pumpkinstrokemarrow

The moved onto yesterday's DT where a 'yours disgusted' was panting on about the iniquity of the census people who had to be told twice that an address no longer existed and had the temerity to call on Easter Sunday afternoon in order to be told for the second time. He was in an awful lather about it. Didn't seem to have occurred to him that doing the census is mostly a badly paid temporary second job for people with badly paid first jobs. Which means that the second job has to be done on days like Easter Sunday.

Much more important to this household was the fact the the news ran into overtime panting on about our success in assassinating an important terrorist, with the result that the locally much more important 'Countrylife' had to cut its lead item about Molly the Moo Cow of Longleat. Perhaps the 'yours disgusted' should get stuck into that one.

More important still was my finding a little book in our bookcase called 'London Restaurants' by someone who wrote under the name of 'Diner-Out'. A first edition of 1924 published by someone I had not previously heard of called Geoffery Bles of Pall Mall. Adverts for other offerings from his list are illustrated above, but it seems that he must have made a lot of money as the chap who first published C. S. Lewis, including here both the wardrobe and the rosary stuff. I can get a copy with a dust cover from Abebooks for £4 - which is a plus as my copy says £1.50 inside. But then, it has not got a dust cover.

This little book is a mine of useful information; thoroughly recommended. That, for example, some people who were keen on their food went to a lot of trouble and expense to get a cook who could boil a potato to their satisfaction - without needing to cover up the result with fancy sauces. Helpful sections on wine, wine corks, cigars and the right cigarette. Diner-Out rather disapproves of chain smoking, but he is quite all right with regular smokers, with discerning smokers who know what they like. He goes on to remind one that hors d'oeuvre were sometimes called appetisers - something which, as a food writer who spent a lot of time in restaurants, he sometimes needed. One really did not feel like a proper blow-out at the Savoy but the 'Daily Mail' needed its article, so the appetite needed to be tickled. He has various suggestions covering this eventuality.

I then move into the body of the book where I come across a page or so about a place called the 'Trocadero' which at that time occupied that flashy but presently unoccupied building of the same name at Piccadilly Circus. It seems that this Trocadero was at the flashy end of the Joe Lyons range of eateries, where you could get a superb lunch, ex wine, for 15s a head (at a time when a wage might have been £5. Or one of the pot boilers above cost 7/6. Relative prices seem to have moved around a bit. Or perhaps I have actually got some much more recent reprint, not a first edition at all. No dates, so hard to tell). Including things like 'Homard Grillé Paillard'. It was also quite OK for gents. to entertain ladies picked up from neighbouring streets there, provided all concerned were properly dressed. At that time the floor manager was one M. Monbiot, whom I find from Google was the grandfather of the lefty writer for the Guardian of the same name. The great grandfather worked the place too. I wonder if the journalist of the family ever alludes to the catering branches in his pieces in the Guardian?

I suppose the last survivor of this class of restaurant was the Café Royal in Regent Street - which sadly I only ever managed to visit in a corporate entertainment capacity up on the sixth floor. Not very grand up there at all.