I woke up this morning thinking about the story which follows. A story which I think has cropped up in dreams from time to time over the years - but I don't know whether it has any foundation in truth. This morning's take is probably not.
For some small number of years I rented a ground floor flatlet, front left as you faced the house, in a terraced house, perhaps in west London, perhaps the sort of thing snapped this morning from gmaps, near Ladbroke Grove in west London. Then a rather more scruffy area than I imagine it is now. The landlady lived in the back somewhere and the rest of the house was rented out. The flatlet was more or less all in one, with a sitting area at the front and a small kitchen diner area at the back. Bed in the middle somewhere. Work table in the middle somewhere. Sink but no toilet or bath, so there must have been shared bathrooms. I used the place from time to time in my travelling days, perhaps when I was with CCTA, because it was cheaper and pleasanter than taking a hotel room by the night. I kept a modest amount of stuff there. BH visited occasionally, perhaps giving the place a bit of a dust. There was some complicated arrangement with the bank for paying the rent, an arrangement which came unstuck at one point and I had to scurry around to put things back together again. A tenancy eventually brought to an end, some time after it had stopped making much sense financially. I never did use the place very often.
There is another story that came to mind after I had woken up properly, another story which crops up in dreams from time to time, not recently, about a restaurant in Queensway which we used to visit when we were young. Near the Bayswater Road end, the same side of the road and quite near the ice skating place. A rather inconspicuous entrance from the street. A two tier place with a front portion more for coffee and cakes, then down some steps to a rather bigger back portion more for meals. There was a balustrade separating the two portions and stopping one falling over the edge. There was a piano just below the balustrade. A little on the dear side, a little grand for us at the time. But we liked it. Maybe some truth in this one?
No trace of any such place now, in StreetView, but it would have been near fifty years ago and there has been a lot of change in Queeensway in that time. As I had found on the occasion noticed last year at reference 1.
PS: it occurs to me now that the first story may be a derivative of the bedsit I rented in Balham for a few months, at the time of our move from Norwich to London some thirty years ago. Not a flatlet and not in the right part of London, but it answers in other respects.
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