Time Gentlemen, Please!
on Jun 12, 2009 in Slug snail & puppydog tail English pubs Quintessentially English as scones, cricket, Marmite or Stephen Fry, pubs like my “local” in Stapleford Tawney, Essex are becoming endangered. In Ireland or America most bars have mundane names, Murphy’s or Clancy’s, while English pubs have h...

A Birthday Wish
on Jun 8, 2009 in A window on My World animal cruelty Today is CabbieBlog’s birthday, and my birthday wish is that people who are cruel to dogs and children are locked up for a very long time, or better still hanged. But first some animal humour from our Government: Don’t worry about the collaps...

Waterborne Cabbies
on Jun 4, 2009 in Slug snail & puppydog tail early cabbies In the 16th Century the Company of Watermen were the equivalent to today’s cabbies. Created by an Act of Parliament in 1556 and given a grant of a Royal Patient in 1585, their trade like ours today was carefully licensed. They would ply for hire fr...

Cabbie’s aide-memoiré
on Jun 1, 2009 in Thinking allowed The Knowledge London’s licensed black taxis have been voted by a very large margin, the best cabbies in the world, according to a poll published recently. We are famed for our knowledge of the city and our ability to recall a large amount of information. At...

The Human Lavatory
on May 28, 2009 in A window on My World London's toilets Gentle reader you will come, as I have now, to a time in your life when finding a toilet becomes not a distraction but a necessity. London loos, until the 1950s, were famous the world over, but now according to the British Toilet Association (yes, th...

Bunker Mentality
on May 25, 2009 in Slug snail & puppydog tail estate agents After convincing the gullible that house prices could only go upwards, and changing the look of upmarket estate agents by putting in plasma screens, bars serving fizzy water and getting spotty youths to drive around London in pseudo-rally cars, Jon H...

Gordon’s a Post Turtle
on May 21, 2009 in I'm as mad as Hell Gordon Brown Have you looked at Gordon Brown lately? He has the haunted look of a hunted animal, with his authority ebbing away and the Palace of Westminster’s standing with the voters at its lowest point for many years, he reminds me of finding a turtle balanc...

Gormley or gormless
on May 18, 2009 in With an artistic bent trafalgar square English compromise don’t you love it? First we beat the Frenchies at Trafalgar, with Nelson dying on board HMS Victory at the moment of victory then he is brought home to a hero’s funeral in a barrel of rum. Nelson had already commissioned his co...

Let It Be
on May 15, 2009 in Driven mad in London Graffiti As a child of the ‘60s I have seen The Beatles in their heyday. My first chance to see them was at the BBC Paris Theatre formerly in Lower Regent Street when they came to London and nobody had heard of the Fab Four outside of Liverpool or Germany.

Keep on the right side
on May 12, 2009 in Slug snail & puppydog tail savoy hotel The Savoy overlooking the River Thames and one of London’s best-known hotels since it opened its doors in 1889, where the dry martini is thought by some to have been invented in the American Bar and where a murder took place back in 1923, opens...