From when I was ten, an aunt and uncle managed a pub for the "Chef and Brewer," chain, for a few years, this would be around 1951. At the time they had no children. I was occasionally invited to travel up on the tube from South London, to stay with them over the week-end. There were always places to go on Sundays with her as the pub was very quiet on those days, being in the City of London. The pub had six floors and a "dumb waiter" which went up from the ground floor to the kitchen at the top. I was watching Ian Hislop's documentary last night about the history of the railway and how goods changed from being carried by roads, to be sent by rail. As an example of how crowded everywhere was in London with horse drawn vehicles until the rail network reached its peak, he showed a number of street photos including this one, which is of Ludgate Circus, where you can see the pub in the background. (I froze the programme and took this photo of the TV screen.) A few years later, they moved and managed an off licence in Regents Park. I still occasionally visited them, on Sundays. One of their customers worked for the BBC and often gave her tickets for radio shows that required an audience. On one occasion she invited me to go with her as she knew it was a show I liked. So together we saw the recording of an episode of "The Goon Show" with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. I think it was at the theatre in Shepherd's Bush.
Most beautiful personal memories indeed - Thanks for sharing! As now we all can imagine how it was like back in those days, (almost 3 quarters of a century ago).
Oh 'blige, three quarters of a century sounds so awfully old, and there I was feeling like a spring chicken -how about you Doghouse
I do feel my age sometimes, like at 7.30 am, when I'm getting up to play golf, three times a week, having not gone to bed until nearly 2.00 am the night before, (so much to do, so little time). But it soon passes, once I've had a shower. I can remember the actor Colin Welland, decades ago in an interview on TV, saying "Once you get past forty, when you wake up each morning, the first thing you do is contemplate suicide." It's never been as bad as that for me. I'm very lucky, I've no problems at all. My "medical history" is an appendectomy at eleven, a dislocated shoulder at thirty-six, (slid on a wet floor during a team squash match and collided with a side wall, soon recovered) and a new hip twelve years ago, though you'd never know it. That's it. I do like to stay active. With all my hobbies on the go, I haven't the time to worry about aging. But at my age it's inevitable that people you know of a similar age can die. The most recent, a month ago, a friend with whom I'd played golf nearly every week for twenty years, was taken ill and died a few days after entering hospital. He wasn't the first this year as when you belong to a golf club with nearly 400 members, every year, two or three people you know die. But the world is now "full of old people," so it's expected.
