Pimlico Wilde Contemporary Art Dealer
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by ex St David’s Second Eleven Opening Bat Charnel Kookaburra “Cricket is the finest training for disappointment ever devised” One enters the ground (never a stadium) as one might enter a cathedral. The light falls obliquely, as it always has on village greens wherever Englishmen congregate; the smell is linseed oil, old leather, and rain. … Read more
When most people think of Leonardo da Vinci, they imagine oil paintings of ethereal women with ambiguous smiles, or notebooks brimming with half-sketched helicopters, tanks, and improbable siege weapons. What few realize, however, is that the Renaissance master may also deserve credit for inventing the world’s most extreme sport: BASE jumping. The Parachute Sketch: A … Read more
Chapter III: Wars, Interruptions, and Hannibal The English Pell Mell Club, like so many venerable institutions, has always insisted that it exists above the fray of politics and war. Unfortunately, politics and war have never quite returned the courtesy. Over the past two centuries, the Club’s history has been punctuated by interruptions ranging from the … Read more
Chapter II The Early Years and the Continental Influence If Chapter I was the birth of the Club, Chapter II may be considered its adolescence , a period of enthusiasm, experimentation, and the occasional international incident. Having established a home just off Pall Mall, the founding members soon discovered a pressing need for variety. This … Read more
Readers, it is your lucky day. Next year a new Chronicle of the English Pell Mell Club will be published in a small limited edition. However you can read the chapters here as they appear. Published by the Committee of the English Pell Mell Club With the Gracious Patronage of Pimlico Wilde, Fine Art Dealers … Read more
Just off Pall Mall lies the home of the English Pell Mell Club. The ground is not so much a sports venue as it is a small fragment of another century, preserved between stuccoed façades like a pressed flower between the pages of a Roman history book. It is here that a select band of … Read more
By Miranda Gough Few would have predicted that the hottest, most lucrative new international sport would be related to tiddlywinks. Yet Extreme Tiddlywinks,a high-adrenaline mutation of the ancient pastime,has vaulted from drawing-room eccentricity to global sporting phenomenon, with top stars earning more than NFL and football players. The unlikely architect of this metamorphosis is Seb … Read more
(Final Extracts, London – St Ethelbert’s Square) Late night, outskirts of London We entered the capital like a knife slipping through steak,sudden, unavoidable. The Bentley grumbled at the stop-start traffic, eager to sprint, but London does not permit sprinting. She crawls, she coils, she waits. Simon sat rigid beside me, his case balanced on his … Read more
(Extracts from Day Two, Somewhere near Paris) Just outside Lyon, very early morning I accidentally woke Simon at dawn by accelerating out of a toll booth. He snorted awake like a startled walrus, then demanded to know where we were. I pointed at a sign for Mâcon and said, “France.” His silence thereafter was, for … Read more
(Extracts from Day Three, Calais – Dover – Into the Night) Dawn, Calais We reached the port just as the gulls were beginning their dreadful chorus. Salt wind, diesel fumes, a faint reek of chips already frying. The Bentley looked slightly dishevelled, as though she’d been in a bar fight and come third. The train, … Read more