Copmparing Israel with South Africa

Since Israel is often compared with South Africa nowadays, I decided to look at the demographics.

In 1990, when Mandela was freed, the population of South Africa was 30 million of whom 5 million were white. Twenty years later the population is: blacks 40 million, whites 4 million. (800,000 whites have left since 1995.) That means that whites are outnumbered by blacks by ten to one.

The figures for Israel are more difficult to determine, but it seems that:

The State of Israel had a population of approximately 7,503,800 inhabitants as of December 2009. 75.4% of them were Jewish (about 5,660,700 individuals), 20.3% were Arabs (about 1,523,900 inhabitants), while the remaining 4.3% (about 319,200 individuals) were defined as "others" (family members of Jewish immigrants who were not registered at the Interior Ministry as Jews, non-Arab Christians, non-Arab Muslims and residents who do not have a religious classification).

That doesn't count the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. If they are counted, then the Arab population is nearly 50% of the total.

Obviously Israel and South Africa cannot be compared historically or culturally. Although some Boers thought of South Africa as the Promised Land, it was not regarded by all Christians as such. And, although my Protestant Huguenot ancestors left France for the Cape of Good Hope 330 years ago to escape persecution by Catholics, they were not murdered by the millions like the Jews. (It's estimated that only a quarter of a million French Huguenots were killed or driven from their lands.) The plight of the Boers, in the eyes of sympathetic Europeans and Americans, is that they unfortunately picked the wrong place to settle.

But the plight of Jews is different. Israel was not only their refuge from anti-Semitism but, according to the Bible, it's the land that God gave them.

Now I'm going to commit heresy in the eyes of American conservatives.

I'm not a Bible-believing Christian so the whole "Promised Land" meme is not part of my thinking. I'm not a Zionist and don't understand why European Jews did not come to America to escape European anti-Semitism. Apart from the Biblical meme, what other reason was there for Europeans to settle in that part of the world?

Okay, the Jews are there now but they are not outnumbered ten to one by Arabs as the whites in South Africa are by blacks. So what's the problem? Why can't they face facts like the South Africans did?

Here's something that I did not know:

Israel has two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew is the primary language of the state and is spoken by the majority of the population. Arabic is spoken by the Arab minority and Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab lands (by 2002 these Jews and their descendants constituted about 40% of Israel's population.)

But I did know that 60% of the Jews in Israel are Europeans. They're immigrants just like the whites in South Africa and will have to adapt to reality.

Maybe the Israeli Jews are up against more dangerous enemies than white South Africans ever were. But the rest of Africa aided and abetted the African National Congress terrorists for decades in South Africa and Russia, through its proxy, Cuba, also waged war on South Africa for many years.

I'm not saying that I am not sympathetic to the Israeli Jews. Of course I am but I'm not more sympathetic to them than I am to white South Africans. It isn't easy being a small civilized and democratic island in an ocean of relative barbarity.

I don't have the answers - mostly because I'm not Israeli and am ignorant of the whole picture but also because I saw how stupid and destructive European and American interference in South Africa was. I also realize that it's probably not fair to compare Israel to South Africa.

It used to drive me nuts when ignorant Americans used to compare South Africa with the American South. South Africa has ten blacks for every one white. In certain states in the Deep South blacks make up 40% of the population. That's not quite the same.

Maybe Israel could be more accurately compared with the Deep South.

Wine-tasting dinner

We went to the monthly wine-tasting dinner at the local Indian casino tonight. The food was delicious as usual. The chef is Italian and really loves food. He told the story of how Catherine de Medici took her own Italian cooks with her to France and they introduced good cooking to the French.

The menu:

Escargot en Toscan (snails baked in tiny baguettes with a creamy pesto) served with a chardonnay.

Oregon coast seafood cocktail (local shrimp and dungeness crab topped with Australian lobster tail in a chantilly) served with a pinot gris.

Venison scalloppini with chanterelle, porcini and portabella mushroom ragout served with a pinot noir.

White chocolate and orange crème brulée served with a white blend of pinot gris, gewurztraminer and muscat grapes.

And the wine was superb but I'm not going to mention the name of the winery because I want to talk about the winery owners and I'm not sure if they'd like that.

When we arrived the only table that had enough seats left for us had a sweater throw over one of the chairs. We sat down and an old man (I figured he was in his 80s) dressed in old jeans sat down beside us and introduced himself as the owner of the winery. Soon his wife joined us. She was also in her 80s but still stunningly beautiful.

The husband didn't talk very much but the wife did. Of course I'm really nosy and had to know all about them. She told us that her mother had been in vaudeville so I piped up and said: "You must have gotten your good looks from her."

"No," she said; "I actually look more like my father."

Her first husband had been a diplomat and they had been stationed in Brazil in the 60s. She told us quite a few tales about Brazil. She's also a cook so we talked a lot about food - and wine - and growing stuff.

Her current husband had been an electrical engineer and she had been a school-teacher when they first met. Twenty years ago they retired, bought some land in Oregon and planted pinot noir and pinot gris long before those varietals had become such fashionable grapes to make into wine in the USA.

She had been raised on a 1,000 acre ranch in northern Idaho and had always wanted to return to the land. We were stunned at how much physical labor they both still do growing their grapes. I guess it what keeps them so young. We learned a lot from them about growing grapes (and other fruits and vegetables) in our climate and clay soil.

After dinner I asked them if they had any wine left to buy. They had a half case each of the pinot gris and white blend and a case of the pinot noir. So we bought $500 worth of their wonderful wines. We parted with an invitation to the winery and will definitely keep in touch. I felt like I'd known them all my life.

Oh, when the venison course arrived, she told us about the first time she shot a deer on their land. She hadn't used a 30-06 rifle since her childhood in Idaho but she was determined to kill this particular doe that ate their grape-vines. She knew that she always pulled to the left so she aimed for the belly and got it in the head. "It was delicious," she concluded with her beautiful smile.

After dinner we stayed and chatted some more and she started telling us about their trips all over the world. "I hate planning," she said; "I prefer to do everything spontaneously."

That's when I said to her: "Well, I'm glad I didn't marry you. That would drive me nuts. I have to plan down to the second."

"Yes, I can tell that," she said.

"And I can tell that you've come a long way from that ranch in Idaho," I said.

I love hearing peoples' stories - especially the adventurers who have come West.

Saturday sitting rooms

The South African connection # 368

The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

Due to "a weird administrative blip", no prize was awarded in 1970, so they are making up for it now. On the short list:

[W]e have Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, a fictionalised biography of Alexander the Great of a kind that couldn't be more fashionable now.

Although Renault was born in England, she lived in my old hometown, Durban in South Africa, most of her life:

In 1933, she began training as a nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. During her training, she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a life-long romantic relationship.

She worked as a nurse while beginning a writing career, treating Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol, and working in Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward until 1945. She published her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939; it had a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, which novelist Linda Proud described as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance". Her 1943 novel The Friendly Young Ladies, about a lesbian relationship between a writer and a nurse, seems inspired by her own relationship with Mullard.

In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa, where they remained for the rest of their lives. There, according to Proud, they found a community of gay expatriates who had "escaped the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain for the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Durban.... Mary and Julie found themselves able to set up home together in this new land without causing the outrage they had sometimes provoked at home."
...
It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time — in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen who fall in love during World War II, and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956), the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes; her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership. It would also foster rumors that Renault was really a gay man writing under a female pseudonym. Renault found these rumors amusing, but also sought to distance herself from being labeled a "gay writer."
...
Though Renault appreciated her gay following (and the income it provided), she was uncomfortable with the "gay pride" movement that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots. Like Laurie Odell, the protagonist of her 1953 novel The Charioteer, she was suspicious of identifying oneself by one's sexual orientation. Late in her life, she expressed hostility toward the gay rights movement, troubling some of her devoted fans.

The irony is that she went to South Africa to "escape the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain" but her Greek historical novels were banned in South Africa in her lifetime. She died in 1983.

Uncivil war contd.: "Never waste a crisis?"

I wrote in my previous uncivil war post:

Apparently the loony leftists haven't heard of metaphors and, since many harbor homicidal fantasies of their own, (see the nutty professor who killed three of her colleagues) they of course immediately started pissing their pants and frothing at the mouth and assume that we're all psycho like them.

Andy commented:

Patrick, the MSM is, of course, taking every opportunity to paint the right as nutjobs. The bad thing about this is that someone really is likely to be attacked. There ARE some frothing rightwingers that have had it! A tiny minority of our side IS ready to exact some real pounds of flesh.

I've often marveled at how few public officials actually are attacked/killed, etc. Governors, Presidents, VPs, etc. have good security. But Congressmen & Senators, not so much. These people are out and about in DC, and at home. It's amazing to me that more nutjobs (on the right, and left) don't act out their frustrations, and plug some of these folks.

Of course, I'm glad they don't. I'm just really surprised. This is the most emotionally charged time I can remember since Vietnam. I believe the MSM is building a framework in anticipation that something WILL happen. If nothing does, well, everybody expects them to be in the tank for ObozO & his crowd anyway.

But if something does, there will be "we told you so" coming from every stinkin' one of them. We'd better pray that everyone holds their fire.

Dan joined in the conversation:

Pat, Like Andy, I'm worried that the media is building a narrative in case something does happen. There's a story or poll almost everyday stereotyping conservatives; today Yahoo news said a new poll showed 25% of Republicans thought Obama was the Anti Christ. Stories similar to this appear daily and the subtext of all them seems to be: something bad's going to happen and we know who will be responsible.

I responded:

Yes, Andy, I agree that "this is the most emotionally charged time I can remember since Vietnam" and, like you, I'm amazed that no violence has happened yet. We may have a few nutjobs on our side but nothing as crazy as the Left.

Dan, we know that politics is simply non-violent war and that [political] warfare is psychological.

The Left did it in San Francisco during the Bush years: "Bush is going to round up all the gays and send them to secret concentration camps in Alaska" etc.

Of course they also used to "joke" about rounding up all Republicans and sending them to re-education camps.

The current hyperbole could possibly be the Left's attempt to create a crisis which they can then exploit. But I don't like to think that any humans could be that cynical. I'm hoping it's just because they're stupid and overly emotional.

PS At the time of the spitting, faggot and nigger incidents, the thought did cross my mind that the perpetrators were agents provocateurs planted by the Left. I wouldn't put it past them "never to let crisis go to waste" - especially when they have gone to the trouble of creating the crisis.

The fact is that there really are true-believing Marxists who will stoop to the lowest depths of indecency to further their cause. (After all Lenin said that the end justifies the means.) They think that conservative Christian Republicans will put gays in concentrations camps or start a real shooting civil war because that's what they fantasize about. They are so perverted and cynical that they don't believe that people can actually be decent.

I've known real Marxists and they are all motivated by one thing: envy. Their covetousness makes them frustrated and filled with rage and hate. I've known true-believing Marxists from all walks of life: white trash, black trash, students, unionists, writers, journalists, lawyers, professors and politicians. They all have one thing in common: they are coldly calculating manipulative misanthropes or even sociopaths. They manipulate the bleeding heart liberals through appeals to emotion.

That means that they control the Democratic party. They started taking over the Democratic Party during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (who was a typical misanthropic "progressive".) Sadly most Democrats are either easily-manipulated "useful idiot" bleeding hearts or degraded and corrupt solipsists.

PPS At dinner tonight Chas and Andy and I were talking about this. Having lived in San Francisco for so long, we know the politicians from there. Are Democrats like Pelosi, Feinstein and Boxer "useful idiot" bleeding hearts or degraded and corrupt narcissists? Actually they are a mixture.

They may have been suckers for emotional manipulation at one time but they now are cynical solipsists. They're richer than most middle-class Americans and will leave their children well-off. They really don't care if everybody else's kids are stuck paying off the bills that they are running up in DC because they know that, with the aid of tax lawyers, rich Democrats don't have to pay taxes.

Name-dropping #4: politicians and Hollywood celebrities

Of course you have to be careful about what famous person's name you drop in certain circles. The first famous person I met when moved to San Francisco was Jerry Brown who was then Governor of California. (He has recently announced that he is running for Gov again - God help California.) I met him at the Zen Center in San Francisco and thought he was a very nice, unpretentious man in spite of his crazy politics - but of course I couldn't tell Republicans that I liked him.

About 10 years later I met another politician, Tom Haydn, who was at that time a State legislator in Sacramento. I detested this man before I met him because of his insane politics and my prejudices against him were not dispelled by meeting him. He is arrogant and phony - and plain ugly. I kept thinking as I talked to him: "How could Jane Fonda ever have married and had sex with this troll?" And of course I couldn't tell Democrats that I despised him.

My friend who had gotten me the job in Yehudi Menuhin's restaurant in London came to live in California soon after I moved to San Francisco. She had given up working for the Arab "prince" on board his yacht in the Mediterranean and taken a job working for the film producer Gary Kurtz.

Kurtz had been collaborating with George Lucas ever since American Graffiti and had produced Star Wars. I liked Kurtz a lot. He is a very nice guy. He had a beautiful house on the south slope of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County with a stunning view of San Francisco. Lucas decided to have his adopted daughter's second birthday party at Kurtz's house. He had a temporary "playground" (swings, carousels etc which I later learned had cost $20,000) built on the lawn just for the party.

My friend who worked for Kurtz was asked to organize the party and asked me to do the catering. I decided to cook finger-food that could be eaten standing as it was a buffet lunch. Lucas' wife at the time was vegetarian so I made falafels, hummus, tabouleh, baba-ganoush and tomato and cucumber salads served with pita bread. I got to Kurtz's house at 6 am to have lunch ready by noon. Lucas was the first to arrive.

My friend kept digging me in the ribs and urging me to go to Lucas and tell him that I was a writer. I was still in awe of Lucas in 1980 when I met him but, even if I weren't, I would not have been that pushy. When he eventually came into the kitchen, I introduced myself as "the cook" and let him taste all the dishes. I was pretty timid in those days and didn't say much and Lucas seemed awkward and uncomfortable. Maybe he expected me to gush about how much I enjoyed Star Wars but I was tongue-tied and he was aloof and unfriendly.

Later, when I learned more about him, I decided that he didn't have enough class to have any sense of noblesse oblige to put mere servants like me at ease. Kurtz fell out with Lucas soon after I met them because Lucas "kept changing plans and going over budget" during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back but my friend told me that there were already tensions between the two men before that. Kurtz is a gentleman and Lucas is pretty "unpolished."

A few years later Chas and I were in Sears in San Francisco buying a plug-in word-processor cartridge for my Commodore C-64 when Robin Williams came in and started to look through the Commodore software. He was very friendly and chatty and told us that he was looking for games for his C-64.

While I'm on the subject of Hollywood celebrities - I also knew the actor Michael Nouri before he became famous. He was also a follower of my Hindu guru - and may still be. I lost touch with him after he became famous. The beautiful actress Marissa Berenson and George Harrison's wife were also followers of my guru but I never met them.

I did meet one other Hollywood celebrity - Alicia Silverstone - before leaving San Francisco but I'll save that for another time.

Buddhism - agnostic or atheist?

Buddhism has evolved into a confusing array of different religions. But the Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, who lived around 400 BC, did not set out to create a religion or to become a god. He was more like a Hindu Martin Luther who set out to reform Hinduism, especially the monasteries. But nowadays the Buddha is worshipped as a god by most Buddhists even though Siddhartha was probably either an agnostic or simply indifferent.

There is an apocryphal story that Buddha invited one last question from his favorite disciple as he lay dying. The disciple asked: "Is there a God?" Buddha answered: "Trying to find the answer to that question is a waste of time. Use what little time you have to become enlightened and then you will know the answer."

While most Asian Buddhists worship Buddha as a god (some, like the Tibetans, even worship pantheons of other gods) most Zen Buddhists and many Western Buddhists are agnostic, deist or atheist.

From Mark Vernon's review:

In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared in 2007. So what's he doing now, just three years later, endorsing a book on Buddhism written by a Buddhist?

The new publication is Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Its author, Stephen Batchelor, is at the vanguard of attempts to forge an authentically western Buddhism. He is probably best known for Buddhism Without Beliefs, in which he describes himself as an agnostic. Now he has decided on atheism, the significance of which is not just that he doesn't believe in transcendent deities, but is also found in his stripping down of Buddhism to the basics.

Reincarnation and karma are rejected as Indian accretions: his study of the historical Siddhartha Gautama – one element in the new book – suggests the Buddha himself was probably indifferent to these doctrines. What Batchelor believes the Buddha did preach were four essentials. First, the conditioned nature of existence, which is to say everything continually comes and goes. Second, the practice of mindfulness, as the way to be awake to what is and what is not. Third, the tasks of knowing suffering, letting go of craving, experiencing cessation and the "noble path". Fourth, the self-reliance of the individual, so that nothing is taken on authority, and everything is found through experience.

It's a moving and thoughtful book that does not fear to challenge. It will cause consternation, not least for its quietly harsh critique of Tibetan Buddhism as authoritarian.

The rest of the review is mostly about how secular humanists and atheists, like Hitchens, have responded to the book. Vernon concludes:

There are questions to ask, such as how compatible Buddhism really is with existentialism and pragmatism. Philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger, for example, are not typically celebrated for their compassion, a key ingredient in any Buddhism. For myself, as an agnostic, I was saddened that Batchelor has now definitively opted for atheism: the closure on the transcendent that decision represents felt like a partial turning away from his previous open efforts to discern the nature of things.

Well, I'm not "saddened that Batchelor has now definitively opted for atheism." I'm a bit surprised because the Buddha didn't "definitively opt" for either theism or atheism. He left the decision to each individual. That's because the concept, the idea, of God that each of us has is completely subjective and very difficult (if not impossible) to describe and therefore to talk about. How can something mortal and finite like the human mind grasp something immortal and infinite?

Some people believe that there is only mind. Others, like me, believe that humans also have souls. I'm not a neuroscientist and have no idea if what I perceive as my soul is really just another part of my mortal brain/mind. All I know is that "I" am not my mind. "I" am watching my mind. I call that "I" my soul and that soul knows God because it is created in the image of God. Hindus and some Buddhists believe that the soul is one with God - and that only God exists.

I like that idea but I haven't got a clue if it's true or not. And I don't care. Paul said:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

That suits me fine. I'll know what I need to know when I need to know it.

Saturday sitting rooms

Spring at Robin's Wood

Digby eating "dog truffles" - yep: cat poop.












Delicious!












Plum blossoms.











Herbie and me and a red-currant bush.











Miss Piggy and me.











Miss Piggy is very talkative.











Two guinea fowl.











Chas with Digby and a bantam rooster.










Chas and Andy with Digby, a bantam rooster and Smudgie the cat.










And our first spring chicken. There are now five new chicks.

Prayer

When I was still young and a fanatical Catholic, (as only a convert can be) I read what Paul wrote in Thessalonians 1 - 17 and 18:

Pray without ceasing.

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

I thought, "That makes a lot of sense. Obviously, if God is omnipresent, then I would want to be aware of Him all the time, asking Him every moment for help and guidance and giving thanks constantly. But how do I pray without ceasing and what do I ask for when I have already been given everything that I need?"

The answer was so simple that I missed it for years. That's because the answer was not intellectual. But of course I searched with my intellect and I searched only within the Catholic tradition. I had to leave the Catholic Church to find the answer.

There is an Eastern Orthodox tradition of praying ceaselessly. It's called the "Jesus Prayer" or the "Prayer of the Heart." The classical form of the Jesus Prayer is:

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

But, when I first found it, it was in a book of "spiritual practices" which included yoga meditation and the wording was:

"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me now and at the hour of my death."

And those are the words that I have used for the past 40 years.

Of course, in the Eastern Orthodox mystic tradition, one is meant to never stop saying that prayer. The history of the Jesus Prayer goes back to the early sixth century, with Diadochos, who taught that repetition of the prayer leads to inner peace much the same way that the repetition of a Hindu mantra does.

I'm not a saint or a yogi so I don't pray ceaselessly but those words have been a life-line for me whenever I've needed to become mindful of God in trying times.

Macarius of Egypt said there is no need to waste time with words. It is enough to think, "Lord, according to your desire and your wisdom, have mercy. If pressed in the struggle, say, Lord, save me! or say, Lord. He knows what is best for us, and will have mercy upon us."

Since God already knows everything already, I seldom use words to pray anymore - except when I need to focus my mind.

Why even bother to pray? The word pray and praise may not come from the exact same etymological root but it's interesting that Paul's words are translated:

Pray without ceasing.

In every thing give thanks.

The other interesting thing is that the word "prayer" can refer to the words as well as the person who is praying. I figure that I am a prayer just by being alive - especially when I am giving thanks and singing God's praises. As Aldous Huxley said: "The nearest thing to heaven on earth is when you are filled with gratitude." And the best prayer is to sing (and dance) His praises.

But sometimes I need to say words to help focus my mind.

On Saturday night my blood pressure dropped so low that I had to lie down on the floor of my bathroom before I fell and hurt myself. Every time that I lifted my head, I started to black out. I started saying my prayer:

"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me now and the hour of my death."

That calmed my mind enough to become aware of God. I lay there for about a half hour before Andy found me. He took my blood pressure and found that it was 57/33, the lowest it's ever been. It should be 120/80 so that was less than half of normal. I felt like I may die so I whispered to Andy to get Chas so I could say goodbye.

I didn't want to go to the ER as that is stressful for the boys as well as me. So, I waited. It took a few cups of teas before my BP finally climbed to 90/60 and I began to feel that I had passed the crisis. And I'm still here - and grateful for another day of life.

Saturday sitting rooms

Name-dropping #3: Yehudi Menuhin

Sometime in the early Seventies I got really fed-up working in retail pharmacies and got a job with the British National Health Service in a hospital Sterile Solutions Lab. Nowadays all sterile solutions are bought from big manufacturers. In those days we made all our own IV solutions and sterile eye-drops. It was an interesting job but I had to join the union and ended up being reported to my shop-steward for "lack of team spirit" - basically I worked too hard and made my fellow workers look like slackers. I also really resented having 15% of my wages withheld for union dues. I was not happy.

Then a friend suggested that I take her place managing a famous "whole foods" restaurant in London. She was leaving for a job as service manager aboard the private yacht of an Arab "prince" in the Mediterranean. I didn't think I had the right sort of experience but I interviewed for the job. It turned out that one of the owners had been a pharmacist but had given up her career because, as she put it: "I got bored with modern pharmacy - counting pills and typing labels - and no longer believed in it." She now believed in organic "whole foods." She told me that she wanted to hire me because she needed someone with organizational skills as she was sick of the "creative types with no real business talents" who were attracted to the restaurant business. I clicked with her. And there was no union. I accepted the job.

I could write a whole book about that restaurant but I'll just tell one tale that relates to the point of this story.

There were two chefs, both called Michael, who were "lovers." They fought constantly and that really had a bad effect not only on the quality of the food but on the service, staff morale and general atmosphere. One day I heard a crash in the kitchen and, when I went to check it out, I found the two Michaels chasing each other around the kitchen with huge carving knives. I fired them and told them to get out or I would call the cops.

They left and I was stuck without chefs. The rest of the kitchen staff were excellent but there were too many Indians and no chief. So I stepped in. Even though I could organize and manage staff, it was a bit of a baptism by fire.

I had grown up in a cooking family and knew how to do basic "British cuisine" but I also knew how to cook "South African cuisine" which is a mixture of European and "Cape Malay." The "Malays" (really Sumatrans) had been brought to the Cape by the Dutch settlers as household slaves and soon introduced their own cuisine and nowadays many of the traditional South African dishes such as bobotie and sosaties are actually "Cape Malay." I had also learned Hindu cuisine from an Indian friend. I introduced some of my recipes and they were hits.

Eventually I hired someone to manage the "front of the house" (as the dining room is known in the business) and I took over as chef. That was the beginning of my dream to one day own my own restaurant. But, when it came time to renew my work-permit, I was told by the Brit immigration authorities that I had to go back to pharmacy as there was a shortage of pharmacists but not of cooks. So I went back to pharmacy for another 20 years before I owned my own restaurant.

Anyway, I better get back to the topic. There were three owners: the former pharmacist and an aristocrat who sat in the House of Lords (and who had tried unsuccessfully - the government bureaucrats were commie - to pull strings with immigration to keep me) and Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist. Even though Menuhin was an American born in NYC, he went to live in England in 1962 and eventually became a Brit citizen.

I was slightly in awe of the aristo but I was struck dumb when I first met Menuhin. He was the most famous violinist in the world when I was a kid. My paternal grandmother, a classical pianist and my first piano teacher, worshiped Menuhin who had been a child prodigy in her youth. (His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923.)

I was surprised at how short Mehuhin was. He was a nice if somewhat aloof and patronizing man who used to eat there regularly. He would walk in, smile weakly, wave his hand sideways like the queen and say: "Good morning, staff." After I had started to cook and spent most of my time in the kitchen, I seldom saw him but he always left a message for me that he had enjoyed the "new dish." He was a vegetarian convert to Hinduism and especially liked my vegetarian Indian dishes. (He brought the yogi B. K. S. Iyengar to the West in the 1950s.)

That's it. Now you can see why I went off on a tangent from the gitgo. I don't have much to tell about Menuhin. Even worse: afterwards, whenever I told people proudly that I had once worked for Menuhin, most of them would say:"Who dee who?"

After building early success on richly romantic and tonally opulent performances, he experienced considerable physical and artistic difficulties caused by overwork during the war as well as unfocused and unstructured early training. Careful practice and study combined with meditation and yoga helped him overcome many of these problems. His profound and considered musical interpretations are nearly universally acclaimed.

Here's a video of Yehudi Menuhin filmed in Charlie Chaplins studios in Hollywood in 1947 and conducted by Antal Dorati with the Hollywood Symphonic Orchestra playing Mendelssohn's violin concerto:

Name-dropping #2: Tate and Polanski

Last August, on the 40th anniversary of the Manson murders, I wrote about the time that I met Polanski and his then wife, Sharon Tate:

Tate and Polanski had gone to Europe the day after Manson first met them in March. I met them in July of 1969. At the time I was working in a pharmacy in Gloucester Road in London. One day Tate and Polanski brought a roll of 35 mm film into the pharmacy to be developed. I told them that the film would be ready in two days time but they did not return. Tate was obviously pregnant and stunningly beautiful. I showed all the other people who worked in the pharmacy Tate's photos. They were typical tourist pictures taken by Polanski of Tate posing in front of all the tourist spots in London.

A few weeks later I heard of that Tate had been murdered. I went to get her photos only to find that they had been stolen.

Yes, it was the same pharmacy in which I met Snowdon.

At that time Polanski was 36 and Tate was 23. He was a creepy little garden gnome and Sharon was a tall willowy blonde beauty - obviously the gnome's "American trophy." She was lovely, open, friendly and "radiant with pregnancy" as they say. He was a shifty-eyed weasel; one of those dirty creeps who makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck and causes your testicles to shrivel up.

Name-dropping #1: my brush with Brit royalty

I've done my fair share of name-dropping. Maybe it has it's uses. I've never tried it but it could be one way to break the ice when meeting strangers with whom you have nothing else in common. Maybe serve the same purpose as talking about sports or movies or soap-operas around the water-cooler at the office? But really it's mostly about the cheap thrill factor - a sort of "second-hand fame".

The first famous person I met was Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret's husband.

My first job when I moved to London over 40 years ago was in a pharmacy owned by South African Jews. It was on Gloucester Road which is where all the aristocrats used to live. In those days most of them were already fairly poor but they put on an act.

The pharmacy had been owned by a pharmacist, Mr Ashton, who was very snobby and very queer. He used to let the old aristocrats run up too much debt and they did not pay their bills. He went bust and sold out to the South African Jews who kept him on because he knew all the aristos.

Whenever Princess Margaret came to the pharmacy, Mr Ashton used to lock the front door and then spend hours gossiping with Margaret while she tried all the perfumes and other cosmetics. The new owners soon put a stop to this because the Princess also did not pay her bills.

Mr Ashton was very deaf. He wore two hearing aids but still couldn't hear very well. He was especially bad at not being able to hear what he was muttering to himself through his ill-fitting false teeth. He would say the most insulting things about the customers in what he thought was a whisper.

For instance, if one of the poor aristocrats used to come in and ask to smell all the perfumes, Mr Ashton would stand beside whoever was serving the aristo and say things like: "Who's she kidding? Stupid bitch hasn't got enough money to buy food let alone perfume. The silly cow lives on cat food. She should sell her stinky old pussy to rich Americans. They would probably pay just to brag that they poked the Duchess of Blah-blah."

I used to squirm because I could see that the customers could hear what Mr Ashton was saying while he was expecting me to silently acknowledge his wit - maybe with a sly wink or a surreptitious grin.

I used to work weekends and early one Sunday morning, Princess Margaret's husband, Lord Snowdon, came in to the pharmacy. He was definitely drunk and reeked of booze and cigarets. (Mr Ashton adored Princess Margaret but hated her husband, because he thought he was a gold-digger with no class. BTW Margaret was also a lush.)

Anyway, I asked Lord Snowdon what he wanted and he said he had just come from a party where he had smoked too much and wanted something for a sore throat. Just then Mr Ashton appeared behind the counter, so I turned to him and asked what I should give Snowdon.

"Oh, just give him some blackcurrant and glycerine lozenges. His throat isn't sore just from smoking. He's a notorious poofter too and has probably been sucking too many dirty...."

"Good morning, Mr Ashton," Snowdon said.

"Good morning, your Lordship," said Mr Ashton.

As I bent down to get the lozenges from a lower shelf, Snowdon put his hand on my butt and started stroking it. I was only 21 in those days and a real country-bumpkin and in awe of the Brit aristos, so I didn't say anything and just let him have a good feel.

Meanwhile Mr Ashton was still muttering. "See what I mean. He's a damn poofter. Better watch your bum, Mr Conlon, before the old sod buggers you."

I gave the lozenges to Snowdon who said, "What am I supposed to do with these?"

I replied, "Just suck one every few hours..."

Then I heard Mr Ashton say, "Stick them up you're bloody arse for all I care."

Snowdon told me to put it on his tab, thanked me and left.

I began to wonder if Mr Ashton knew that the customers could hear what he was saying. I started watching him more closely. He would always draw attention to his deafness in an exaggerated way, shouting "I can't hear you" while cupping his hand behind his ear. Then he would start muttering his insults. Mr Ashton knew that the aristos couldn't complain to the new owners because they owed too much. This was his way of having revenge on them for not paying their debts to him.

Once I had figured out that Mr Ashton knew that his mutterings could be heard, I had a hard time not bursting out laughing when he would do it. He had his act down to a fine art. He was a very plain man in his 70s with a terrible dark brown toupe that used to slip sideways. His moustache was dyed black and his false teeth used to come lose and would float and threaten to pop out. He also used exaggeratedly effeminate mannerisms - hands on hips and flapping limp wrists and stroking his wrinkled turkey neck like he was wearing a string of pearls.

He knew he was old and ugly and terribly faggy - a laughing-stock - but he was determined to have some fun before he died and he did. He used to get a real kick out of seeing me nearly popping at the seams with silent laughter, tears running down my cheeks till I had to rush to the bathroom and burst out laughing. He's dead by now - or over 110 years old. Rest in peace Mr Ashton. You gave me lots of good laughs.

Some names I will drop in the future: Sharon Tate and Roman Polanksi, Yehudi Mehuhin the violinist, Jerry Brown who was at that time governor of California, George Lucas, Tom Haydn, Robin Williams, Michael Nouri and Alicia Silverstone.

PS True story. Princess Margaret was once asked by an American: "How's the queen?"

Margaret answered: "Which one? My mother, my sister or my husband?"

PPS I'm not a fan of Brit royalty. To me they're inbred parasitic tapeworms with tiaras.

Saturday sitting rooms