Story and photographs by Jules

This window dresser and a pigsarmsman recently sashayed into Harrods with his 86 year old Mum for an oyster treat. Mum being insistent that they have, `the selection’.

Now this is a great idea because one gets to do the comparison in `real-time’.  One can guzzle the little molluscs one after t’other and compare taste.

Just as an aside here let me tell you that oysters actually filter and clean the water that they live in. (Makes a change from Humans, the nasty beasts.) A healthy oyster can filter 50 gallons of water a day. Well so I read somewhere. I’m not going to provide a peer reviewed paper!!

Anyway they ( we) had some rock oysters, Japanese Pacific oysters, Clares, Belons- and my favourite The Colchester, accompanied by brown bread and butter. The bread baked on site and the un-salted butter sourced from The Harrods Dairy Farm—or so I’m told.

They were duly dispatched, accompanied by a glass of French Champagne * (from Harrods vineyards, no doubt)- and this enabled us to come to a sensible decision with the suitcase purchase, upstairs.

One of my old haunts in affluent days of yore was Wheelers. Good old fashioned silver service, with slightly snooty waiters. It made me feel good in the seventies, to dine in the up market establishments. Me with denims and kaftan shirt, accompanied by the remnants of “the beautiful people of the sixties” ,the hoi-polloi , current and fading  debutantes and–well anybody really, especially if they had pizzazz.

I never got to Wheelers Oyster Bar in Whitstable, but have avowed to take the pilgrimage one day. This year perchance, if plans for a 400^th anniversary school reunion are taken up. It is miles away, nowhere is too far in Dear Old Blighty .

Thanks to Neville Cole for prompting me to dig out last year’s photos. If you hadn’t they would probably just languish on my hard drive for evermore and a day.

But just before I go I’ll just share this:

On a sojourn on the Coast of California once, we picked out a seafood restaurant in Sausalito, just over the Northern side of The Golden Gate Bridge. We had driven up from LA, stopping at a couple of motels and made camp in a Ramada Hotel in San Francisco. You know, we had the family room with two king sized beds for five of us. Fortunately the saucepans were 3, 5 & 7 years old, so we all bunked in No Prob!

I can’t recall the name of the restaurant, but their specialty was lobster and I was very keen, especially after some recommendations.

I’ll keep this short—as it’s humid today and I need a pool fix.  So let me just tell you that it was a riot.

They slapped bibs on us and made a great big fuss, as we were `Poms abroad’. This led to an abandonment of our English manners and we took great delight in making a mess. 5 or 6 beers helped the oysters down and some Californian White (can’t remember the style), washed the lobster down. It is the way we would like to eat, more often I’m sure.

*poetic embellishment—as Mum had champagne and I had soda, lime and bitters.