser with convenient removable head; “the oil is poured through an aperture in the beak”.

Non-believers must simply accept that, say, Camilla’s 3ft ivory rod with a dove “symbolic of the Holy Ghost” is too critical to national reverence to allow substitution with a replica more suited to the same nation’s acquired aversion to ivory. That this rod was brand-new on its introduction in 1685 merely underlines, to the devout, the still greater sacredness of an older spoon used in the anointing process. And that this year’s olive oil is literally from the Mount of Olives demonstrates, says the archbishop of Canterbury, “the deep historic link between the Coronation, the Bible and the Holy Land”.

If these links fail to convince younger, more secular, more republican-minded subjects, they may not automatically impress older ones whose presumed pro-Charles tendencies are potentially offset by long memories. Anyone who can recall him, aged 32, smirking “Whatever ‘in love’ means” at the 19-year-old Diana, may think there are worthier objects of prayer. And when did the virtuous Camilla, famously lazy and still a sucker for £735-a-night wellness retreats, start reminding clerics of King Solomon? Or is the deep religious message of the coronation one that the last queen’s conduct helped for so long to obscure: that with heredity in charge, the Church of England is never safe from supreme governance by a future version of Prince Andrew?

Either way, even given the accepted difficulties of picking spiritual leaders, it might have been wise for a church dedicated to the poor to invite fellow professionals to share the responsibility of anointing an irascible billionaire, however docile Charles might currently appear.

No wonder some of the coronation prayers read like a cry for help.

Day 27, “Self-control”: “As we remember the important tasks set before our King, and the challenges he will face, we pray that the fruit of self-control, which informs all our actions and decisions, will give him patience and strength…”

Amen.

Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist

Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

“Old stuff. The Old World is full of it. But objects speak.They tell us things”.

The word “loot” derives from from the Hindi lūṭ or “booty” either from Sanskrit loptra, “booty, stolen property” orluṇṭ, “to rob, plunder”. It is one of the many words that entered into the anglophone vernacular in the wake of European imperial expansion. Charles James’s “Military Dictionary, London 1802, defines it as “Indian term for plunder or pillage”, and “goods taken from an enemy”. Like the very concept of empire itself, the word is a loaded one, loaded with historical memories, with national identities, and with differential moralities. Are goods taken in war by the victors as reparations or recompense for blood and treasure spent? Are they stolen goods that the perpetrators have a moral obligation to return to their rightful owners – or, as is the case with most of the inheritors of once imperial patrimony, the current territorial powers that be.

These questions loom large in the commentatary of an entertaining if lightweight, and yet, most informative programme running on the ABC at the moment, called, provocatively, Stuff the British Stole.

In this Australian-Canadian production Marc Fennell, the affable host the ABC’s Mastermind, trots the globe recounting the stories of the artefacts that ended up in British and Australian museums, galleries and churches during the days of Empire. Arriving in the wake of global protests that have seen statues ripped down and colonial legacies scrutinised with renewed vigour, the series offers an accessible beginner’s guide to the British empire’s long shadow and sticky fingers. Along the way, he encounters academics and diasporic communities for whom these objects, and the dispossession, death and cultural erasure they represent, have been open wounds for generations.

Each artefact acquired during the age of Empire is a reminder of colonial rule, be this benign or oppressive as determined from the perspective of the observer. For a long time, Britain’s best excuse for having nicked and then held on to many of these priceless antiquities has been that in a world of chaos and destruction, its institutions have long been the safest place to keep its ill-gotten treasures. The programme asks rhetorically in commentary and actually to museum curators: “is there an honourable way of handing in to your stolen stash?” Shouldn’t you be handing it back to its people? “Is this loot” asks the narrator of the director of the Art Galley of NSW. It is a public art gallery”, he replies.” … it belongs to the people of NSW … it’s there for education and discussion … I think it’s best not to use words like this right away … it was coming out of the rubble in the middle of a war zone … its a bit problematic”.

Britain was not the sole perpetrator of plunder, mind. A lot of loot of found its way into the museums of other European empires and and also the United States and Russia. And it was acquired in much the same way, in a mix of altruism, academic inquiry, subterfuge and outright banditry.

In our own travels, Adèle and I encountered an amusing tale of imperial skulduggery. When we were in Damascus, we stood by the modest catafalque of the celebrated Muslim war lord Salah ad Din al Ayubi, known in the west as Saladin, as our guide recounted the story of how before the First World War, the German Kaiser visited the Levant, then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst visiting the Old City of Damascus, Wilhelm cast covetous eyes over the famous sultan’s casket. It is said that his entourage attempted to poach Salah ad Din’s tomb and spirit it back to Germany, but was intercepted by the Sultan’s police. By way of contrition, the emperor presented Damascus with a gaudy new catafalque more suited, he reckoned, to the last resting place of a renowned warrior. The two monuments now sit side by side in Salah ad Din’s small mausoleum beside the looming Roman wall of the splendid Umayyad Mosque, and pilgrims weep beside them. Our guide, a Syrian Kurd, upbraided elderly fellahin visiting from the countryside for praying at the empty fake – “don’t you know that Salah ad Din al Ayubi was not Arab but Kurdi, and he is in that tomb, not this one!”

But I digress …

Marc Fennell with Stuff the British Stole

A stone and a rock, a statue and a shirt …

Episode One kicks off a tad earlier than Imperial age, and closer to home with Scotland’s Stone of Scone, the big brick upon which Scottish kings were crowned until Edward I took it home to Westminster as a symbol of Sassenach conquest. It has seated the arses of British monarchs ever since, and though it was sent back home to Edinburgh in recent times as a recognition of Scottish nationalist sympathies, it will doubtless be lent to London for the enthronement of Charles, Third of His Name.

But the usual imperial suspects follow. There’s the Koh i Nor Diamond “gifted” to Queen Victoria from an adolescent Duleep Singh, maharajah of the independent but defeated state of Punjab, along with his empire, in the mid-19th century It is now in Britain’s Crown Jewels, tucked away in the vaults of Tower of London (the ones on show to the public are replicas). Once the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition, the diamond is now set in a crown that Queen Consort Camilla may or may not wear at her husband’s coronation in May. Britain’s royals have amassed a Smaug-like treasure trove of bling that might featured in future lists of Stuff the British Stole.

The Peking Shadow Boxer is an ancient bronze statue “rescued” from the ruins of war by a British sea captain during the Boxer Rebellion at end of the nineteenth century and now somewhere in the storerooms of the Art Gallery of New South Wales – the rebellion was one of Australia’s first overseas war. Then there is the story of a ceremonial war-shirt once worn by Native American Blackfoot chief Crow Foot, his “uniform’ or regalia, if you will, “gifted” (no one really knows how or why) to the Mounties during treaty negotiations when Canada was a British Dominion, and now, “in a place where it does not belong”, in London’s V&A Museum. This episode was particularly visceral. Coming almost contemporaneously with the recent revelations of what happened in Canadian “residential schools” that endeavoured to “take the Indian out if the Indians”.

We’ve heard that one in Australia too as we still struggle to come to terms with our past. As Mark Twain quipped, history might not repeat, but sometimes it rhymes. And it is passing ironic that the final episode is a brief, sadly predictable chapter in Australia’s frontier war in the early Nineteenth Century.

The hunt for Yagan’s head

Yagan was warrior and Noongar man whose people lived by what is now the Swan River near Perth in Western Australia. Settlement land grabs and tit for tat robberies and murders, and revenge for the deaths for his brother and father provoked him to violence. The colonial authorities put a price of his head, dead or alive, for a payback killing in 1834-35 and he was shot in the back by two young settlers. His head cut off and was paraded around the colony to send a message to his people.

It took over a century to track down Yagan’s head. Ken Colberg, a Noongar war veteran and elder, made it his mission to find it. He traced it to a house in London – a colonial lieutenant had brought it back to England and endeavoured to sell it to a surgeon who was interested in such “trophies “. The surgeon declined to purchase it so the soldier conveyed it to Liverpool where he flogged it to Liverpool Museum. Over a century later, on the instructions of the museum, it was buried in Everton Cemetery near Liverpool in an unmarked common grave along other with other remains including 22 still born babies interred by a local hospital. Two English archaeologists agreed to assist Ken in his quest, tracing the location of the grave and negotiating with the authorities and descendants of the deceased children to effect Yagan’s exhumation.

It was handed over to a Noongar delegation in Liverpool Town Hall on 28th August 1997 – the day Princess Diana died in Paris. Ken made a passing reference to this during the ceremony: “That is how nature goes … Nature is a carrier of all good things and all bad things. And because the Poms did the wrong thing, they now have to suffer”. That went down well in the. Australian media, his comment prompted a media with newspapers receiving many letters from the public expressing shock and anger. Ken later claimed that his comments had been misinterpreted.

Yagan’s remains were finally laid to rest in Australian soil, on the banks of the Swan River on Noongar country.

And so concluded the first season of Stuff the British Stole. But there’s more to come – season two is promised and is already available as a podcast. It includes Tipu Sultan’s mechanical Tiger from Bengal, India, presently in the British Museum, commissioned by the sultan and depicting a tiger munching down on a prostrate English soldier. That one was taken when Tipu met his doom at the hands of Clive (of India, that is, and looter in chief of Indian artefacts). There’s there’s a revered chalice from Cork from a time when catholic worship was banned by British authorities; the Gweagal Shield acquired by Captain Cook when he hove to in Botany Bay; and the Makomokai tattooed heads from Aotearoa. And, of course, the most celebrated of artefact of all, the Elgin Marbles that most folk associate with the British Museum rather than with the Athens Parthenon which has served successively as a temple, church and mosque before Venetian ships bombed it in the seventeenth century – and from whence the eponymous Lord Elgin lifted them on the dubious pretext of preservation and plonked them down in perfidious Albion.

The return of Yagan. Ken Colberg is in the centre

Which brings us to the mosaic …

This is the story that enticed me into Stuff the British Stole and thence, into this post. Having enjoyed half a century of interest in the Middle East, I was immediately sucked in. And as with Yagan’s los head, it too has as Australian connection.

It is April 1917, during the second battle of Gaza, and British General Allenby’s army of soldiers from Britain and its empire is pushing northwards across the Negev Desert towards Ottoman-ruled Gaza and thence Jerusalem. It’s not officially called Palestine yet – the old Roman name, favoured by theologians, romantics, and British tourists and politicians, would not enter world politics and controversy for a few years yet. The Reverend William Maitland Woods is chaplain of the Australian and New Zealand Anzac division, and soldiers of a Queensland brigade of the Australian Light Horse are digging trenches at Besor Springs, near Gaza. The Reverend is an amateur archeologist and made a habit of entertaining the troops with stories about the Holy Lands where they were campaigning. The soldiers uncover the remnant of a 6th Century Byzantine mosaic dating from 561-562, during the reign of Emperor Justinian. A excited chaplain seeks professional advice from curators at the Cairo Museum and is given permission to organise a group of volunteers to uncover and remove the remains. Sapper McFarlane of the New Zealand Wireless Troop was given the job of drawing what they uncovered. That’s him in the picture below.

The reverend convinces his higher-ups that the mosaic must be saved, and sixty three crates are sent to Cairo. Egypt at the time was a British “dependency “ (good word, that).

There then commenced a tussle between British high command in Cairo and the Australian defence department. By September 1917, the Australian Records Section was feverishly collecting battlefield trophies. Charles Bean the official ANZAC historian liked to call them “relics”, consistent with the reverential language of “spirit”, “sacrifice” and “the fallen” he afforded his soldiers. The British : “It’s not a trophy of war – you cannot have it – it may be returned” or words to that effect. TheAussies: we wanted stuff for our prospective Australian War Museum, and anyhow, we’ve shed blood in this fight”.

And so, what would be called the Shellal Mosaic ended up in Canberra. Most of it, anyway. Other fragments found their way to St James Church in the Sydney CBD and in a church in Brisbane. It is believed that some diggers took pieces too. In 1941, when the War Memorial was under construction, an appeal was sent out to ageing members of the light horse regiments to return the bits they’d souvenired, but there were few, if any, volunteers.

Concerned, with very good reason, that the treasure might not get all the way Down Under, Woods gathered up several baskets of tesserae from the site, the individual fragments from which a mosaic is made, and commissioned an artisan to fashion an exact replica of the inscription headstone, one metre by half a metrre. He gave this to a friend, a Colonel John Arnott who at war’s end, returned to his family property at Coolah in rural New South Wakes and embedded itinto his garden steps. The farmhouse and its steps are with the family today.

Ancient History interlude: What makes the Shellal Mosaic such a significant archaeological find? For one, it was a Christian chapel from the Byzantine period when Hellenic pagan culture was giving way to Christianity. For two, the mosaic was made of marble, an expensive material and not commonly used other than by the very wealthy. And for three, the use of exotic animals from different lands, such as lions, tigers, flamingos and peacocks, common images in Byzantine art, all paying homage to a central chalice, could point to other pagan races and lands embracing Christianity.

The Shellal Mosaic

Yet, the tale gets curiouser and curiouser …

During the excavations, Maitland Woods discovered a chamber beneath the mosaic. It contained human bones lying with its feet to the east and its arms closed on the chest. The bones and inscriptions on the mosaic got the reverend quite excited, more so than the more mosaic itself as a rough translation of the inscription suggested to him that let him they were the bones were those of St George – of England and dragon fame, not the Dragons.the league football team of the eponymous suburb in southern Sydney which was not established until 1920. They were not, however. Saintly George lived in intolerant pagan Roman times and was martyred for his faith. More likely, they belonged to a local bishop time called as George. Woods feared these would be sent to England in perpetuity so he packed them up and gave a ‘parcel’ to his friend, Reverend Herbert Rose, for safe keeping, and this found its way to Rose’s home parish of St Anne’s in Strathfield in Sydney’s inner west, where they are interred in the floor in front of the church’s communion table. Woods’ fears were justified. During the delivery of the remaining bones from Cairo to London, George’s skull disappeared, never to be seen again.

As Yagan would aver, heads do that.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

For further history stories in In That Howling Infinite, see Foggy Ruins of time – from history’s back pages

For stories about the Middle East, see A Middle East Miscellany

For stories about Australia and also the Frontier Wars, see Down Under – Australian history and politics 

Bronze, stone and possum fur

That was the year that was – don’t stop (thinking about tomorrow)

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone
Cold the heart and cold the stove
Ice condenses on the bone
Winter completes an age
WH Auden, For the Time Being – a Christmas Oratorio, 1941

I considered using a line from the above as the title of this retrospective of 2022.  It was written during 1941 and 1942, though published in 1947, when the poet was in self-exile in the United States and viewing the war in Europe from afar – although the long poem from which it has been extracted does not in itself reflect such pessimism. A more fitting title could be taken from another long poem that was published in another (very) long poem published in 1947 – Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world between the wreckage of The Second World War and of foreboding for the impending armed peace that we now look back on as the Cold War, with its oft-repeated mantra: “many have perished, and more most surely will”.

The year just gone was indeed a gloomy one, meriting a dismal heading. There are few indications of where it might take us in ‘23 and beyond, and my crystal ball is broken. Pundits reached for convenient comparisons. Some propounded that it was like the 1930s all over again when Europe constantly teetered on the brink of war. Others recalled 1989 with the fall of the aneroid Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, beware of false analogies. In 2022, things were more confused. The tides of history have often resembled swirling cross-currents.

Things, of course, might have been worse. There are, as I’ve noted in successive posts on my own Facebook page, many qualified “reasons to be cheerful”. The  year could have ended with Ukraine under Russian control. An emboldened China might have been encouraged to launch an assault on Taiwan. A red wave in the midterms would have buoyed Trump. And here in Australia, Scott Morrison might have secured another “miracle” election victory. The West could have retreated on all fronts.

Instead, therefore, I have selected a title that hedges its bets, because, to paraphrase the old Chinese adage, and the title of an earlier retrospective, we certainly live in interesting times and in 2023, and a lot of energy will be spent endeavouring to make sense of them – or, to borrow from Bob:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
B Dylan

The year in review 

Christine McVie, longtime and founder member of Fleetwood Mac departed the planet on 30th November this year. And contemplating this year’s posts in In That Howling Infinite, I could not help thinking about one her most famous songs. I recalled that it featured on newsreels of the revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you’ve done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

The song seemed quite apposite as the soundtrack of a revolution that had overthrown one of America’s many friendly autocrats. At the time, no one could predict what would happen, but, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was a time optimistic expectation. And yet its shock waves have reverberated and ricocheted in ways unimagined at the time.

As 2022 ends, with blood flowing on the streets of Iran and in the mullahs’s torture cells as young people rise up against a hypocritically brutal theocratic tyranny, we see again and again how that which goes around comes around.

Women, Freedom, Life

If the malign hand of history has literally reached out and gripped Iran’s young women and girls by their hair, it has also endeavoured to strangle the thousand year old Ukrainian nation in the name of an atavistic irredentism. Russian troops invaded the Ukraine on February 24, causing what has since become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Out if the spotlight of the world’s easily distracted attention. intractable conflicts lumbered mercilessly on – in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo and many other “far away  places with strange sounding names”.  

On the far side of the world, the USA continued to struggle with the reverberations of January 6th 2021. Donald Trump, like Dracula, has not gone away, and whilst his 2024 presidential run is looking increasingly shaky, he continues to poison the atmosphere like radioactive dust. The unfortunate folk of the United Kingdom endured three prime ministers during the year, including the shortest ever in the history of the office, and after two years of pandemic, are facing a bleak economic winter as well as a frigid actual one.

In Australia, it was the year of the teal – at least according to those who study the evolution of language, the year we lost a queen, our long-serving foreign head of state, and a king of spin, the down-fallen and disgraced Scott Morrison. And a sodden La Nina saw incessant rain drown large swathes of eastern Australia, visiting misery on thousands. COVID-19 mutated, the Omicron variant surging from beginning of the year, ensuring no end to the pandemic – today, it seems like everyone we know has had it, including ourselves (and we were soooo careful for a full two years!). As restrictions were cautiously lifted, we as a nation are learning to live with it. 

Politically, it’s been a grand year for the Australian Labor Party. With our stunning Federal election win in May and in Victoria in November, the Albanese government’s star is on the ascendant and it’s legislative record in six months has out run nine years of Tory stagnation on climate, integrity and equality – a neglect that saw the rise of a new political force in the shape of a proto-party, the aforementioned “teal”, named for the colour of the candidates’ tee shirts. The opposition has been reduced to a bickering and carping crew, and whilst Labor continues to ride high in the polls, the Coalition bounces along the bottom of the pond.

Lismore, northern NSW, March 2023

Flooded house aflame, Lismore March 2022

Christine McVie was just one of many music icons who checked out this past year. The coal miner’s daughter, Loretta Lynn, crooned her last, as did rock ‘n roll bad boy Jerry Lee Lewis and Ronnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who gave the boys in The Band their big break. Rock heavyweight (literally) Meatloaf took off like his bat out of hell and keyboard evangelist Vangelis boarded his chariot of fire.

Acclaimed British author Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall trilogy inspired back to back posts in In That Howling Infinite in 2020 found “a place of greater safety”, and French author Dominique Lapierre also joined the choir invisible. I had first learned about Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinians’ al Nakba in his O Jerusalem, and about the bloody tragedy that accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, in Freedom at Midnight, both books featuring in past posts. 

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

One could argue that the most significant departure was that of Britain’s longest serving monarch. Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost all of my life, as has the now King Charles III who was born four months before me, and of whom, as a nipper, I was jealous. I recall how I watched the queen’s coronation on a tiny black and white television in the crowded and smokey parlour of the boarding house run by a friend of our family. By happenstance, Netflix served up two over the top regal sagas to binge on: the penultimate season of The Crown, which whilst entertaining, was a disappointment in comparison with earlier seasons, and Harry and Meghan which was whilst excruciatingly cringe-worthy, was nevertheless addictive viewing. The passing of Her Maj reminded me that in my lifetime, I have witnessed three monarchs and eighteen British prime ministers (and incidentally, eighteen Australian prime ministers).  The public outpouring of grief for the Queen’s ascent to the choir invisible was unprecedented – the picture below demonstrates what the Poms do best …

The Queue along the Thames to pay respect to Her Maj

There were farewells much closer to home. My mediation colleague, aspiring author and friend John Rosley, and Beau Tindall, the son of my oldest Bellingen friend Warren, took off on the same day in May. Peter Setterington, my oldest friend in England – we first met in 1972 – died suddenly in London in March, and our friend and forest neighbour, the world-famous war photographer Tim Page, in August, after a short but nasty illness. Pete is memorialized in When an Old Cricketer Leave His Crease whilst Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride,is an adaptation of the eulogy I gave for Tim in September, one of many on that sunny afternoon day in Fernmount. It is a coda to Tim Page’s  War – a photographer’s  Vietnam journey, a story we published a year ago.

Tim Page by Joanne Booker

What we wrote in 2022

The ongoing Ukraine War has dominated our perception of 2022, from the morning (Australian time) we watched it begin on CNN as the first Russian missiles struck Kyiv, to the aerial assault on infrastructure that has left Ukrainians sheltering through a cold, dark winter. Two posts in In That Howling Infinite examined the historical origins of the conflict: Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism and The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism. “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom looks at the song that has become the rising’s anthem. None can predict the outcome – whether it will be a doomed intifada, the Arabic word that literally means a shaking off – historically of oppression – and figuratively, a rising up, like that in Ireland in 1798 and 1916, Warsaw in 1943 and 1945, and Hungary in 1956, or an Inqilab, another Arabic word meaning literally change or transformation, overturning or revolution.

The run up to May’s Australian elections inspired Teal independents – false reality in a fog of moralism.; and Australia votes – the decline and fall of the flimflam man. 

More distant history featured in Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure, the story of the Suez crisis of 1956 that historians argue augured the end of the British imperium, and the role played therein by longtime Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. Johnny Clegg and the Washing of the Spears is a tribute to the late South African singer, dancer and songwriter, and a brief history of the war that destroyed the great Zulu nation, setting the scene for the modern history of South Africa. And journeying further back in time to sixteenth century Ireland, there is O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song, a discussion of the origins of a famous and favorite rebel song.

Then there are the semi-biographical “micro-histories” in In That Howling Infinite’s Tall tales, small stories, obituaries and epiphanies. In 2023, these included: Folksong Au Lapin Agile, the evening we visited Montmarte’s famous folk cabaret; Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1, the story of a café that played a minor part in my London days, as described in detail in an earlier travelogue, Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Better read than dead – the joy of public libraries; The quiet tea time of the soul, an ode in prose to a favourite beverage; and The work, the working, the working life recalling the many jobs I took on in the sixties to keep myself in music, books, travel and sundry vices. 

We cannot pass a year without something literary. We celebrated the centenary of three iconic literary classics in The year that changed literature, and with the release of The Rings of Power, the controversial prequel to The Lord of the Rings, we published a retrospective on the influence of JRR Tolkien. One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter? – a personal perspective with an opinion piece by English historian Dominic Sandbrook, an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society which featured, in Unherd, an online e-zine that became a “must read” in 2022. A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling recalls the death in battle on the Western Front in 1917 of the poet’s only son, it’s influence upon his subsequent work, whilst Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow is an obituary for another poet, who seen a lifetime speaking truth to power.

And that was that for what was in so man ways a sad year. Meanwhile, In That Howling Infinite already has several works in progress, including a review of historian Anthony Beevor’s Russia – Revolution and Civil War, what King Herod really thought about the birth of baby Jesus, and the story of a famous and favourite British army marching song.

Best wishes for 2023 …

Death of a Son

That was the year that was – retrospectives

Life in Wartime – images of Ukraine

When an old cricketer leaves the crease

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

When the day is done and the ball has spun in the umpire’s pocket away, and all remains in the groundsman’s pains for the rest of the time and a day. There’ll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin, on a dusty pitch with two pounds six of willow wood in the sun.

It was a magical Sunday afternoon during an English Indian Summer in September 2008, an afternoon that evokes memories of long gone childhood and adolescence. I was England on my tod to surprise my mother on her 80th Birthday, and passing through London, I was staying with one of my oldest friends and his family in Muswell Hill. He asked me if I’d like to pop down with him to the local cricket club to down a few ales and watch a game.

Now, in all of my adult life, I have never been into spectator sports, and I haven’t watched a cricket match for over half a century. But I was enjoying the company and the craic, and thought “well, why not?” So there we were, sitting in the little members stand, drinking beer and calling out “well bowled!” and “well played, sir!” like a pair of old die-hards. In addition to his many other talents, Peter was an avid and talented amateur cricketer, and the game was his passion – he once considered a professional career and in retirement and was part of a peregrinating team of amateur players who would criss-cross the world giving kit and coaching to young people who lacked the skill and wherewithal to play. The visited some thirty countries in their cricketing odyssey.

Peter Setterington passed away in his sleep on Wednesday 23rd March, 2022. He was almost seventy five. We’d been firm friends for five decades. It’s 4am the following Sunday and I’m sitting here writing this eulogy in a hotel room on the fifty fifth floor overlooking Sydney’s Darling Harbour and listening to Roy Harper’s tribute to the game that is played in heaven. It’s cold and rainy outside and this echoes the emptiness I am feeling inside.

‘Twas in another lifetime

When the moment comes and the gathering stands, and the clock turns back to reflect on the years of grace as those footsteps trace for the last time out of the act. Well this way of life’s recollection, the hallowed strip in the haze, the fabled men and the noonday sun are much more than just yarns of their days.

1972. I was house sharing with former uni pals in London’s East Finchley. One of my friends worked for a market research company located on the top floor of an ornate Georgian building in Trafalgar Square. It’s still there – it’s the one with the little cupola on top. He talked about this very friendly, garrulous, and ambitious bloke who’d just joined the team. Not long afterwards a girl who also worked there threw a party in Romford, Essex and invited Chris and us flat mates. And so one Saturday evening in spring, we all headed over there.

The party is now a blur. I was introduced to Peter for the first time, but then proceeded to get blind drunk. I passed out on the bathroom floor and woke up in a flat near Hampstead Heath with the sun streaming through the windows. A kindly lass had volunteered to put me up for the night and Peter, who lived in close by in Swiss Cottage at the time, had driven us there. I think I was fully clothed. He rang me up a few days later to ask how I was, and we became fast friends.

His helping me out at that party when we were total strangers was an early display of the decency and generosity of spirit that he showed to me and to others on many subsequent occasions. When a mutual friend got himself into dire straits and seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, Peter made every effort to track him down until the trail went cold in Thailand. He was like that.

Later that year, my friends hit the Hippie Trail, ending up in Australia. I moved to a bedsit in Finsbury Park and commenced my Middle East studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. A year later, I moved in with two gay friends who had a big house in Highgate. I cleaned the place and lived there for free in a top floor flat. They would introduce me to friends as “the only queer in the house”. Peter would often drop in of an evening in an old red Post Office van and we’d pop over to Jack Straw’s Castle by Hampstead Heath for a drink. He ran a mobile disco on the side at the time, and the van was the “band bus”.

During my London days, we’d visit each other and he’d have great parties. Peter really knew how to enjoy life and to help others to do so to. In March 1974, he threw one for me at his Swiss Cottage home to celebrate my 25th birthday, to which I invited all my London friends. I recall walking home to Highgate across the Heath in the early morning mist.

I’d stay weekends now and then with Peter’s folks in Oxford – Spring and summertime walks in bucolic gardens, punts on the River Cherwell and Pyms on the back porch. So quintessentially English. If I recall rightly, his father was a teacher at the university, well read and very erudite. His mother, whom Freddie had met whilst he was on military service in the Far East, was a charming and beautiful Burmese lady who treated me like part of a delightful and happy family.

In 1978, my wife and I moved to Australia. But when I returned to the old country, I’d stay with Peter and Jenny, first in Finsbury Park, and later in Muswell Hill near the Alexandra Palace. His home was our home, and as the years rolled by, Adèle, my second wife, and I watched Peter and Jenny’s sons grow from childhood to youth to family men.

Over time, Peter rose higher and higher in the marketing world, eventually becoming a senior executive for Saatchi and Saatchi – until he rationalized himself out of a job sometime in the nineties. I recall once lending him book called Driving The Pigs To Market, a take-down of the marketing industry. It may still be somewhere on his crowded bookshelf , and though I’ve stayed at his place many many times over the years, and I’ve searched the shelves, but could never find it.

On the surface, we seemed an odd couple, Peter and I – him with him marketing shtick and business acumen, and me with my Middle East studies, music and poetry, and later, as a visiting Aussie. But in reality, he was much, much more than his marketing persona. He was a Renaissance man whose interests extended far beyond his day job – he was well read and loved music and was an avid fisherman, hedonist and wine buff, and above all, a consummate family man.

We had clicked immediately, and whenever we reunited, he’d collect us from the tube station ( a long track by shanks’s, and we’d just pickup from where we’d last left off years before, chatting away through the night about life, the universe and everything, and downing gallons of French wine.

A big man with an unquenchable zest for life, he was a force of nature. With his cheeky grin, loud laugh and pukka accent, Peter was and is and will remain so much a part of my London life – and London will never be the same without him.

Yours was a life well lived, old chum, and yes, “very well played, Sir!”

Fare thee well …

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, you never know whether he’s gone. If sometimes you’re catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly Mid-on. And it could be Geoff and it could be John with a new ball sting in his tail. And it could be me and it could be thee and it could be the sting in the ale, the sting in the ale.

For more about London in In That Howling Infinite, see: Back in the Day – my journey, in song and poetry; A Window on a Gone World – London days; Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Something about London; Ciao Pollo di Soho – memories a classic café 

There is a bench dedicated to Pete near the Grove Café, Muswell Hill,  London Greater London.

Sit, stranger. Take a load off…

Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

Soho (needless to say)
I’m alone on your streets on a Friday evening
I’ve been here all of the day
I’m going nowhere with nowhere to go
Al Stewart, 1972

… it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our gloves …
Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Too Much

Sometimes, out of the blue, a message from the old country triggers happy memories and sends us wandering through “the foggy ruins of time”. An old friend from my London days emailed me the other day, recalling how back in the day, I’d frequent a cheap and cheerful Italian café in Soho – what was then “swinging” London’s seedy, sexy and infinitely interesting red-light, hip-boutique and cool restaurant mecca. She’d laid down one wintry English afternoon to relax with a novel, and to her surprise, two pages were dedicated to that very same café.

So, as often happens these days, I was soon flicking through my back pages and disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind.

Cut to 1967 and pictures of a gone world …

The café at the end of the M1

As I wrote in a recent trawl through my back pages (OK! Enough with the Bob Dylan already!):

.“… that motorway from Brum to London was a road well-traveled. In my final year at Moseley Grammar, I’d often hitch down to London for a weekend with pals who’d gone there before. We’d hang out at cheap and cheerful Pollo’s Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street in Soho and the Coach and Horses across the road, and go to Cousins folk and blues joint in a cellar in nearby Greek Street, and the 101 Jazz Club off Oxford Street. Bunjies folk cafè and Ronnie Scott’s jazz club were just around the corner. After a meal or a pint, I’d often catch the last tube to the end of the line closest to the M1. I can’t recall how many times I headed off into the night; and there were always drivers on the road at the witching hour. I guess many folks “get the urge for going”, as Joni sang back then, “and they had to go …” And in those generous times, people were happy to offer a lift to a wayfaring stranger – gentle souls who would not leave strays stranded by the dark wayside; lonesome folks seeking company and conversation in the dark night of the soul; curious people wondering why a young man would hitch the highways in the middle of the English night”.

Yes, Café Pollo was indeed a significant landmark of my London days.

I discovered Café Pollo in the Spring of 1966 when I’d first hitched to London with school friends to take part in a Campaign for Nuclear Disbarment march. From ‘66 through ‘71, I’d go there whenever I was in town, and regularly when I ended up living there – right up to my departure for Australia in 1978. When I was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I’d go there for lunch after Friday classes with my best mate and soul brother Mike (we were born on the same day in the same year in a British city beginning with B).

So, for years and years I’d hung out at Pollo’s. Dined there, boozed there, courted there – almost always on spaghetti bolognese and Chianti with a sticky rum baba to follow. It was crowdy, noisy and smokey, and in winter, steamy and clammy – and “cheap as… “

Though I’d left Old England’s shores, I’d visit Pollo’s whenever I returned and catch up with old pals. When I became vegetarian, the bolognese was replaced with pesto pasta liguria or arrabbiata. When The Evening Standard and Time Out recommended it as an excellent “cheap eats”. I thought its glory days of low-key popularity were over. But it was always there, the same as it always was. The feature picture of this post was taken, I think, when Adèle and I were in England in 1987 – I still have that old Chinese denim jacket and use it for sitting around our bonfires in wintertime.

We continued to go there until 2005, when we were denied service as we just wanted a cup of coffee. The next time I popped by, in September 2008, it was gone. Indeed, it had closed soon after our disappointing coffee quest. Having served the impecunious for generations, it was, in the words of a classic London cafés blog, dismantled and dumped, to be born again as a classier, impersonal, cut-out trattoria – La Porchetta Pollo Bar.

But at least, the name and the memory live on …

Cheap, cheerful and unchanging …

Classic Cafés published an excellent obituary to this Soho icon. Here are some extracts:

“The Pollo, at 20 Old Compton Street, with its ox-blood booths, lapidus beanpole railings, contemporary ceiling, murals, top notch signage, and perfectly preserved light fittings always had hungry queues waiting outside. It remained the proverbial Soho institution for as long as anyone could remember. A proper bargain Italian with perfect ‘60s decor, friendly banter and a worryingly high turnover of chefs (there always seemed to be a ‘chef wanted’ sign in the window). “Cheap and cheerful” remains the operative term at the long-standing Italian café Pollo …

… The almost endless hand-written choice of pastas has now been typed up for easier interpretation, but otherwise the menu remains much the same as I remember it being 20 years back. The food is still hearty, the prices are laughable for central London, the coffee is rocket fuel – and the waitresses still insist on doubling you up in the booths with complete strangers …

… Plenty has changed in London. Fortunately, Pollo hasn’t … The Pollo often finds its way onto the ‘top cheap London eats’ lists, and it was the Evening Standard listing under budget eating that first nudged me in its direction a few years ago… It isn’t fancy. It is an Italian restaurant. The inside looks something like a truckers’ caff, with formica tables and little booths, and there is more room downstairs if it looks full. There isn’t a lot of space and the tables are packed in, but the food is good. The main courses consist of a variety (unsurprisingly) of pasta and pizza dishes, again the price range for these tends to be between £3 – £5. There are some risottos as well, and some meat dishes, such as chicken with rice or veal which are a bit more expensive”.

One toe in the Mediterranean …

As for the book my London friend was reading, which inspired her email and my jaunt down the rabbit hole (a pleasant one), The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, here’s what the protagonist had to sat about about our café de coeur:

“In late January 1989, Jennifer and I were sitting in a cheap Italian restaurant called Pollo in Old Compton Street, Soho. It was always full of students from Saint Martin’s our school around the corner because it offered its loyal impoverished customers three courses for a fiver. Jennifer had introduced me to Pollo when we first met. Once we discover spaghetti vongole and penne arrabbiata, it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our  gloves … She devoured a plate of spaghetti bolgnese even though she was supposed to be a vegetarian. While she drank water,  I knocked back carafe of red wine and ordered another one …. it was warm inside Pollo. Everyone was smoking and shouting us the waiters thumped plates steaming pasta on the formica table. A young man with a blue mohican was stubbing his cigarette in the avocado that had arrive on a plate. it was stuffed with something pink’.

Al Stewart’s Soho (needless to say …)

Apropos the song quoted at the beginning of this memories, whenever I recall Soho in the sixties, I always think about my bedsitter days in London to the early seventies and also, British singer-songwriter and musician Al Stewart’s over-orchestrated debut album of 1967, Bedsitter Images. I knew Al Stewart’s London ‘ere I first knew London. I bought the album when I first saw him perform at the famous Jug o’ Punch folk club in Digbeth, Birmingham, run by The Ian Campbell Folk Group (I also saw a teenage Joni Mitchell play there – it was love at first sight, and I bought her first album there too, Songs from a Seagull). Al may have autographed his record – I can’t recall. It was stolen from my bedsit room in Reading in 1970 along with many of my favourite discs.

Maybe it’s about what here in Australia that, borrowing from our indigenous compatriots, we might call “spirit of place” – the association with the streets within a hop, skip and an amble from Old Compton Street out into Shaftsbury Avenue and that bookshop in Charing Cross Road, the opening verse of the second track Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres, and that flat in Swiss Cottage, a suburb I used to frequent in the seventies. Maybe it’s the seedy, needy, greedy vibe of the priapic songs on Al’s follow up albums. An old friend and Al Stewart fanboy called them aural masturbation. Although there were many “love chronicles”,  the lengthy titles track of his second album, Al also wrote about melancholy middle aged suburban couples and historical events, with the odd foray into poetic mysticism. My flat mates and I were all fans of Al back then, and went to most of his gigs.

In the early seventies, when a girlfriend started going out with him, I actually got to know him for a brief while. Indeed, one time, when he played in Birmingham Town Hall, me and a couple of pals drove up to my old hometown to see him, and after the show, invited him back to my folks’ place for a late night fry up. My mom reckoned he need fattening up. And afterwards, she and Al sat in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about pop music. “I love Cat Stevens”, mom said. “Oh, I much prefer the Incredible String Band”, said Al. “Oh, they’re very weird, but Paul like them!” She said. Then they got talking about Mick Jagger. And my dad, in the sitting room, said to us others gathered there, and referring to Al’s stature, said “there’s not much to him is there!”. Strange but nice how you recall these little things. The folks have both passed on …

My Bedsitter Image

© Paul Hemphill 2022.  All rights reserved

For more about London in In That Howling Infinite, see: Back in the Day – my journey, in song and poetry; A Window on a Gone World – London days; Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Something about London

Postscript – on another iconic café …

Rowda Ya Habibi

Cheap, cheerful and unchanging, with it garish turquoise neon sign and bold orange awning and signs advertising cushion rooms and belly dancing, Rowda Ya Habibi was a Newtown institution, and one of the first Lebanese restaurants in this cosmopolitan area.

It has been closed these past eighteen months – the pandemic finally closed the doors of this inner west icon, but driving down King Street recently and seeing its fading, sorrowful frontage brought back memories of our Newtown days.

Adèle and I had been coming here for for nigh on thirty five years. We’ve known Antoinette and Asaad Rowda, who ran the restaurant since 1978, and their family for much of that time, and the last time I was there, Antoinette introduced me to the tall handsome man I’d known as a toddler. Whenever I dropped by, we’d chat about Lebanon and Syria – they were Maronite Christians from the north of Lebanon – and I’d practice my Arabic.

I can’t count the number of takeaway felafel rolls we have eaten over the years, an instant and filling meal at a price that satisfied the appetites and wallets of tens of thousands of University of Sydney students, staff from the nearby Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and locals over the years. And it was the place to go with friends on a budget to enjoy delicious, homemade Lebanese tucker and clap and laugh along to the belly dancer who would sweep in on a Friday night in a flurry of scarves and scimitars and entertain us with her raqs arabiyya dragging unwilling and clumsy customers to their feet to join her in the dance.

And at the risk of upsetting Syrians, Lebanese and Israelis, I’d would declare the house hommus “al ahsin fi al’alim”, the best in all the world.

Rowda Ya Habibi, Newton, Sydney