A year later Jah decided to move to Australia after visiting George Hobday, a friend from Cambridge who was working as a doctor there. “I love this place,” Jah mused on an early trip; “miles and miles of open country and not a bloody Indian in sight.”
Making that point, but not too obviously:
Next door was a disused Texaco garage that he acquired for $10,000 and turned into the Lone Star, a chic beachfront restaurant with a four-room hotel attached. This was much-loved by the local glitterati, who appreciated his discretion as much as the food and atmosphere.
Why would a four room hotel in Barbados require discretion?
Yet according to one Glaswegian, Ali Ahmed Aslam, it was created at his restaurant Shish Mahal in the early 1970s — and his claim to have invented the curry as a suitably mild modification to suit British tastes is generally accepted as the most credible.
“We used to make chicken tikka, and one day a customer said, ‘I’d take some sauce with that, this is a bit dry’,” Aslam said. “So we thought we’d better cook the chicken with some sauce.”
He called his sauce masala, a Hindi word meaning a mixture of elements. Somewhat unpromisingly it was based on a tin of condensed tomato soup that he had bought for its blandness and for his own consumption while he recovered from a stomach ulcer. Whether it was the same branded tin painted by Andy Warhol is not recorded, but to it he added yoghurt, cream and a variety of spices, including coriander and turmeric.
The customer, a bus driver of Asian origin, liked it so much that he brought his friends to the restaurant to taste it. Realising that he was on to something, “Mr Ali” (as he was known to his customers) put the dish on the menu and called it chicken tikka masala. He was soon serving it to Asian and British customers alike; the dish became a potent symbol of Britain’s new-found multiculturalism and was, Aslam said, his gift to his adopted city.
Note that this specific tale is the “most credible” among the origin stories. That chicken tikka masala was invented in Britain is true, that it’s – largely – chicken tikka with a can of tomato soup is true. That it caters to a rather British taste – I want some gravy with that – is true and so on. This particular person in this particular restaurant?
To an extent we’re talking about steam engine time here. But even when we are talking about steam engine time there always is the Newcomen, the Watt, who actually do the thing that’s sleeting through the world as inspirons.
All the available evidence tells us that the doner kebab was invented in Berlin – why not Glasgow for the chicken tikka masala?
A tall man with impatient eyes, he had a habit of making up his mind about something — often correctly — and not being overly anxious to listen to contrary opinion.
This is a great reworking of a classic.
Note the bass player from The Blockheads. That was from an album celebrating his survival from cancer – pancreatic I think?
Tensions that had always been present between Johnson and his hard-drinking bandmates began to stretch towards breaking point. The others were content to let the guitarist handle all the songwriting, and the relentless touring schedule denied the perfectionist Johnson the time he needed to come up with new material.
Socially, too, they were drifting apart, with the then-teetotal Johnson keeping to his room with a selection of non-alcoholic stimulants rather than joining his colleagues in the bar. He became withdrawn and touchy, a recipe for disaster in a band where the gags and jibes flowed even faster than the booze.
Err, yes.
Guess which of the four was on amphetamines, which on booze?
I’ve always had a very soft spot for this track:
One of the first albums I ever bought that.
And, of course:
Yet of all his exploits, it was his schools’ cricket festival of which he was most proud. “People haven’t heard of David English and I’m quite happy about that,” he said. “I can’t play guitar like Eric, I can’t sing like Barry and I can’t play cricket like Ian. But I can help people achieve their dreams.”
David English CBE, rock’n’roll mogul and cricket benefactor, was born on March 4, 1946. He died from a heart attack on November 12, 2022, aged 76
After she’d moved on to the Carved Angel tho‘.
A quintessentially English woman with handsome features and a frank, steadfast expression, Molyneux learnt her craft under the flamboyant George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall in Bath.
Came back from the US, where I’d been working as a waiter/bartender. Making $50 to $100 a shift.
Got to the Hole in the Wall. Made £49 in my first week, including tips that was, for a 48 hour week.
When I moved on – after 4 weeks – to something better paid I was told “Well, you’ve just not got it in you to do proper food, do you?”
Well, no, near slavery never has been a desire of mine. Lordy Be the “fine food” sector was badly paid back then.
So, on the early rock and roll tours, big competition for who was going to headline. Who was the last act to play that night that is. So the story goes it was decided by whose latest record was highest up the charts. So:
Another infamous “Killer” moment involved Berry. When the pair were on tour, Lewis objected to Berry going on after him, and so set his piano on fire following his performance with the words: “Follow that, boy.”
Brian Robinson obituary
Trailblazing cyclist who became the first Briton to complete the Tour de France and three years later, in 1958, win a stage
OK, age 91, pretty good going.
before doing his National Service with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Mild- mannered when not on two wheels, he then worked for his father’s carpentry business — which specialised in making coffins — and trained in the evenings. He competed for Britain in the men’s road race at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games alongside his older brother, Des,
Something he said earlier. Perhaps in that flurry of interest when he got knocked off his bike more recently.
Something along the lines of “If you were an Olympic hopeful you were never sent abroad in your National Service”.
Not sure why that comment has stuck but it did.
“Our mandate is to find the 200 best companies in the world and invest in them and find the 200 worst companies in the world and go short on them,” he said. “For my shorts, I look for a bad management team and a wildly overvalued company in an industry that is declining or misunderstood.”
That might also explain why CEOs are paid so much. Because the bad ones have such an effect – as do the good ones.
his fund’s average annual returns of 31.7 per cent between 1980 and 1998.
Lamb fell out with his wife after she joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they divorced.
She was later lured as a consultant to Revlon at a fee that was so beyond her expectations that she thought the monthly income was her annual salary.
Not that it has, to me, mind. But there was a metals deal where what we’d originally thought would be a 5 figure profit ended up – same first two digits – having an extra zero on the end. Yes, before the decimal point. Larger quantity, unhedged exposure moved our way, all quite delightful.
Her father went on to work as an assistant manager in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, where the family settled in the late 1920s. According to some reports, though the evidence is sketchy, she was the niece of General George Patton, the colourful wartime commander.
The family relocated again in 1942 after Virginia, an only child, had been spotted by a Warner Brothers talent scout while performing in a play at her high school — and after her father had accepted a position as an engineer in the Lockheed aircraft factory in Burbank, California.
She was thrilled to move west and take up a contract with the studio,
That’s actually a move east – south and east.
James David Thomas was born in Leicester in 1934, the eldest son of Jack and Doris (née Keble), who were travelling performers. Jimmy’s uncle shot tops of candles from fingers and his aunt ate bananas under water.
Eating ‘nananananas underwater?
Whut?
Anne Heche obituary
Actress who got her breakthrough in Donnie Brasco and dated Ellen DeGeneres
Famous for who you date?
Edmond, a Lebanese-born Sephardi Jew, was said to have made $40 million at the age of 16 in arbitrage trading between Italian and British gold (profiteering by buying and selling the same asset in different markets).
Profiting, yes. Profiteering has a certain “Oooh, that’s naughty!” tone to it, doesn’t it?
Barger’s transformation from wild one to mild one was complete when he abandoned his allegiance to the Angels’ most sacred icon of freedom and individuality. “Personally, I don’t like Harleys,” he confessed. “I ride them because I’m in the club and that’s the image, but if I could I would seriously consider riding a Honda . . . we really missed the boat not switching over to those Japanese models.”
Worth started out as the prep school for Downside. During the war it moved there as well.
During the conflict Bernard remained at Downside, the Catholic boarding school in Somerset. When the Comtesse sent him a box of oranges, he had to share nearly all of them with the other children. His brother Laurence became a writer and brought the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Britain.
One Saturday afternoon in 1943, while most of the school was watching a cricket match, two Sea Hurricanes circled. One went out of control, clipped a tree and crashed into the pavilion. The 22-year-old pilot and nine children were killed: Kelly was unhurt but traumatised.
Father was there that day as a 10 year old. One of those things he never quite got over……
Many claimed that Del Vecchio was motivated by preventing his six children wresting control or sullying his legacy. “I have never considered involving my children or even my grandchildren in the management of Luxottica,” he once said. “Your kids will always be your kids. You can fire an executive, but not one of your children.”
Many people disagreed with Kent’s views, but this was an era when they would engage in courteous debate. He not only appeared in the press, but also gave talks to universities and schools including St George’s Ascot and the Judd School in Tonbridge. “I used to talk to trainee officers at the army staff college at Camberley and we had very reasonable and interesting discussion,” he said. “It annoys me when people assume that you must be a lunatic or a Russian spy.”
Indeed he did used to give talks. One at Downside.
After which I asked him “You said in your speech that war is outdated. If this is so then why is it that there’s been, on average, one a year since 1945?”
His answer “I’m sorry, I don’t understand your question”.