What we truly endured
Bluebird took me down
memory lane, for what I remember is it was the model of one of the official
cars granted to my father in his accountancy prime of the 1980s in the Nissan range,
though now, I realise it was a broader model dating from 1995, the one in our
fleet of vehicles being the U11 series.
This was the thought on my mind as we sought the entrance to the King’s Road
restaurant in Chelsea for brunch.
The pictures of food
we saw on Google Maps after we realised the Chelsea Farmer’s Market had been
gentrified to the standard of unrecognisable and inaccessible, this became our
fallback. The young lady, nails all done in a shade of pink that would appear
as just pink to men, looked like she had taken on a part-time role as a waiter,
untrained, nervous, and unsure, like she was just earning a crust she did not need
to be able to go out to party with her girlfriends.
All the appearances
of sophistication and shabby chic were soon dispelled, the service was unsupervised
and unprofessional, the food pitiable in presentation, I had to scrape the
dollops of hollandaise sauce off the eggs royale and still had enough to paint
the walls, if I was so inclined. We sat through it with regret and left in haste,
for one should resist posting a review on TripAdvisor, for a couple of stars
would be overly generous to the lasting impression. Like a Jehovah’s Witness
proselytiser, I did half shake the dust off my feet as I left.
Everything off in
this place
Then, for the first
time ever, I set foot in Harrods and nothing, absolutely nothing, endeared me to
the place, and it is why I had never been there before when Fortnum &
Mason had proved its standing.
Stopping over at a
Harvey Nichols café for a cream tea, two ladies refused to be seated beside
us. I won’t want them for company either, as they looked like Madeline Ashton
and Helen Sharp, the two protagonists of Death Becomes Her,
so artificially enhanced to occlude any semblance of natural beauty that once
blessed their visages. Perchance there was a child in that restaurant, it would have
squealed in terror at sighting them.
In a fashion for the
history
Another patron was so
grandly attired in exorbitant designer label apparel that altogether failed the
basics of coordination, and it did nothing to enhance her; she was more a clothes
ass than a clothes horse. All that money and no fashion sense. Yet, I am
informed that having the same designer label in 3 textures and 4 layers of
clothes is termed Ghetto Fabulous; what do I know about fashion?
This area of Chelsea
and Knightsbridge with its pomposity of class, old and new money, and antiquated aristocracy long past aspiration or adulation, that radiates from Sloane Square was named
for Sir Hans Sloane, an
Irish physicist from the 18th Century, who was buried at the Chelsea
Old Church and out of whose bequest formed the foundations of the British Museum, the British Library, and
the Natural
History Museum in London. The unsavoury aspects of his provenance and
activities are not accounted for in this piece.
