The Savoy
Though it is over in two minutes, refuelling the car is, I find, an intolerably bothersome and slightly disgusting chore. There is something Kafkaesque about the process, bound up with ideas of hunger and gratification ...the petrol tank's ever-open orifice somehow oral, the throat turned up in expectation, even though pumped full to overflowing, like a goose fattened for pâté de foie.
My eye always casts about for some diversion to ward off these unpleasant forecourt ruminations. The other day at Halstead, Essex, running idly along the rank of buildings on the opposite side of the road it came suddenly to this, sounding in my mind a skirling, electrified Wurlitzer organ-blast. The former Savoy cinema was built in 1916, well before talkies. "A wildly incorrect confection" splutters Pevsner. Quite right though. Two open pediments, the larger containing an oculus, and pilasters with "vaguely Corinthian" capitals. There is an extra pair of capitals, threequarters of the way up, supporting nothing. The dentils are extremely naïve, the interspaces between them being too great ...and should they also go around the tops of the capitals?
The Savoy
Though it is over in two minutes, refuelling the car is, I find, an intolerably bothersome and slightly disgusting chore. There is something Kafkaesque about the process, bound up with ideas of hunger and gratification ...the petrol tank's ever-open orifice somehow oral, the throat turned up in expectation, even though pumped full to overflowing, like a goose fattened for pâté de foie.
My eye always casts about for some diversion to ward off these unpleasant forecourt ruminations. The other day at Halstead, Essex, running idly along the rank of buildings on the opposite side of the road it came suddenly to this, sounding in my mind a skirling, electrified Wurlitzer organ-blast. The former Savoy cinema was built in 1916, well before talkies. "A wildly incorrect confection" splutters Pevsner. Quite right though. Two open pediments, the larger containing an oculus, and pilasters with "vaguely Corinthian" capitals. There is an extra pair of capitals, threequarters of the way up, supporting nothing. The dentils are extremely naïve, the interspaces between them being too great ...and should they also go around the tops of the capitals?