THERE'S a place in Kensington High Street called The Non Stop Party Shop. It's very cheerful but much more harmless and less frenetic than you might think with a name like that. It's really a shop filled with banners and streamers for every sort of celebration imaginable. So for last weekend, there were green balloons and streamers and shamrocks and a big long banner with letters forming the words "Happy St Patrick's Day" hanging down from it. Lots of pubs bought them, the girl said, and mercifully they always seemed to lose them again by the following March so they bought them all over again.
Two girls whose Irish antecedents either went back a long way or else who were very musical and took on the intonation of EastEnders very quickly - or possibly they weren't Irish at all - were buying decorations. They were riddled with indecision over an inflatable leprechaun. It was funny. But was it that funny? I said I thought balloons were more fun, to be honest, dozens and dozens of them, you couldn't go wrong with clusters of them up in corners. That was my view. They thanked me gravely and watched until they thought I was out of their area and then bought the inflatable leprechaun. "Abdul will love it," one of them said to the other.
IN Sainsbury's in Cromwell Road, two very posh foodies were shopping for a theme dinner. They were having oysters and Guinness and were going to make Irish soda bread as a treat. They had the recipe in a nice plastic folder so that it wouldn't tear or get lost. They studied it with some puzzlement. "Well darling, we more or less have everything already for that at home," she said dismissively. "Brown flour, white flour baking soda. What's baking soda?" he asked. "One of those things, darling. You know what baking soda is? I'm not sure I do darling, what's its trade name?" "Oh darling it doesn't have a trade name." She was very impatient. The party might have its undertones of stress I thought. "Well, not so hasty darling, and look, it says buttermilk." "Oh they don't mean buttermilk, darling, they mean sour milk." "We don't have any sour milk at home." "We can sour some up sweetheart."
He was not convinced. "While we're here why don't we get a carton of buttermilk?" he asked, a slightly querulous note coming into his voice. She played her trump card. "I'm harsh, darling. I know how to make soda bread." When people with accents like that say they are harsh they are not condemning themselves for being stern and hard to please, they are in fact saying that they are Irish. "You may be harsh darling, and I'm not harsh, I agree, but I do know a hell of a lot about cooking. I know that you buy the bloody ingredients."
"If you insist, darling," she said, lips pursed.
THERE'S a primary school near here and the sight of mothers waiting for their children was a terrible reminder of all the children that didn't go home from school last week in Scotland. Naturally, this is what the women talked about as they stood with their eyes fixed on the low building; where you could see the drawings and paintings on the wall and hear the sound of five year olds singing. Half of them had kept the story entirely from their children. They said it was quite possible. You just didn't turn on the news on radio or television. You didn't leave a newspaper around the house. They wouldn't know, they would not hear about it until it had gone to the back of the general public's mind at any rate. One other had even asked the local newsagent not to put out one of those billboards with "Slaughter of the Innocents" on the road, in case the children from the school in west London saw it.
The kind Indian newsagent had agreed at once. Some of the other mothers did not agree. They said you couldn't shelter children completely and that if they thought something was being kept from them they would be more frightened still. They said it should be regarded as one of life's tragedies, and possibly say a prayer and then pass on to the next subject.
But the mothers who thought that children would be terrified by the story were very strong in their views. Some children were already frightened of going to school. Suppose they thought that it was possible for someone to break into school and kill children like them? Why add another terror to their little lives? And it wasn't even as if there was anything they could do to prevent it happening. It wasn't like telling them not to talk to strangers or to cross the road on a zebra crossing.
A cold wind blew up the road where the Indian newsagent had taken in his sign lest it frightened the children. The doors opened and the five and six year olds ran out screaming with excitement. Mothers reached out for their hands, and they walked away towards the estates, the high rise blocks, the small streets around.
The lollipop lady said that since that terrible thing had happened you saw a lot more of their mothers hugging them. It was as if they had a vision of what it would have been like if fate had brought a killer to their little school instead of the place that none of them had ever heard of before and none of them would now ever forget.
THERE were a lot of book receptions in London because of the book fair and, of course, the nature of these things is that not everyone knows personally the people they invite. There was a roaringly elegant scene near Eaton Square, in a kind of penthouse that had been rented for the week by a multinational organisation. They were having dos for about 40 or 50 every night.
I have a friend who has a humbler flat in the same house and she said you couldn't get into the lift without steaming plates of canapes and crates of champagne squeezing in as well. It made her grit her teeth.
Anyway, this night she had invited her parents to come and visit her and it was their first time to come and see the flat and she had told them to press button eight, but someone else had pressed the penthouse bell and gone back to pay his taxi, so this voice roared at them to come in and go straight up to the eighth floor. Obediently they did and were plunged into a room of strangers who pressed food and drink on them and introduced them to other people. They were mystified but pleased that their daughter had so many friends.
Her mother was rather upset by some of the pictures on the wall and her father was becoming heavy browed about how she could afford all this on her wages. So they asked a waitress to tell their daughter that they were here. And then slowly it all became clear. So they went down to the door and humbly pressed button eight. And their daughter was furious because they were so late, and they were full of drink and smelling of garlic starters and saying they had eaten so many they didn't want any dinner now. Her parents said there was wall to wall thick carpet upstairs and a very friendly crowd of people. Nobody actually said it straight out but the visit to the daughter seemed a poor thing by comparison.