THERE ARE MANY absurdities at the Soho Fair, in keeping
with the delightful incongruity of the whole project. The cosmo- politan committee has modelled it on a French fair, but no kermesse. however heroic, ever had such a crazy appeal. A garish Dutch organ plays in Golden Square. painted with Elizabethan musicians and Victorian odalisques; a band of West Indians pours out Latin-American rhythms; exquisite young Londoners have put on dirty jeans, and Bohemian young Frenchman blazers, to sell programmes; a dark, Celtic lady plies a spinning-wheel in Shaftesbury Avenue. But they are all from Soho. Gaston Berlemont, who runs. the York Minster and the fair, says he got the idea at the deconsecration service of St. Anne's, which had been Soho's parish church until it was bombed. Now that there is no church, he thought there should be a fair in her honour. I do not know which of the several St. Annes he means, but for incongruity's sake I hope that it is the lady from Constantinople who lived for fifty years as a hermit on a promontory in Epirus. `We've tried to cater for all tastes,' says M. Berlemont. 'Some people like poetry, just as some like elephant's foot steak. Personally 1 like neither.' I hoped that this meant there would be an elephant barbecue on the programme, but that seems to be one taste that is not catered for.
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