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Saturday 22 November 2008

London Notebook

Barry Humphries on life in the capital

New parking laws have been introduced as part of a master plan to make living in London as unpleasant as possible. Instead of giving you a parking ticket, they now take a furtive snapshot of your car and book you without you knowing it, sending you a ticket a few weeks later in the post. This way, they hope you will have lost or thrown away your ticket from the meter, and won’t be able to prove whether you were legally parked or not. This racket has, of course, been going on in Camden for some time. You are cynically given the option of legally challenging the authorities, but by the time of the hearing, the parking enforcement agent will have probably gone back to Somalia. At least they wear nice green uniforms, unlike almost everyone else working the streets of London, who wears a luminous sulphur-yellow jerkin. It is a sartorial aberration which has infected people who don’t even work out of doors. I have even noticed supermarket staff stocking the freezer in their fluorescent lime body-warmers, as a protection, no doubt, against out-of-control shopping trolleys.

Bond Street, once such a charming and varied thoroughfare, is on the brink of ruin. After 130 years of trading, Agnew’s picture gallery has been sold to some Italian haberdasher and one fears for the few remaining premises that don’t sell jewels or dresses. Apart from Sotheby’s, Mallets, Partridge, the Fine Arts Society, and Green’s, née Wildenstein, it’s now wall-to-wall rag trade; a boring Frockerama and mostly owned by the Dutch! Paradoxically, with all those clothes behind glass, the pedestrians are among the drabbest and most ill-dressed people west of Albania. Where are the hats of yesteryear? Where are the gloves?

Most Belgian women I have known wear gloves when driving, just as the Californian girls of my acquaintance prefer to drive barefoot, like the hoydens in a tale by Kerouac. Many people think that I do not drive and that I am an only child but, in fact, I am a keen motorist and an Australian Grand Prix driver with, I believe, several siblings. I always wear motoring gloves, custom-made for me by my gantier in Lisbon, but they have recently gone missing. Lately, I seem to have mislaid many things, including wrist-watches, glasses of course, and last Tuesday, a small drawing by Picabia. In such cases, I always telephone Minna, my psychic adviser in Brisbane, who tells me where to find them, and she is never wrong. Thanks to Minna’s long-distance clairvoyance, I discovered my driving gloves in the most unlikely place of all. The glove compartment of the car. Where would I be without my sub-tropical sibyl?

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