Posted on Sunday Aug 2 0:00:00 BST 2009
Back at my house in London and discover that the end of Fitzroy Street is disfigured by a huge blown up photograph of “cricketing legend” Shane Warne sporting a wavy, parti-coloured yellow wig. In a daze at its presumption, I venture towards this hideous excrescence. It isn’t a wig! It is indeed a hair transplant. The poor sap has been persuaded to publicize the fact. It is an advertisement on behalf of the new clinic on the corner of Fitzroy Square which has moved into a conservation area to pursue its dread trade. I suppose if you are bald and vain it affects your mental capacities. I would have expected that you would want to disguise the fact in some way, with a sporty hat or, at the least, a minimum of discretion, but Shane is clearly so enamoured of his golden tuft, no doubt extracted from some privy part of his anatomy, that he is seeking to encourage others to do the same. Posted on Thursday Jun 18 0:00:00 BST 2009 Off to Suffolk.
Carol is the lovely town clerk of Hadleigh. She sent me a letter about six months ago, following on from a call from Jonathan Glancey the esteemed architectural correspondent of the Guardian who lives nearby and knows me a little. I live nearby too, on the other side of that rural river of steel, the A 12, but close enough to get over to this rather pleasant market town just nudged in to South Suffolk to do some quiet shopping from time to time. Howsomeever, over the last six months I have hardly been there and very busy so this is regrettably the first time I can get to the place.
I like Hadleigh: a success as a town and a high street with timber framed wool merchants’ houses painted that satisfying lime wash matt ochre. People live on the shopping street. The big ring road is working. It takes traffic out and around and away into the country. I felt almost ashamed to be driving in there at all last Wednesday. There were people walking about in the middle of the road, crossing from the butchers to the grocers and the wine shop and the newsagent. The Deanery where the Oxford movement was born, the medieval Guildhall and the church all fall off to the flat area to the south, which backs onto the river. Jonathan and Carol had asked me to join them in resisting Tesco who wanted to get into the old fulling works and build a handy superstore there. |
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