Today marks 100 years since that perennial children's favourite, Winnie the Pooh, was published. It wasn't the writer's first work for children: in addition to When We Were Very Young, in which an as-yet-unnamed Pooh made his first appearance, A.A. Milne had already written a play called Make-Believe and a novel-length fairytale entitled Once on a Time (though the latter was half-intended for adults).
If you saw the documentary Freddie Davies: A Life in Show Business on Talking Pictures TV recently you will have caught a glimpse of his grandfather, Jack Herbert, walking past a theatre and standing on its stage (above). The footage comes from a 1969 documentary about Sid Field, the sketch comic revered by Tony Hancock; Jack and Sid had worked together in revue in the 1920s, Sid as juvenile lead and feed to Jack, an up-and-coming comedian by then, thanks to his success in several revues produced by Clara Coverdale.
If you missed the broadcast yesterday, Martyn Tott's "chatumentary", as he has called it, about Freddie Davies is currently available to watch online on TPTV Encore - for a week, I imagine. You will need to subscribe in order to watch but provided you can tolerate the adverts it's free to watch.
A distinction drawn in Radio 4's Today programme between the genres of autobiography and memoir may be less than wholly convincing - is "a work of literature that is verging on fiction" really an adequate definition of a memoir? - but it did remind me of my feelings when reading the comprehensive 2016 biography of the playwright and screenwriter R.C. Sherriff, best remembered for Journey's End.
At last the film Sven Klang's Combo (as it was known on its UK release) is - at the time of writing, anyway - available to watch online here. This is a big deal as when I last checked a few years ago it wasn't possible to buy a DVD with the appropriate subtitles - and it's well worth seeing. Benny Green reviewed it very warmly in Punch as the most convincing portrayal of a band's interactions he had ever seen on film.
When I first heard the Flamingos' doo wop classic Golden Teardrops I was puzzled by the reference to "a cottage by the sea", which seemed an arbitrary place in which to picture the loved one. Did it perhaps signify something to the record's original audience which I had missed?
... I'll remember,
No matter where you'll be -
In a crowded room
Or a busy street
Or a cottage by the sea ...
That was around fifty years ago but I didn't think to investigate further - until now.
As the Guardian has published a list of the Kinks' 40 greatest songs which omits several of my favourites I've dusted off these notes about some of Raymond Douglas Davies's finest.
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Donovan, that seeming child of faerie, recently turned eighty. He is still performing and only a week or two ago on social media trumpetingly denounced as "fake news" the possibility of his retiring. At the time of writing his most recent concert was four days ago, in Cork; another, in Galway, is scheduled for October.
I don't think I'll be buying a ticket should he ever venture to England again, but I'm glad I went to see him a few months ago at Richmond Theatre; it felt like a final farewell to one whose music had once meant a great deal to me.
Settling into my (very comfortable) seat an usher handed me a Donovan CD. Possibly this happened to everybody - I was rather late in arriving, so don't know - but for a moment it felt like a "thank you" from the veteran troubadour himself, a way of acknowledging all the cash I must have thrown his way over the years, though later I did entertain the unworthy thought that his merch people might have been trying to offload copies of the less well-known albums which hadn't attracted many buyers in the foyer.
A few years ago in these pages I described my disappointment at a 2004 Dono-concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the first experience to test my Dono-faith, nevermore to resume residence in my heart with the same ardency. As I finished that piece, I found myself being pulled two ways: he had meant so much, even if he was no longer what he had been. Then, still searching for the precise words with which to tie a ribbon neatly around the experience of those long years of fandom, I noticed that his official site had a link to a live concert in Germany ...
Click.
Danish chain Flying Tiger Copenhagen has been based in Croydon's Whitgift Centre for at least seven years, but its store is now labelled as "permanently closed" on Google Maps.
[Daily Express, 28 April 2026]
The above news is, as a friend of mine would put it, "A wee shame." Especially as Croydon's Tiger store is not the only branch of these cheap but inviting stationer's-cum-giftshops to have closed in recent times; I mourn the loss of a North London branch which happily occupied many post-prandial minutes when I was working nearby.
More than a hundred Tiger establishments remain aroar in the UK though it seems that their days might be numbered too: according to a recent report the Flying Tiger company is about to be taken over by the private equity firm which acquired and rebranded WH Smith as TG Jones. That might not be the reprieve it seems: as 150 of those translated Smith's are now at risk of closure that surely doesn't augur well for other acquisitions.
The Croydon branch of Tiger seems to have been particularly popular with its customers, so why did it have to close? According to the Extra London News website it's merely one of many retail casualties, the result of "economic pressures, high business rates, and the post-pandemic e-commerce boom".
True, you can still find shops which stock inexpensive stationery and the sort of small impulse-purchase which Tiger specialises in but for me, at least, they aren't a viable alternative - even if, like Paul Simon, I took (and take) some comfort there.
The blunt fact is that whatever their consolations most of the correspondingly cheap'n'cheerful emporia lack, or lacked, Tiger's style. Wandering into the branch of Wilkinson's (before its contraction) which was situated upstairs from Tiger in that North London mall I remained in a state of painful sobriety, acutely conscious that I was merely frittering away what remained of my lunch hour by looking through cheap tat. The moment I stepped into Tiger, however, its decor and choice of background music was enough to give me, however fleetingly, a kind of spiritual elevation: with Wilkinson's above me only in the literal sense I felt, for a moment,
little lower than the angels
And - to proceed at last to the point of this post - quite apart from their less inspired surroundings, Tiger's rivals never seem to stock the stationery item which I prize above all else:
The soundtrack double album for the fifties-set British film That'll Be the Day was number one on the UK charts today in 1973, or so I have recently been informed on social media. Its featured oldies helped foster a love in me for doo wop and rock'n'roll more generally even though I have never owned a copy. Tracks were played on the radio at the time - Luxembourg as well as Radio 1 - and I still recall the moment I first heard Frankie Lymon hitting a certain note on Why Do Fools Fall in Love.
The modest film, written by Ray Connolly, has endured, probably because it wasn't primarily conceived as a means of shifting records. Quite the reverse, in fact: the soundtrack LP came into being in order to raise the rest of the finance to make the film, as Connolly has said.
[Producer David] Puttnam went to see a small Canadian television marketing company and proposed building our movie around a plethora of old hits they could promote as a tele-marketed compilation album.
They would pump more than £200,000 into an advertising campaign, showing clips from the film, so all we had to do was put together a 40-track soundtrack album of oldies but goldies.
We’d always planned to have some songs in the film, but 40!
