Unlike my Father and other ghosts of Soho, I can lay little personal claim to its past. Soho's golden age, like every other place I've travelled to since, always appears to be over, or belong to the generation before mine.
Revisiting it through an excellent and very entertaining documentary from the 1980s, entitled 'A Day in the Life of Jeffrey Bernard', that turned up quite unexpectedly in the Linden Hall Studio in Deal recently, I was introduced to an enticing fantasy-world that celebrated daytime drinking, chain-smoking, long lunches and bonhomie. A poignant, honest and remarkably touching film, I saw the late-Soho commentator in a new light, far removed from the rude, extremely unwell and literally legless old soak I found in The Coach and Horses some years later.
I was playing cricket for the pub in some vague hope it might lead to some kind of proper employment, but The Coach & Horses team; a shifting shape of characters and misfits from the far corners of London society were never going to lead me anywhere but back to the pub where we'd met.
Captained by a hopeless, yet affable chap called Nick Robson, who somehow managed to run the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square, we were corralled out of dark midweek haunts and betting-shops into the unchartered open air to play cricket. Sponsored by the Landlord with tins of out of date Tuborg lager, we begun our season with a match against The French House, followed by a foul-mouthed fixture on the outfields of The Oval in an ill-tempered game with The Spectator Magazine, before games began to dry-up and the team disbanded before August in its inaugural year; lacking opposition, support, leadership and players. Our results and performances were lost on Jeffrey but, who could blame him, he'd probably had a very long lunch.
Tim Synge is the writer of Seafront Pages, Original tales from the dark depths of the Kent Riviera and beyond.. www.seafrontpages.blogspot.com
Revisiting it through an excellent and very entertaining documentary from the 1980s, entitled 'A Day in the Life of Jeffrey Bernard', that turned up quite unexpectedly in the Linden Hall Studio in Deal recently, I was introduced to an enticing fantasy-world that celebrated daytime drinking, chain-smoking, long lunches and bonhomie. A poignant, honest and remarkably touching film, I saw the late-Soho commentator in a new light, far removed from the rude, extremely unwell and literally legless old soak I found in The Coach and Horses some years later.
I was playing cricket for the pub in some vague hope it might lead to some kind of proper employment, but The Coach & Horses team; a shifting shape of characters and misfits from the far corners of London society were never going to lead me anywhere but back to the pub where we'd met.
Captained by a hopeless, yet affable chap called Nick Robson, who somehow managed to run the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square, we were corralled out of dark midweek haunts and betting-shops into the unchartered open air to play cricket. Sponsored by the Landlord with tins of out of date Tuborg lager, we begun our season with a match against The French House, followed by a foul-mouthed fixture on the outfields of The Oval in an ill-tempered game with The Spectator Magazine, before games began to dry-up and the team disbanded before August in its inaugural year; lacking opposition, support, leadership and players. Our results and performances were lost on Jeffrey but, who could blame him, he'd probably had a very long lunch.
Tim Synge is the writer of Seafront Pages, Original tales from the dark depths of the Kent Riviera and beyond.. www.seafrontpages.blogspot.com
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