… Keep readingLife is chaos. It’s a cacophony upon which we try to impose a sense of order, often for the sake of our own sanity.
When I read the excerpt below, I was unsurprised to find my father had ended up a Londoner by accident, not design. It was through another series of accidents that he met my mother, that I was born in London and that now I’m writing these very words.
Some people struggle to accept that we primates stumble through existence. They insist that everything is controlled and planned out. One of the gloomier versions of this type of worldview is that everything is manipulated by some shadowy ill-meaning cabal, often labelled as the Illuminati or New World Order.
1937
Lady troubles in Ladbroke Grove, 1937
I think my dad wrote this part in the 1970s, so perhaps those 40-odd years made it more melodramatic in his memories than it really was. He mentions his local was The Mitre which is right at the bottom of Ladbroke Grove – these days, that’s considered more a part of Holland Park. A lot of this part of west London was much rougher before WWII, particularly Notting Hill, but these days it’s all pretty fancy. – AZ
It was 1937. I, a young artist who’d recently been abandoned by his wife, had been milling around in the horrible emptiness of my studio in Ladbroke Grove.… Keep reading