Black and White Babe of the Week 7: Cindy Crawford


The 1980s saw the rise of the supermodel. Models, who had previously been anonymous, became household names and none more so than Cindy Crawford whose distinctly atypical curves separated her from the existing stick-thin brigade. Cindy became the first supermodel to pose for Playboy and liberated her fellow supermodels to discard their clothes as often as possible. Hooray!


Agent Triple P sat next to Ms Crawford on an aeroplane once and found her completely delightful.

Blog Hits


We are rather surprised to discover that The Adventures of Triple P is now receiving between 450 and 500 hits a day! We are under no illusion that it is our deathless prose which is attracting more attention in a day than a very expensive government website we were involved with attracts in a month. No, we well know that pictures of young ladies in a state of undress will attract such interest day after day. And, as Barry Norman probably never said, why not?

The Lord of the Rings: The Complete Recordings

Williams

Agent Triple P has long been an aficianado of film soundtracks and thought that the John Williams scores for the original Star Wars trilogy would never be surpassed. However, we have now conceded the title of best film scores ever to Howard Shore's monumental achievement for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.



Shore



Over the last three years the original soundtrack selections have been overtaken by a series of limited edition versions of the complete scores for all three films. These are, almost certainly, the most expensive cds that Agent Triple P has ever bought. We managed to buy The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers as soon as they came out over Christmas 2005 and 2006. However the complete score for The Return of the King has proved most elusive. It appeared in late 2007 and almost immediately sold out. The record company announced that they would not be pressing another edition and we watched with disbelief as the prices on eBay approached £150 for the set. We were delighted, therefore to pick up the set for a mere £80 (frankly we would have happily paid £150) from a seller in Chicago. We had no great hopes of this set actually arriving, given the vagaries of the US Postal Service and the UK Customs and Excise, but were delighted when it arrived by FedEx today.


Howard Shore's score is the greatest achievement in film music since the original Star Wars music re-defined what a film score should be and took us back to the days of Korngold, Steiner, Waxman and Herrmann.

Korngold



The three complete scores total 135 tracks and 9 hours and 58 minutes of music. Shore's use of leitmotifs is the most effective since Williams original Star Wars score and, arguably the finest use of leitmotifs since Wagner's Ring cycle (appropriately).

Miss May: Keeley Hazell











We haven't put up Miss May yet this month as we have been very busy with other things but as June approaches we feel that we would be remiss in not marking our May Calendar girl at all. So here is Keeley Hazell, a young lady whose charms are all too apparent.





21 year old Keeley, from Lewisham (home of a very successful PPP police station), trained as a hairdresser but won a series of modelling contests including the Sun's Page 3 idol. A great favourite of the more dubious end of the lad's magazine market she has recently been hailed by David Cameron as an enviromental warrior for such eco friendly suggestions as having sex with the lights off.
Trust a BNC man to come up with a wafer thin justification for championing a young lady with very big tits. Frankly, Agent Triple P, if faced with Miss Hazell, would be quite happy to keep the lights on and pay for a few acres of trees in the Amazon for the privilege of interacting with her genuinely awe inspiring bust.
Does she look good in a vest? Oh my God!


We are convinced that Agent DVD would agree!


Badoing!

The Imperial Hotel, Delhi

Nothing lifts Agent Triple P’s heart like a truly great hotel. His trip to India had yielded one very good hotel, one great hotel and one truly great hotel. Indeed, pleasant though the Taj Bengal was in Calcutta and as redolent with history as was the Taj Mahal Palace in Bombay neither of them could hold a candle to The Imperial in New Delhi.


Quite simply the Imperial had leapt straight into Triple P’s list of the top five hotels he had ever stayed in. It joined a list which included the Adlon in Berlin, The Island Shangri-la in Singapore, the Ritz in London and the Bauer-au-Lac in Zurich.
These were hotels which combined (with the exception of the Shangri-la) heritage, unrivalled dining, beautiful rooms and common parts and impeccable service. Hotels where Triple P felt at home.
They had to have a good bar which could make a top-notch Martini. They had to have a world-class restaurant. They had to have spacious rooms with excellent bathrooms. They had to have beautiful women (whether staff, guests or both) wafting elegantly about. They had to have, if it was a hot place, an excellent outdoor pool. The Imperial scored highly in all areas.

Our modest room.
The Imperial was opened in 1936 and is located on what was then Queensway, now Janpath. Designed by Lutyens it was intended to be the most luxurious hotel in the city and succeeds triumphantly. Whilst its exterior is resolutely Art Deco its interior is a blend of Art Deco, Victorian and Colonial. Literally hundreds of 18th and 19th century artworks litter the rooms and spacious corridors. All the pictures have an Indian subject and many of them have a military theme, often showing gallant British soldiers from different periods of the Raj happily skewering the locals with sword, bayonet and lance.

They don't like it up 'em!

The guests included many locals but also more westerners than Triple P had seen on his visit so far. Alarmingly, a high proportion of them seemed to be French. This, however, did have the effect of improving the scenery around the pool considerably, as leggy lovelies wearing very small bikinis sat around reading Paris Match and taking desultory swims in the pool whilst their much older (inevitably) male companions had furtive gatherings in corners of the hotel or stood in little groups inside the lobby waiting to be taken to some meeting or other.


The hotel itself was on four floors and was arranged as a square with no less than eight protruding wings, giving it somewhat the appearance of a hash mark in plan view. Unlike most hotels, considerable attention to detail had been devoted to the corridors and they gleamed with marble and polished brass.


The central corridor. The cleanest hotel area on the planet?


Indian rugs were scattered about as were interesting sculptures and pictures. Little, and not so little, alcoves were placed throughout the hotel and served to show off more splendid pictures and sculptures. Coming across them was often an unexpected joy and Triple P took time to examine the selected paintings and statues.

The lobby was restrained, compared with the typical South East Asian cavernous look of the Island Shangri-la, but led to a magnificent central corridor that went the whole length of the hotel. Most of the bars and restaurants led off from this corridor or the adjoining four storey atrium with its glassed-off roof, palms and tinkling fountains.

In fact fountains were to be found in many places, several of them being of the barely dressed girlie variety of which Triple P was rather fond.


The main restaurant, where breakfast was served was called 1911, reflecting the date when New Delhi took over the mantle of India’s capital city from Calcutta. It served typical International fare and was as informal as you would find in the hotel. Informality, however, when you were shown to your table by lovely sari clad women and then served by waiters in red military jackets and turbans, was something of a relative term. In a separate section of the restaurant was a glassed off verandah which was a splendid place to have breakfast.



Outside was a terrace which was a very good place to take afternoon tea. Whilst the temperature was 102ยบ when Triple P was there, a nice breeze and large green umbrellas kept the conditions bearable outside.



The adjoining 1911 bar, whilst undoubtedly beautifully decorated was too brightly lit for Triple P’s taste and contained, horrors, a television which seemed to show, inevitably, constant cricket, much to the delight of the Australians who appeared to be its habitual residents.




He preferred the smaller Patiala Peg (named after the early twentieth century tent-pegging victory by the Maharaja of Patiala’s team over the Viceroy’s).


Our splendidly efficient barman

It contained only seven or eight tables, some rather daring Art Deco girlie statues and a lot of old Indian Army prints. It was also one of the few hotel bars in the world that made a Martini in a properly chilled glass.



That's the way to do it!



Daniell’s Tavern was named after landscape painters Thomas and William Daniell who arrived in India in 1786 to paint the country’s scenery. The restaurant, with its pan-Indian cuisine, is located on the exact spot where the uncle and nephew team camped to produce thei painting of Jantar Mantar and early eighteenth century observatory. Triple P had a most splendid lunch there.


Sadly, there was not time to sample San Gimignano, the Italian Restaurant, or the inclination to visit La Baguette, the patisserie. Both looked splendid, however.


His favourite restaurant had to be The Spice Route, a South East Asian restaurant that resembled a wooden temple inside. Outside there was a stunning courtyard with pool and pagoda for al fresco dining. Recently voted by Conde Nast International traveller as one of the ten best restaurants in the world and that week having received another award for best ambience, Triple P could not think of a better place to entertain a young lady. Which he did, twice!


Outside, a short walk through the palm-filled gardens, was the pool. The palms gave good shade to part of the poolside and there was a small bar which could supply Kingfisher beer and substantial snacks. Triple P and his companion had hot Chicken Tikka and onion sandwiches in thin Indian bread which were just excellent. Service from the crisply uniformed staff was friendly and impeccable.


All in all Triple P cannot recommend The Imperial highly enough and we will just finish by saying that we venture that it is indeed the finest hotel we have ever stayed in anywhere in the world.