Down Memory Lane. A frighteningly long way

It was with some pride that I realised, in my thirties, that I remembered events in my life that had happened twenty years earlier, even though I had been practically adult at the time. It felt like a sign of growing maturity. But then, some years on, it struck me that I was talking to my sons about thirty-year old memories, and remembered how, at their age, I’d been shocked when my parents had talked about such things. With my conscious mind, I knew it was possible to remember things that old, but something deeper in my being simply couldn’t adapt to the notion.

This morning I boarded a plane for a destination which brought back a fifty-year old memory. Fifty years. Half a century. It makes me feel like a living history book. Only history measures matters in fractions or multiples of a century.

The destination was Philadelphia – or Philly, as I’m assured I should call it – and I was last there when I was fourteen. Practically half a century, since in two weeks I shall start a year of boring all around me by asking them whether they’ll still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine.

My parents were living in New York at the time. I travelled to Philly with my then girlfriend’s family. They were artists and they were taking us to see an exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Only one canvas sticks in my mind: it was the first time I’d seen a “white-on-white”. The artist – for such, I was assured, he was – had gone to considerable trouble to screen print white paint onto a white canvas.

White on White: profoundly meaningful. Right?

Callow, uncouth youth that I was, I couldn’t bring myself to take this seriously as a piece of art. How shall I put this? Translating a fine old Anglo-Saxon expression into more clinical terms – I don’t want to shock, after all – I was more inclined to view it as extracting the urine.

Of course, fifty years on I’ve become far more sophisticated in my appreciation of art. Today, I fully grasp the concept that behind such a piece of work lies a great mind, a fount of insight, generating a message of complexity and power.

It’s just, sadly, that I still don’t grasp it.

It’s fun to be back in Philly, half a century on. The place where the colonists first declared they’d had enough of their British overlords. It’s a sentiment with which, as a subject today of the descendants of those same overlords, I entirely sympathise.

In fact, it was a little odd, when I made my way into the plane, to discover that the greeting message was being spoken in a British accent. English, indeed. Home counties, even. I’m told it’s an accent, like the Scottish one back home, that’s trusted out here.

My advice? Be less trusting. I know people with that accent who have my confidence but plenty, sadly, who don’t – many of them in government.

I shall enjoy my brief stay here. Even if it does remind me of how old I’ve become. Still, as I always say, there really is only one way of not growing old.

That’s to die young. That was never an attractive proposition. In any case, it’s a great deal too late for me to adopt it.

Enjoying the present, reliving the past

In a memorable line, the Comedian Eric Morecambe assured his audience that he was ‘playing all the right notes, though not necessarily in the right order.’

We've never been that good at getting the order of things right. When the judge granted Danielle, then married to her first husband, her divorce, he took a look at her belly and said ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the time lag before the decree becomes absolute to the minimum.’ He took it down to a week from the normal six, and as a result Danielle and I were married just eighteen days before our son Michael was born.

With Danielle’s first son David with us, and Nicky showing up not that long after Michael, there was no way we have a honeymoon at the right time - i.e. then. So instead ten years later, with a business trip to San Francisco in the offing, I suggested that Danielle come along and take the opportunity to have a delayed honeymoon. Better late than never, after all, and we would enjoy it all the more for having waited so long.

And we did enjoy our trip to what quickly became Danielle’s favourite city anywhere. We stayed at a hotel which boasted a penthouse which was more a pentshack: a wood and glass construction placed on the roof, with breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and the city, where we were woken in the morning by the sea lions barking and could watch a flock of parakeets flying past our windows.

When, nearly twenty years on, I again got the opportunity to take a business trip to San Francisco, Danielle announced ‘I’m coming along.’ It struck me as a good idea, so she’s at my side as I write this.

This time we did everything much more by the book. The first evening we were in China Town to indulge ourselves in truly superior Chinese cooking. The next day we had a walking tour through part of the city, enchanted but shivering through weather that had turned to bitter winter overnight. To warm up we headed to a vegetarian restaurant, Green’s, where we had an excellent meal against the background of yet another view of the bay and the bridge.

Our first visit to San Francisco had left me with only one regret: we’d had a remarkable breakfast at the famous Cafe Roma, sitting in the tiny back terrace area, under vine leaves through which the surprisingly warming October sun was shining. But I chose not to wash down the meal with mimosa, the combination of orange juice and champagne that would have been the perfect complement to my scrambled eggs and smoked salmon.

So I took great pleasure in correcting that omission while I was at Green’s, and we had mimosas there - though as befits the constant innovation that marks the city still, this one was made with pomegranate juice rather than anything so pedestrian as mere orange.

Ready to enjoy mimosas and correct an old omission
Pomegranate, no less - my dear, the style, can you imagine?

Then we set out to find our hotel with the pent shack again, which was not as straightforward it sounds, since we couldn’t remember the name let alone the address. But we tracked it down, and found the San Remo unchanged, and still endowed with its jewel of a pent shack.

We also travelled round the city by the most appropriate means, cable cars, even hanging on for dear life to the outside on a couple of occasions. That was a mode of transport we’d disdained first time, this trip has really seen us being quite exemplary in ensuring we did things properly.

The right notes in the right order, for once. And the notes themselves are pretty special, they resonate with us. San Francisco remains Danielle’s favourite city. 

And I have to say that I too find it hard to imagine one to prefer to it.