A Watford town centre bar is welcoming back visitors with an Instagrammable Paris-themed open air terrace and cocktails. Its new St Germain terrace – named after the stylish Boulevard St Germain in Paris – overlooks High Street and national campaign manager Jack Jolly describes it as “the perfect place for that long-awaited catch-up with friends”. The Florist Watford certainly lives up to its name with a feminine and sophisticated floral theme throughout the venue. To celebrate its new terrace there is a limited edition cocktail menu influenced by the summer flavour of elderflower.
The Parisian terrace at The Florist With its chilled music, delicate décor and warm friendly service, it’s not surprising that the venue is nearly fully booked for next week.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet who founded City Lights bookshop, epicentre of the Beat movement – obituary
He published Kerouac and Ginsberg and helped to establish San Francisco as a hub of Fifties and Sixties counterculture
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1998
Credit: REUTERS
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who has died aged 101, was a poet who, as founder of the celebrated City Lights bookstore and publishing house in San Francisco, was a key player in the Beat movement. He was immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur.
City Lights, the first all-paperback bookshop in the US, was established in 1953 as a forum for political dissidence and poetic debate. It exploded into the national consciousness when Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged under the Obscenity Act for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s talismanic poem of gay sex, artistic consciousness and spirituality, “Howl”.
My desires for this year are really very modest. I just want to visit Paris again. Covid has delivered many nasty and tragic blows to many people: it has also kept me away from Paris for the first time since I was 16 years old.
At that tender age - long before the purpose of the Erasmus scheme had ever been imagined - my ma took me to Paris because she believed, quite simply, that everyone should go to Paris once a year. Preferably in the spring. Because Paris was the centre of civilisation. And I ve been there every year since then - until our beastly plague intervened.