Stroud is noted for its steep streets
independent spirit and café culture. Wikipedia
London’s Café Royal opened in 1865.
It was the home of posh café society from its onset
and is forever associated with Oscar Wilde.
Long past its café society heyday it’s now
a restaurant /hotel owned by Trusthouse Forte.
The Paris left bank café Les Deaux Magots
opened in 1885 in St-Germain-des-Prés. Its habitués
included Verlaine Rimbaud and Mallarmé.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s
literary gang together with Albert Camus
made their headquarters at the Café de Flore
which rose to prominence pre and post-Liberation.
The American ‘baroque’ rock group The Left Blanke
(complete with ’e’) had a lovely influential hit with
their own song Walk away Renée (with acute accent).
The French singer-songwriter Alain Souchon has
a marvellous celebratory song Rive Gauche à Paris.
The Cedar (Street)Tavern in Greenwich Village NYC
was a bar-restaurant where artists writers and poets
mainly met and got drunk in the 1950s: among them
William de Kooning Jackson Pollock Jack Kerouac.
Augustus John (1878-1961) a society painter
and professional bohemian lorded it in
The Café Royal before and after the first world war.
Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) was a friend
of Augustus John and also born in Tenby.
She was a painter model writer and scandale
and In her later life – just as Augustus John
was known as the King of Bohemia –
she became known as the Queen of Fitzrovia.
Fitzrovia – sometimes known as North Soho –
was an area of pubs cafés and restaurants
centred on The Fitzroy Tavern at first
and later on the Wheatsheaf pub
which became the haunt of literary bohemians –
most famously Dylan Thomas –
during the 30s 40s and up to the middle 50s.
‘Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic
farming originally developed by Rudolf Steiner
that employs what proponents describe as
‘a holistic understanding of agricultural processes’.
One of the first sustainable agricultural movements
it treats soil fertility plant growth and livestock care
as ecologically interrelated tasks emphasising
spiritual and mystical perspectives. Wikipedia.
’Take a powder’ American gangster argot
meaning vanish disappear scram vamoose….
hear it in film noir movies from from the 1940s.
Jeff Cloves
.