Postscript • • • ONLY Mr. Cronin, the butler, has
aroused a comparable amount of public interest in recent weeks. Half an hour before the doors of the Tate were due to open on Sun- day, at two, the queues for Picasso stretched round into the side streets on either side of the building; police were marshal- ling the cars that were drawing up; young women Were picnicking on the pavement; and an ice- cream van was doing a steady trade with old gentlemen, small boys, and cute American girls. Once we were inside, attendants were calling, Queue both sides,' and 'Tickets, please!' and within another half an hour our successors were halted at the revolving doors-the head of a line that stretched down the steps and on to the Embankment-until the nearer galleries could clear themselves. They were as crowded by now as private-view day at the Royal Academy, if a good deal less dressy; not as shrill with talk, but filled with the deep diapason of the noisiest air- conditioning plant in London.
We live in a free society, so the attendants (lid not keep us moving, as the guards do in the Lenin-Stalin tomb in Red Square, but most of the visitors shuffled round of their own accord, With an almost Muscovite devotion to duty and absence of facial expression. It would have been nice to see, at any rate, a few people openly taking pleasure in some of the greatest paintings of our time. As it was, the only visitors I saw who Were patently enjoying themselves were four young Orientals (Chinese? Japanese?) in front of one of the master's more comprehensively dis- articulated nude women, pointing to her private parts, which were not at all where one would expect to find them, and exploding into sniggers that would not have seemed out of place from Occidental fourth-formers.
A reader not only of these plebeian pages but
also of the reminiscences, as recorded in the Sunday Pictorial, of Prince Filippo Orsini, sends me a cutting in which it is set down how the prince fell in love with a film actress and, it goes on, 'Any minute now, I said to myself, you are going to be up to your patrician eyeballs in a scandal that will give Roman society something to chew on besides spaghetti.'
The very next time I come across a Roman prince talking to himself, I shall lean a little closer, to try and catch him referring to 'my patrician eyeballs.'
• And as we are gossiping, this week, a little above our station in life, let me draw your attention to another princely figure-the Ameri- can lady who is Mrs. Harry Crosby by marriage, 'Caresse' by choice, and the Principessa Roc- casinibalda by purchase, to whom the current issue of the Queen devotes four pages of photo- graphs and letterpress, winding up with, 'Active, idealistic, interested in everything, Princess Caresse still finds time to putter, to read in her garden, or to send to her friends such unexpected gifts as a huge block of ice wrapped in red ribbon like a Christmas present.'
I now recognise how unprincely, inactive, un- idealistic, uninterested in anything, not even
puttering, my friends are who send such drearily expected gifts as books, bottles of claret, boxes of chocolates and theatre tickets; or who tie their huge blocks of ice in string, the insensitive clots.
From time to time I. am asked to repeat the name of the five-shilling wine I mentioned here a couple of Christmases ago as being outstanding value for money. Its name is Periquita-a full- bodied dry red table wine from just south of Lisbon, across the Tagus-but, alas, it is now 5s. 6d., along with the two white wines (sweet and dry) of the same breed, all of which are sold by Yates's Wine Lodges, who have added some five- shilling Spanish wines to their list to console the disappointed. Yates's are deeply entrenched all over the North of England (in their Blackpool grill room, Periquita is sold at the table at 7s. 6d. a bottle-indeed, all their wines are sold with meals at only 2s. above take-away price: Soho should take note), and they have a wine bar in the Strand, opposite where the Tivoli used to be, and Peter Robinson now is, where sherry is Is. 6d. a glass and draught champagne 2s. 3d. You can hardly go wrong at 5s. a bottle for the Spanish wine, but I retain a long-standing good- will towards Pgriquita. I wouldn't choose to drink it every day of my life, but it is better than most
vies ordinaires one gets in France, and at 5s. 6d. it is worth keeping a bottle always handy, to wash down a modest meal, or for cooking or mulling. Amateurs of the history, of viticulture may like to know that it is said to come from one of the last remaining districts that have never known phylloxera : the insect that causes the disease can't get through the sandy soil to attack
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