Postscript : .
UP in Islington, the whole of Milner Square has been bought for development by a Scottish investment company which is said to have been n inspired by the cachet—and, doubt, the cash value—of Canonhury Square, hard by. It is part of the same tendency that Myddleton Square, near Sadler's Wells, just over the Finsbury frontier, which has always been a melancholy chocolate- brown all over, has begun to blossom into pale- grey stucco and balcony railings, white glazing- bars and doorways, and doors that are red or blue or grey or a lively yellow.
I live in Islington myself, so I am all for its becoming as gay (though I hope it will never become quite so self-conscious) as Chelsea— especially if the borough council is thereby shamed into keeping its streets clean. All the same, I can't help thinking that the investing Scotsmen have something of a job on with Milner Square, which is not at all like Canon- bury Square or, indeed, like anything, else in London. It was designed by Roumieu and Gough, in the 1840s, and might as plausibly be attributed to Gustave Dore, for there is a nightmarish quality about the narrow houses, which seem tall enough to shut out the sky, with their tall, narrow pilasters, from between which tall, narrow windows peer down upon the cringing passer-by like the eyes, set much too close together, of a sinister assembly of short-sighted monsters. 'It is possible to visit Milner Square many times,' wrote Sir John Summerson, 'and still not be absolutely certain that you have seen it anywhere but in an unhappy dream.' I hesitate to ask a Scottish in- vestment company to dig deep into its pockets, but I should very much like it to slap a new façade on to those gaunt and gruesome house- fronts before it turns the houses into flats and the flats into a fortune.
One of those fascinating characters whom I come across only in the gossip columns has beCome the father of a baby girl, and his choice
of a name seems to have more than ordinarily baffled the Daily Mail's historian of our own times. For the learned Paul Tanfield records that 'the child is to be called Hero, which Mr. Ben- nett regards as not at all an odd name for a girl,' and he must have continued his puzzled inquisition of poor Mr. Bennett, who is further reported as saying, 'Is it unusual? The name just occurred to us.' I'm not quite sure which to admire the more—the proud father to whom names 'just occur,' slap out of Smith's Classical Dictionary (or Much Ado About Nothing), or Paul Tanfield, who seems to have thought, in so far as he thought at all, that when Leander swam the Hellespont it was to pay his rather soggy call on a boy friend.
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It is a pity that some trusted friend could not while there is nothing undignified in having chosen to be something rather less than a para- graph in the history books, there is a substantial difference between the footnote, 'He gave up his throne for the woman he loved,' and one that reads, 'He gave up his throne for the woman he loved, and became a feature-writer on the Daily Express.'
It is a long and, in more senses than one, a fruitless time since the Food Standards Com- mittee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries recommended that bottles of 'orange drink' should show how much fruit or fruit juice they contain. Mrs. Barbara Castle, MP, says that many contain only 5 per cent. A Sunday Pictorial reporter, soliciting the views of a spokesman for the fruit-drinks trade, was told, 'If manufacturers added more fruit the flavour might change and people might not like it.' I am glad that he conditioned his reply with ',night change' and 'might not like'—but why can't his employers let the public suck it and see?
It was saddening to learn that hailstorms last weekend battered those vineyards around Verona where Soave wines are made, to the tune, it is said, of more than a million pounds' worth of damage. Wine-growers, like farmers everywhere, tend to make the most of disaster, but with more reason than some, for their eggs are usually in the one basket, and if the vines themselves have been destroyed it will be five years or so before the new plants bear grapes that are grown- up enough to make a serious wine.
As one might guess, soave in Italian means 'suave' in English, but the wine gets its name not at the hands of an enthusiastic sales execu- tive, but after the battlemented little- town of Soave and the gentle hills around. It is a white wine, very dry indeed as Italian wines go. with a refreshing acidity. Indeed, as I remember Soave from drinking it often in Venice. it has a sort of slight bitterness to the aftertaste, which made it go well both with the magnificent Adriatic shellfish and with oily dressings and sauces. It is usually seen in tall, slender green bottles, as Mosels and Austrian wines are—per- haps a relic of the days when Vienna ruled the Veneto. Peter Dominic of Horsham sell Soave, at 8s. 9d. a bottle: the man I discussed it with at their London cellars said that he thought it quite the best of the Italian white wines. He might well be right, though I should like to try it against the caste/li wines from near Rome before pontificating.
According to the Italians themselves, vines were first planted in these parts, and wines made, by the Etruscans. Which reminds me that when I was last in Florence I heard a charmingly eager American girl, urged by her guide to visit
the Museo Archeologico for the sake of the Etruscan antiquities and puzzled as to what these could be, crying out after much explanation, 'Gee! Do you mean there were Tuscans and Ee-tuscans?'
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