Half-dark and deco: the Beaumont’s bar
(Picture: Helen Cathcart)Some lessons really shouldn’t need teaching, but this weekend I learnt the hard way that plastering your face with temporary tattoos isn’t the shrewdest move when an afternoon under the blazing summer sun follows. My cheeks now sport the tan lines from hell, including one unsightly speckle that looks like an apple with a bite chewed out. Good old Glastonbury.
Mind you, fruit on the face has been big since René Magritte’s bowler-hatted, Granny Smith’d Son of Man, the surrealist’s 1964 self-portrait about looking beyond the obvious, or something. Magritte has inspired a new(ish) walnut-panelled American bar in the Beaumont, where a copy of Le Maitre d’école — an elder sibling to the Son — is framed by gold-brown bottles of booze, and lends its name to the first drink on the “ceci n’est pas” menu (cigars feature, but no pipes).
