This series of articles covers a short weekend break in London over 30 November - 1 December 2002. We had a look around London on the Saturday and visited a record and film fair in Wembley on the Sunday, catching up aith a few celebrities.
Click each of the photographs below to read the articles. A link at the bottom of each one will bring you back to this Index.
Sunday 1 December 2002. We had chosen this particular weekend to come to London especially for this event. We were staying in the Premier Inn at Wembley and it was a short walk to the exhibition hall where the Record and Film Fair was being held.
There were far more records than films, sad to say. But at the time I was collecting records from the 1930s up to the late 1950s on 78 rpm 10-inch shellac discs. Again, sadly, only one stall had any of those in the entire place.
I found a familiar face on one stall though - Ian MacLagan of The Small Faces! So we chatted for a while and then I moved on, aware that there were a couple of other people I wanted to catch up with. One was the actress Ingrid Pitt who was sitting quietly behind her sets of photos. I didn't know Ingrid then as well as I would in later years, but I knew she could be very witty, but had also had quite a traumatic early life. I think there were more people there for the records than there were for film-related photographs or pre-recorded film.
In the UK this still meant VHS tape as 2002 was the first year in which DVDs started to outsell VHS tapes and for a fair like this they would have to wait a bit before second-hand DVDs turned up in the UK.
Anyway I digress. Ingrid was sitting on her own and her eyebrows lifted in recognition as I went upto her stall. "You look fabulous!" I said and was rewarded with a broad smile as her face lit up. "Do I?" she asked, and we fell into a conversation.
Then I went off to meet another of my favourite actresses. I had been a keen photographer since teenage years and had always looked for photos of the then model, Caroline Munro, in the pages of Practical Photography and Amateur Photographer. Then, following a long contract as the Lambs Navy Rum Girl, she broke into films and starred in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and a few Hammer horror films before (as far as I was concerned) totally stealing the limelight from Barbara Bach as a Bond Baddie in The Spy Who Loved Me. An absolutely lovely lady to meet and know.
She was there with the equally delightful Jayne Crimin, both of whom I have had the pleasure to know for over a quarter of a century. Neither of them look today like that could even be possible...
Star Wars Imperial Troopers. I was in no danger - I was right in front of them and their weapons don't work if pointed at people. Mind you, one of them nicked a doughnut off Miss Franny once - she was very indignant...
A few records from the 78s stall found their way into my possession. Elvis's early hit Heartbreak Hotel was in near mint condition and plays superbly. If you get a shellac record in this good a state it sounds much better than the easily-scratched vinyl of a 45 rpm record. Unfortunately it cost just a bit more than three shillings and sixpence as written on the cover. That would have been just seventeen and a half pence!
I bought Ron Goodwin's version of the Theme from "Limelight" as much for the original cover, which was a design I didn't have in my collection at the time.
Laurie London's "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands". Give me a bit of time - I still haven't worked out why I bought this yet - it's horrible...
And so we returned to the car for our journey home, passing the doomed twin towers of the old Wembley Stadium, seeing them for the first and last time.
Saturday 4 June 1994. A disappointment - it threw it down raining nearly all day. The Cotswolds are lovely on a nice sunny day but there's not a lot of shelter apart from tea shops and cafes so with a view to making the best of it, we went to Cheltenham.
Walking about in a city gets you just as wet as walking about in a small village, so we looked for somewhere to go and I snatched photos as we flitted from car park to shopping centre!
I saw a sign for a record fair and left the ladies to visit the shopping centre whilst I went for a mooch round the singles and LPs (remember them?) in a hall.
The record fair whittled away a happy hour or more. I even made a purchase or two. One of them was Curved Air, being the second album from the band whose name was the title of the album. I used to see them live every time they came to Manchester when I was a teenager - brilliant band! A few singles were bought as well - destined for the jukebox!
Then back to the car and a drip over the map and we decided to drive a bit more and visit Gloucester.
We parked near the canal. This is the National Waterways Museum. But that wasn't what we had come to see. We went into the Robert Opie Museum of Packaging and wallowed in a rosy-tinted nostalgia of boxes of Omo and Acdo, packets of Spangles and all sorts of things that get thrown away in their thousands every day. Brilliant! The Gloucester museum is now closed but a lot of the collection is on display in Notting Hill in London. It was well worth seeing.
It's still raining. But I've spotted another museum reference on the map back in the Cotswolds so we'll go to check that out on our way back to Bourton-On-The-Water!
