I am tame David.
But there are rules on here..S F relating to polite dinner party
conversation.
My memories of that place are decades old! Nearby places I also remember are Rules, The Savoy Grill and the River Room, Saturday dinner dances as a special treat, tea dances at a hotel in the Aldwych (can't remember the name), Kettners, L'Escargot, a french steak place near was it 5 Dials or 7 Dials maybe called Mon Plaisir? Sheekey's. Must be others- Barbara will know them all!
Simply responding to your assertion that even the best restaurants close one day. (some are even open seven days per week).Really Barbara you must go to some very tame dinner parties.
Mr Gay that last paragraph typed by you on Saturday was hardly Dinner Party
conversation!
Carol Mr Boyson was not someone who encouraged the art of education to
floursh. Perhaps he was a man with 2 faces..... methaphoricaly speaking.
Fear never encourages anything good.
Le Procope and La Brasserie Lipp seem to be doing quite well and Le Grand Véfour has beeen going for over 200 years.
Clearly Barbara never met my first RE teacher who would prowl round the clasroom with a poker heated to white heat in the central coke stove. The school was in a collection of nissen huts recently vacated by the USAAF medical corps. Now that was frightening!
Dear Barbara,now you have explained why you asked the question about Boyston,i understand why you were on your defensive side just reading about the chap. mâkes me shiver,he must have been extrêmely frightning For his pupils
Simpsons changed ownership in 2005,
Is it as good as its reputation?
A top Restaurant guide inspector gave it 2 stars out of 5
on Trip Advisor.
Have any of you or friends been there recently?
Where is that restaurant ?
Eternity does Barbara !
Did you make a booking at Simpsons today David Gay?
Quickly noted David Rosemonts feelings that it was possibly closing.
Even the best restaurants close one day.
Nothing lasts forever.
It is closing according to Radio 4 and the Torygraph naming but two!
Actually, my school days were ultimately no worse than it was for others. I hated school so fought back. Others submitted. They must to this day be scarred by the experience to some extent. One or two I know of have have been really sadistic b's in their turn. One certainly went inside for beating his wife half to death because she asked for a divorce (because she found him too violent as it was) then claimed to need psychiatric help to recover from his school days. According to child abuse experts I have worked with, that is a very common phenomenon.
I have always borne in mind how grim education can be since I have worked in children's rights, realising there are numerous countries where it is still as bad as I worked in them. I have had my swords crossed with people in the UK though. When the child abuse genie was let out of the lamp, I was in a meeting in which a MP said that "a bit of homosexuality never hurt anybody", which when a couple of my fellow child advocacy field people laid into was met with something about, "well it never harmed me". The man in question was known to be gay. When pursued on the issue about boys being forced whether so inclined or not, he dismissed it as juvenile fun. When pursued on teachers he said that he doubted it had ever happened. He was simply a brick wall. However, when the first serious scandals involving schools broke he must have shrunk and hid in a corner (if he has any kind of conscience, that is) and certainly never appeared to have said a dicky bird as Jimmy Saville and subsequent scandals broke. The duplicity stuns me always. That there are people nostalgic for those days likewise.
I have the film and think it to be excellent, and generally love the work of Alan Bennett. Yes one can feel sympathy for the main character (Richard Griffiths who died in 2013 and who himself had problems at school and was in that other super film Withnail and I) slightly creepy as he was. In those days being a declared homosexual was against the law, now it is not. I think that there is a lot of Bennett in the character too. One was taught to be suspicious of such people, they were "queer" not in the way of gays now. However there have been plenty of examples of non gay teachers running off with under age girls as well. Unfortunately the world is now perceived as being unsafe in such matters. Then we were much more trusting. In many way things have gone too far the other way.
Brian,
Sorry to hear of your bad experience of school days (the best days of your life...)NOT.
I can remember being about 5, at primary school in Middx, being kept behind along with a couple of other children at lunchtime, whist the Headmaster, a small humourless man, who habitually walked around with his thin cane, tried to force us to eat our food. For years, I had an aversion to mince pie or anything too spicey & mixed -up (trifle) and try how he might I couldn't eat it, despite being scared that I'd get the cane ! At the same school there was a truely terrifying teacher, Mrs Prole (for some reason my brothers thought this amusing) who was incredibly strict and short tempered, wore tight suits, grey hair in a tight bun and thick heavy brogues. She was the designated loose tooth extractor and one would be sent to her, whereupon she would tie a thick piece of thread around the tooth, tie the other end to a door handle and then promptly shut the door. She did incredibly detailed nature study drawings in chalk on the board, that we were expected to copy anf she had eyes in the back of her head.....many a knobbly kneed pupil would have his/her legs slapped as she descended...and was accused of being a 'fidgetty -Phil'...
She had a doppleganger who I fell foul of at secondary school, who taught needlework and was permanently cross. We were in the well -behaved 'top stream' (out of 6, in a girls school), so I can't imagine how she coped with the lower streams, who were generally bolshier and noisier. One lesson we were instructed to work in absolute silence and at one point another pupil (Shirley Ayres...fixed in my memory vividly), mouthed at me 'what's the time ?' I looked at my watch and mouthed back,'10 to 12' and instantaneously, I felt a heavy blow,administered to my right shoulder , the shock of this made a avalanche of blood shoot from my nose over the table and my sewing. The teacher, I think may have had an anxious day, ....but I didn't have the courage at the time to take things further and at least file a complaint.......looking back now, I know that I should have done something about it. I comforted myself at the time by the thought that all that perpetual anger (why was she in teaching if she disliked it so much)..would probably give her cancer at some point.
Later on, in my first teaching job at a RC boys school , in the '80's, small boys would arrive late to class, blowing on their hands and looking a bit tearful, after an encounter for some mis-demenour or other with one of the brothers who ran the place. I also witnessed the public humiliation of an older (teenage), pupil, as a female teacher physically manouvered him, by sharply & painfully, twisting his ear and dragging him across the room....she must have had good knowledge of the temprement of her 'victim' to get away with it....and confident that she would be backed up by the brothers....Not good to witness.
Recently, the award-winning film "The History Boys" was on TV with 'Pie In the Sky' actor......what's his name ?.... It is a good film with some very good acting, but although I think the director writer was trying to make the homosexual teacher, someone one could sympathise with, for me he was repellant in his preying on these too young boys....and thinking it was 'just a bit of fun'....Maybe, I've misinterpreted the film, but it seemed to be backing that view of things, which I am not comfortable with....I probably need to see it again, to make-up my mind....
Don't worry Jon, Simpson's is still going strong as far as I know. They are taking reservations today. Likewise Rules. The Gay Hussar was under threat of being sold up and closed in 2013 but is still going for the time being.
Simpsons has closed!!! Awful! I used to love that place. Please tell me "Rules" is still there.
But we have been affected which we show by not wishing it on others...
I never went to Simpsons but it is a now a closed chapter.
Although I hated school; uniforms, and the coming and going of young teachers
brought in to teach us French. As soon as the began they seemed to run away ....
no idea why.
But I loved domestic science and my teacher predicted that one day I would teach
cookery....well she was not far from the truth.
Jon's postings whilst inventive and amusing did all contain elements of truth relating to the schools of the fifties and to a lesser extent the sixties. Fagging and thrashing (la vice anglaise) were pretty well finished by mid sixties, however the memory lingered on. There was an awful restaurant in Baker St called School Dinners where waitresses dressed in St Trinian's outfits served bangers and mash at inflated prices. There was ritual food chucking every night and offenders were "dealt with" by means of a caning meted out by the "teacher" clad in fishnet tights. I read that they just closed Simpsons in the Strand, where I last ate about thirty years ago by virtue of my then membership of the Reverse Lunch Club. Most of the members of the latter have long since passed into oblivion, but felt little pain in the process.