Lord Holland joins us today because of my invitation to lunch on Tuesday. Don’t be silly, he din’t ask me, he died in 1840. But here’s a clue; before lunch we walked around Holland Park.
Pigeons do not respect the great and the good – they perch and poo indiscriminately. Lord Holland is well anointed.
My host reminded me that before WWII a descendant of Holland lived here and shot driven pheasant – he owned enough land to get in three drives before lunch. Early on in the war the house was badly bombed and never re-built, although more remains than I had imagined.
Where did we have lunch?
I wonder what Lord Holland would make of it? He was a Whig so my guess he would give it the thumbs up. The restaurant is on the top floor and, in my opinion, you can see quite enough of the museum walking upstairs.
The car is a taster of Ferrari: Under the Skin at The Design Museum. Stephen Bayley reviewed the exhibition favourably in The Spectator last week but as a former boss of the museum he would. I had forgotten that he was briefly the creative director of the disastrous Millenium Dome. He resigned in 1998, to the considerable annoyance of the new Labour government, on the grounds that it was “going to be a load of crap”. How right he was.
Lunch was excellent. My host left me briefly because he had to cycle home to confer with his staff. This was a mistake on his part as I’d had a Negroni and was well into a large glass of the house white by the time he returned. The restaurant has an open plan kitchen. This is a mistake when my host is present. After lunch he engaged the chefs in constructive criticism – namely that the chicken confit was a bit stringy and they should replace it with duck. They were attentive; my guess is that they thought he was a restaurant critic.
The life and times of the author may be characterised thus: Friends. Food. Wine.
And ranked as of importance (descending) as:
Wine. Food. Friends.
It has taken me a while to deconstruct your nom de plume. At Castle Park the standard response was either “he who smelt it dealt it” or “he who supplied it denied it”.
I was surprised you did not decode my moniker earlier? The name was actually that of a racehorse which ran in the (I think) 1980’s, the commentary for which is killing, totally killing! The scintillating fact is that the horses Dam was called ‘zip your lip’ (do check it out in the racing post) but I could not possibly have used that for fear of silencing the author. I could have used another facetious racing name viz. ‘wear the fox hat’: try it in your best Irish accent!
My father told me there was a herd of cows in Holland Park before the War. I am not sure this can have been compatible with the pheasants unless a) the park was much bigger than it is now or b) the cows were removed for the season to the Fox Strangways estate in Dorset ( which seems rather hard work). Can both cows and pheasants be true?
Yes, cattle and pheasants can co-exist. The pheasants would have been driven over the fields where the cows fed. The park was substantially bigger then.
If you’re a fan of the occult attraction of the prancing horse, the Ferrari exhibition is interesting. I found the trivia – Enzo’s driving licence? Wrist watches? – vaguely compelling although Il Commendatore’s brutal treatmement of his drivers is unsurprisingly ignored. Enzo’s statement as being ‘an agitator of men’ is much preferred.
Stephen Bayley knows a lot about cars. Being a pugacious style-obsessed aesthete, his review would unlikely be coloured by his imprimatur as former boss of the world’s first museum of mass-produced design. His Spectator column has, post tenure, criticised it as becoming confused and muddled. And of course the Dome, that great white elephant that trampled on the early Blair years’ euphoria. But then Bayley was horrified at Blair arriving at No10 in a Montego Estate – ‘someone capable of tolerating such awfulness is not to be trusted’ he wrote. And dealing with New Labour’s ‘Mandelstein’ who had responsibility for the Dome was doomed. Mandy wasn’t a proper aesthete whilst Creative Director Bayley was a politically insensitive poseur. By the end of 1998, for very differing reasons, both had resigned.