At about 11 o’clock one night, about twenty years ago, I was walking back to the place I was staying in Covent Garden, up one of the side streets leading from The Strand.
Suddenly a flock of men on motorbikes & scooters drew noisily into the kerb a few feet in front of me. I was more startled than alarmed – What on earth?
A taxi drew up, & out stepped Jerry Hall & another woman; a brief, professional pose, lights flashed, cameras clicked; an anonymous metal door opened in the wall to reveal a dingy staircase leading down. Jerry & her friend disappeared inside, the flock departed, as noisily as they had come.
On all the occasions I had walked that way before I had never noticed the door in the wall, or had just thought it was there as an escape hatch or for taking deliveries of coal in the old days. Now I noticed, for the first time, a very discreet name plate proclaiming the name of a temporarily famous & fashionable London nite-spot which figured frequently in the gossip columns.
That was my one & only brush with the paparazzi, but it made me thankful that my daily life was of no interest to the press.
