We often eat at a Persian restaurant close by in Richmond. The food is good, the service quick and aspects of the decor very special. On the walls are a series of framed examples of Persian calligraphy. What is extraordinary is how each letter, with its gracefully sweeping lines and elegantly balanced proportions, can be seen…
Double trouble
Both Mr B and Mr F are unusual. Not for what they do, but for what they don't do. I have known them as neighbours for well over fifteen years but whenever I see them walking towards me in the street I know they will walk straight by. They will make no attempt to say…
A fleeting moment
Thanks to the enduring suspension of our host's old Mercedes, our descent of the winding drive to the riverside clearing couldn't have been smoother. Phyllis, who collected us from the station, had invited us to spend a night at her family's water mill. The once-dilapidated seventeenth-century mill had been restored by her father Bastiaan and he had also…
As you like it
Yes, it all started seventy years ago. I was fourteen years old, growing up as a faithful disciple of William Shakespeare. I had declaimed his noble words on the stage, I had stepped reverentially through his birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. And then one day, browsing in a seaside bookshop... Walter Ellis’s little book The Shakespeare Myth…
Time traveller
The other day my mind played a trick on me. While fully conscious, I suddenly saw myself standing staring at a poster on a wall in a Paris street in 1944. The experience was most odd and, because of the poster, very moving. The feeling was quite different from the experience I get when my…
Strapped for cash
Members of the Greyhares' generation have lived through two seismic monetary advances. In 1993 it was the introduction of the free movement of goods and capital across Europe's Common Market. Six years later we witnessed the introduction of the Euro-Zone's common currency - the euro. Now we are facing a third and, for the individual,…
A dog’s afterlife
The older I get, the more I wonder at certain of the people around me, the things they profess to enjoy, and the way they behave. In some respects, I confess, my puzzlement is my own fault; I simply cannot be bothered to find out. It was like that all those years ago when, at…
Russian unorthodox
It is often said that underground theatre thrives where there is state oppression. And, by all accounts, Russia is currently a country where oppression is rampant. Censorship, freedoms curtailed by draconian laws, a harsh penal system, widespread corruption, centralised power - altogether not a pretty picture. So when Russian performing arts came to London last…