The Down Town Fish Bar occupies centre of the area of Tunbridge Wells which we call The Village. It is the last of a number of shops which in days gone by served local people in the Mount Sion area with groceries, meat, bread, dairy and other products. You can trace where the shops were by the frontages of buildings now converted for domestic use, eight or perhaps nine of them. In those days some people lived here who rarely travelled further than The High Street, which runs on a parallel course, at the foot of Mount Sion, with the London Road and The Common, all within five minutes walk.Visitors yesterday were the occasion of a Sussex Pond Pudding. It is an old fashioned suet pudding in the centre of which sits a lemon, amply pricked to allow the juice to escape, and padded with lumps of butter and demerera sugar. The pudding cooks, suspended in a basin in simmering water, for about three hours; the suet crust forms; inside, the butter, sugar and lemon juice make a rich, sweet and sour sauce which intermingles succulently with the suet paste. It oozes forth like delectable larva when the pudding is cut open.
Now and then suspect visitors comment on this blog. It is clear that their sole purpose is to draw attention to their trade or inclinations. Most are ignored or deleted, but I must spare a word for Manoj Singal whose company is Meenakshi Polymer Pvt Ltd of New Delhi. I am not sure why he. yesterday, visited a post of mine which goes back to March 2007. But I am nevertheless grateful for his attention and encouragement.
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There's almost certainly a banal (and commercial) reason why Manoj Singal of Meenakshi Polymer Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, visited Now's The Time but who cares when we are party to an imaginative sense. I see him him sweaty and frazzled, sitting in an untidy office with open windows through which the sounds of street traders penetrate. He turns to his accountant (an untouchable who gained his degree via the Open University) and says, "You know, Santi, I'm told on Mount Sion there is a court where Jamshyd still glories and drinks deep. Where matters of the spirit are given precedence to those of trade. With corridors down which one brushes against shelf after shelf of books - some of them, Santi, devoted to the charm and uselessness of poetry. Poetry, Santi, in this day and age when you and I must bend ourselves to the rigours of injection moulding. Does the world need any more plastic laundry baskets, Santi? Why don't you and I make a pilgrimage to this same Mount Sion where wandering is an honourable activity and reflection the highest expression of the human mind. You and I, Santi, entering this quieter world taking time to utter the mantra 'Frontage, Pudding, Visitor' and where the natives will grace our foreheads with a mark of understanding."
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