Oxford!

There was some quite nice light today

Agent Triple P was unexpectedly in Oxford today, which brought back a few memories (mainly of redheads, we have to admit!)  Although details of the city have changed much of it, particularly the colleges, naturally, have changed little.

Triple P once had a very intimate escapade at the top of the church tower overlooking his college

Triple P popped into his old college but the quads were full of fenced off building materials while they completely rebuild the college kitchen.  Food at Triple P's college, whose not too distinguished alumni include Michael Palin, the current Prime Minister, and...er..., well, a lot of judges, was pretty good by Oxford standards of the time. Some of the meals we had at other colleges were diabolical (Christ Church springs to mind).  Merton always had the best food when we were at Oxford; the story being that a rich American was so appalled by the food his son had to eat when he visited there that he paid a top chef to take over the running of the kitchens.  Our biggest problem at college dinner was the fact that you got a communal bowl of potatoes or rice between eight of you.  This had to be shared and was fine unless the dish was rice and you were sitting next to Mr Chung, a mysterious graduate student from China who appeared to speak no English.  Actually he didn't appear to speak at all.   Mr Chung was quite capable of demolishing the entire bowl of rice on his own before you fot so much as a spoonful so it was very important that you never sat anywhere near him!

Boots seem to be de rigeur with the current crop of lady students

The female students we observed today were quite different from the ones that we had (so to speak) when we were there.  Apart from the fact they were all glued to mobile phones and were carrying laptops (which would have seemed like complete science fiction to us in our day) all their clothes were much more figure hugging and their skirts, of course, were much shorter.  We were there in the days of long, high collared Laura Ashley dresses and before the days when stockings made their comeback.  That said, notable exceptions must be made for C, Triple P's principal girlfriend  in his first year and MS a girl whose rather obvious charms tended to divide the men in the college's opinion in the same way that Marmite does with most people.  We hate to be ungallant but the looks of the female students do not seem to have improved in the last three decades as much as the looks of girls from the general population of their age; which just goes to show that brains and beauty combined are a rare thing.

Triple P's rooms in the first year were on the top floor of the second building from the right.  The left hand window was his living room and the right hand window was his bedroom.  This was unheated and, as a result, Triple P developed a taste for intimate activities on the floor where you could be next to the gas fire and you could admire your young lady naked with out her freezing to death, particularly if you could toast crumpets for her on said fire.  The bedroom, apart from containing a large hospital bed with an iron bedstead which also, at least in the summer, facilitated our first bondage sessions, had a wooden box containing a large knotted rope which was, it seems, the only provision for a fire escape.  Best to keep a close eye on the crumpets (so to speak) therefore.

Triple P's college from ground level

All in all an enjoyable day but we must return soon as we were in something of a rush and would have liked to have visited a few more of our old haunts!

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Martini of the Week 11: The Orient Bar at the Pera Palace Hotel, Istanbul

Agent Triple P likes Istanbul and it is always a pleasure to return there, as we did last month.  After Canada we think it is the country that we have visited most often. True, Istanbul is hopelessly over-crowded (nearly 14 million people or nearly 20% of the population of Turkey) and can be horribly noisy but the location for this week's (yes, we know we never actually post one a week) Martini, the Pera Palace Hotel, perched overlooking the Golden Horn, is quieter than some places that Triple P has stayed in the city.

The Pera Palace was built in 1892 specifically for travelers on the Orient Express arriving from Paris.  It was the first European hotel in Turkey and the first building, other than Ottoman palaces, to have electric lighting.  It also had the first electric lift in the city which is stil operating today.  It was closed in 2006 for an extensive renovation and reopened about  a year ago. 

Ravioli

They have done an excellent job on it although, sadly, as is often the case these days, the site of the restaurant has been moved from its original grand room to something more contemporary and characterless downstairs.  Nevertheless the food at the new restaurant  is excellent even if the decor is a bit at odds with the more traditional look of the rest of the hotel.  Triple P had splendid ravioli followed by guinea fowl for lunch one day.

Triple P and his companion, B, were sat in the Orient Bar; a great favourite of Ernest Hemingway.  Other famous guests include Ian Fleming, Great Garbo, Jackie Kennedy, Alfred Hitchcock and Sarah Bernhardt.  Famously, of course, Agatha Christie stayed at the hotel and penned Murder on the Orient Express there.  You can even stay in her old room and the restaurant has been re-named Agatha's.

The Orient bar today (or, rather, last month)

The decor of the refurbished bar is a bit relentlessly purple for Triple P's taste but, fortunately, there are enough original elements remaining to still provide a vintage experience.  When we last visited the bar was more yellow and traditional although it was looking a little tired, but the updating has been done well we think. 

 Orient bar about six years ago

In its heyday

The service was truly excellent and the only negative was the slushy jazz/funk muzak.  We are not suggesting that they should have gone twenties retro (or even Richard Rodney Bennett) but something more appropriate to the surroundings would have been nice.

Orient Bar terrace

On the evening Triple P and B were there it had been 27 degrees centigrade and so most people chose to sit out on the new terrace.  This was very nice and, indeed we sat there another night but Triple P wanted to experience the bar proper.  The lighting was engagingly dim and curtains blocked out the bright evening sunlight very effectively, making it seem later than it actually was.

B who was in a particularly expansive mood had a glass of the local (from the Marmara region), and trendily labelled ,Arcadia Suavignon Blanc-Sauvignon Gris.  She drank this in two gulps, justifying herself with a trying day, so we ordered a bottle.  Not as assertive as a New World Sauvignon and, indeed, it showed quite a lot of grapefruit taste.  Not in an English white grapefruit sort of way but in a fruitier red grapefruit sort of way.  Fortunately the grassiness of the Sauvignon Blanc took away what could have been a sweetly cloying aftertaste.  Wine is expensive in Turkey, due to UK-style high taxes, but this was certainly better value than the imported wines.  A normal bottle of French Champagne, for example was over £200 a bottle. 

At this point B berated Triple P for writing wine notes rather than paying her the attention she undoubtedly deserved in her white silk with cerise flowers cocktail dress.  This was certainly a better outfit than the following morning's effort which consisted of some, admittedly fetching, olive green shorts with white trim and a Freddie Mercury teeshirt.  Oh well, it was only for going down to the spa, we suppose.  Still, the elegant public spaces of the hotel suggest something more formal should be worn at all times.

Anyway, Triple P's Martini was gratifyingly cold and made with Absolut vodka.  It only had two olives, rather then rather increasingly prevalent three or even four and B kindly removed the second one.

We finished the evening with a very restorative (Triple P had had to get up at 4.15am to catch his early morning flight from London) cup of truly delicious Turkish tea.  Happily it wasn't full of sugar, as it often is.   Because of his fatigue Triple P retired early (around nine pm) whilst B gave him a demonstration of how harem girls serviced their virtually immobile masters in a series of gyrations which, she claimed, were the origins of belly dancing.

Most diverting!

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Traffic Jam lights

For the last week they have been digging up the main road close to Agent Triple P's house, again. With the road down to one lane the resultant congestion has meant queues of up to half a mile in length during the rush hour.

This morning Triple P left the house early for a doctor's appointment in the village and the lights had failed.  Guess what?  There was no queue whatsoever. People just took it in turns to drive when it was clear.  Triple P is reminded of the town in Denmark which removed all of its traffic lights, road markings and warning signs to find that the traffic flowed better and the accident rate dropped.

A lesson, here, we think!

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Yachty Totty at Cowes Week

Triple P has had a request for more yachty totty (or is it yachtie tottie?) so here are some pictures we took at Cowes.  We are just back from Cowes Week, the world's biggest yachting regatta, where the scenery was enlived by the usual influx of Sloane Rangers down to race or, more likely, just watch and shop whilst Giles, Dominic, Jonty, Hugo etc. raced.

Equally inevitably, busloads of local "talent" (we use the term loosely and loose is as good a description as any) arrive at the Red Jet terminal on the number 1 bus from Newport every night in ridiculously high heels and short skirts looking for likely looking men who can buy them drinks.  They are usually ludicrously over made up in the hope that people won't recognise the fact that ther are mostly under age.

The local girls, we are sorry to report, may have good figures (some of them really do) and nice brown legs (the Isle of Wight has a better sunshine record than most of the rest of Britain) but can be less attractive than their "overner" sisters. 

Now there are some pretty girls from the island; Triple P worked with one many years ago who was quite gorgeous, but, on the whole, they largely fall down in the face department.  This is because there is a recognisable Isle of Wight profile, where the slope of the forehead continues straight into the nose, giving them the same profile as a Norman helmet.  There is, we are afraid, something vaguely Neanderthal about it. 

It may well be because they are more inbred; given the surprising lack of adventurous spirit as regards travelling off the island to the mainland (or the North Island as they refer to it). Even travelling from, say, Bembridge in the east to Yarmouth in the west (about twenty miles) is viewed as something akin to HM Stanley's expedition down the Congo.

Anyway, some of these young ladies may be locals but we suspect that most of them are not.  The local girls tended to appear at twilight (they are very much crepescular creatures) when the light was too poor for photography.

This specimen demonstrates the "just off the Red Jet" (fast catamaran from Southampton) look, with no effort made to dress like a yachty as yet.

Soon, no doubt, she will look like this.

Shorts were very much the thing this year (not surprisingly for a sailing event) but the new development was the ubiquity of denim shorts which, unusually, were adopted by the local "shazzers" as well as the yachties.  Shazzers, for our overseas readers, is a derogatory term in the UK derived from the name Sharon as Sloanes believe that most lower class girls are called either Sharon or Tracy.

One ridiculous aspect of some of the denim shorts on display was that they were obviously cut-off jeans and, therefore, had the pocket linings hanging down below the hem of the shorts.  This, we feel, looks just ludicrous!

Denims are not really the thing for Cowes Week (they don't work with salt water very well) but we thought this young lady (below) carried off her skinny jeans very effectively.  Of course nicely toned thighs work wonders.

The more authentic sailing look is better exemplified by these two.  The "blonde" hair, as can be seen by looking at most of the other examples in this post is, of course,  de rigeur.

Finally, it was pretty windy this year which is excellent for sailing (although we admit to sitting out the 48 knot winds on one of the days in the second half of the week in favour of cooking a coq au vin) but not so good for encouraging girls to strip off and sunbathe.

Away from Cowes, in a rather more sheltered spot down the coast, we did come across these two fine examples decorating a motor boat.  Motor boat girls are different in many ways from their wind propelled cousins and we may examine them another day if, as seems likely, we return for the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes powerboat race.

A fine way to end...

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Martini of the Week 10: Saigon, Saigon Bar, The Caravelle Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City

During our visit to Asia a couple of months ago we stopped off in Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon, as most of the locals still seem to call it. Triple P was staying at another historic hotel there, the Caravelle, but historic for a different reason. Built in 1959 this was the headquarters, during the Vietnam War of the press corps with ABC, NBC and CBS all having their Saigon bureaux there.

Caravelle Hotel in May 1975 shortly after the fall of Saigon

Caravelle Hotel 2011

It was from the Saigon, Saigon bar on the top floor of the Caravelle (then the tallest building in the city) that the press corps watched the North Vietnamese army roll into the city. The hotel is now owned by the Vietnamese Government but if you are imagining some sort of Soviet Intourist look forget it. It is a quite splendid five star hotel that employs some of the prettiest girls Triple P saw in Vietnam and that is saying something!

Caravelle hotel staff wearing the traditional ao dai

The Saigon, Saigon bar is a great place to have a quiet lunch and a Bia Saigon overlooking all the manic traffic below.  In the evening, however, it becomes one of the places to be in HCMC crowded with a mixture of locals, hotel guests and American Vietnam War veterans.

Served by waitresses in fetching off the shoulder red tops it is one of the most characterful bars we have ever visited and must be on any must-visit bars around the world list. It's certainly more attractive than the nearby Rex rooftop bar which has equally strong Vietnam War credentials. They also have a great Cuban band playing from 10.30 on most nights.

Triple P's companion did not join him in HCMC as he was only there one night.  He arrived quite late so took a substantial snack to accompany our Martini.  The Saigon, Saigon Vodka Martini was large and cold (although not quite as cold as Agent Triple P likes).  It was made with standard Smirnoff and had too many olives, however.  Still, one of the better efforts we had in Asia. 

All in all we rate it 6/10

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Big Breakfast of the Week 9: The Lemon Garden Cafe, Shangri-La Hotel Kuala Lumpur

Back to Asia for this week's big breakfast and the Lemon Garden Cafe in the Shangri-La hotel, Kuala Lumpur.  Agent Triple P has travelled to KL, as British ex-pats irritatingly call it, probably more often than any other Asian city.  It was a senior executive of a very big British bank with Asian roots (er...) who once said to Triple P that British men move to Asia for one of three reasons: women problems, drink problems or money problems!  Certainly every time we go to Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Manila, or Jakarta we run into a certain type of forty-something man, usually with a mustache, who drinks too much whisky at the ambassador's reception and has a twenty year old local girlfriend who is spending all his money.  She wants to get married so she can live in England and then, of course, he will lose half his money anyway.  Oddly, (or maybe not) they often seem to work for tobacco companies as Asia is their only expanding market.  So, they'll be dead by the time they're fifty anyway, what with the drinking, the cigarettes and the twenty year old girlfriend.  Someone from the British Embassy in Bangkok once told me of the alarming number of dead businessmen they have to deal with who have literally been fucked to death by a local teenage prostitute and they have a selection of stories they have to use for the wife and family.

Anyway, all of this was prompted by the fact that we first met one of these ghastly ex-pats the first time we visited Kuala Lumpur about ten years ago.  We were staying in the Mandarin Oriental, which is still our favourite hotel in the city.  The Shangri-La was not nearly as good as the Mandarin.  Still, we had quite a good view of the Petronas twin towers (formerly the tallest building in the world and still much more attractive than number 1).

The Lemon Garden Cafe is one of those big canteen style breakfast areas that also serves as the cheap, holidaymakers, lunch and dinner venue.  The selection was as expected with a mix of western and Asian food.  The choice for a cooked breakfast was not brilliant, we have to say, but we had the (rather chewy) beef bacon, some  chicken sausages (not bad) and the usual strange local version of baked beans. The hash browns were a bit dry but they did have mustard.  What cheered up the whole experience were some really pretty girls working there.  In fact the welcome and friendliness of service was excellent.

So it scores 5/10 but at least one point was for the staff.

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Come Fly with Me...on a Lockheed Constellation

One of the great album covers of all time

Agent Triple P has been enjoying Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Come Fly with Me. Apart from the class of Mr Sinatra and the Billy May Orchestra we have been very taken with the wonderful cover for this production which comes from a time when air travel was still a glamorous adventure.

A grinning Sinatra indicates to a, no doubt, lovely young lady that she should hop on with him to the TWA Lockheed Constellation in the background. The blue sky, the shiny airliners and the waiting stewardess all promise a brightly coloured and supremely glamorous international fifties adventure.

However, all is not quite as happy and optimistic as it might appear. Beatles producer George Martin was in the studio with Sinatra when he was shown the artwork for the cover. Apparently, he was furious over the cover saying it looked like a TWA advertisement. Whatever he thought, the cover went out and the fact that Capitol records give an acknowledgement to TWA on the reverse of the cover does make you wonder if there wasn’t some early product placement going on.

The second issue faced by the record company was that the family of Rudyard Kipling objected to Sinatra’s performance of On the Road to Mandalay and, as a result, on all copies of the record issued in the British Empire the track was replaced by Chicago.

Although looking back at it now the Lockheed Constellation looks like the epitome of fifties travel, in fact, by this time it was already becoming obsolete. It was the last gasp of a way of flying that was to disappear with mass jet flight. The De Havilland Comet had already become the first jet airliner and the first production Boeing 707 flew the same year that Come Fly with Me came out. The first Douglas DC8 flew the following year in 1958. These intercontinental jet airliners killed the Constellation dead for anything other than local flights.

The original version of the Constellation

 

In 1937 Lockheed had been working on a four engine pressurised airliner to be called the Excalibur. However, this planned plane was cancelled when Trans World Airlines, encouraged by shareholder Howard Hughes, requested a plane that could carry forty passengers 3,500 miles, way beyond what the Excalibur could have managed. So Lockheed developed the Constellation instead and the first one flew in January 1943. During World War 2 they were used as long range troop transports. Post war they at last were able to fulfill their original purpose as airliners with the first one being delivered to TWA in October 1945. They launched their first regular transatlantic flight with it in 1946. A Lockheed Constellation still holds the record for the longest non-stop passenger flight as on TWA’s inaugural flight from London to San Francisco in October 1957 the plane stayed in the air for 23 hours and 19 minutes.

The Super Constellation

 

In 1951 a lengthened version, with capacity for 109 passenegers, first flew. It is instantly recognisable by its square windows as, indeed, on the cover of Come Fly with Me.

This is how air travel should be!

 

The plane’s elegant profile came from the fact that no two bulkheads were the same shape. Unfortunately, this made the plane expensive to make and less able to cope with pressure variations and all subsequent planes used the cheaper but less interesting tube shape. The last scheduled Constellation flew on a passenger route in 1967.  856 Constellations were built and 19 civilian and 8 military versions survive.

Although the Constellation would be instrumental in making flying much more attainable for ordinary people it was a very luxurious flying experience in its intercontinental days. Proper beds were made up for sleeping and passengers sat in large armchairs eating real food and drinking drinks served on silver trays.

Coffee, tea or me?

Of course, partly all this luxury was because people really needed to be induced to fly in the days when planes fell out the sky rather more than they do today. However, it was also because flights were expensive and rich people tend to be fussy about such things!

Come fly with me!

 

So today we can only dream of boarding a Constellation accompanied by a be-stockinged lovely wearing something like this.  We would have been able to look forward to being pampered by beautiful stewardesses.  In those days they had to be young, slim, well educated and single as this TWA recruitment advertisement from the fifties shows.

Sadly, in reality Triple P is off to Asia for two weeks; having to put up with seven flights, struggling through security, fighting for overhead locker space with people who totally ignore the on board bag limits, dealing with the idiots who always sit in your seat by mistake and sitting next to people tapping away at laptops or, even worse, people who never, ever stop talking. Never mind, at least on the Asian airlines the stewardesses are still young, attractive and helpful.

It’s nice to go trav’ling. Or it was.

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