RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN STIANSEN

When I was a lad, George Bernard Shaw’s plays were daily bread and butter, second only to Shakespeare’s in the repertory. Some time in the Eighties, they sunk out of fashion, though the rhetorical power and theatrical bravado of occasional revivals continue to take audiences by surprise.

Next year, however, 70 years after his death, Shaw comes out of copyright and his oeuvre becomes a free-for-all: I’d put good money on a considerable reassessment in 2021, and I’ve already heard rumours that major stagings of Major Barbara and Mrs Warren’s Profession are on the cards. Great starring roles for actresses; plenty of chewy intellectual meat. More than a decade ago, many in the architectural profession got very agitated when Norman Foster accepted a huge deal from the terrifying Kazakhstani dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev to build a pointless pyramid in his megalomaniac capital Astana.

Now, there’s another sharp intake of breath as supercool, superhot Danish architect Bjarke Ingels (responsible for the jaw-dropping Google building in London’s King’s Cross development) has been photographed smiling alongside the unpleasant Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, as Ingels explores the possibility of master-planning an extensive state-sponsored tourism scheme in Brazil’s north-west. Big bucks are involved, but will they cost Ingels his hipster credentials? When artist and film-maker Derek Jarman died in 1994, he bequeathed his weatherboard cottage on the shingle at Dungeness to his partner Keith Collins. Now Collins has died too, the cottage and its uniquely beautiful garden will go up for private sale unless £4.6million can be raised to buy and endow it. Influencers such as Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Deller are on the case.

But no such rescue is proposed for another essential scene of the Jarman romance – Patisserie Valerie on Soho’s Old Compton Street, the authentic French original that served as the template for the chain that was rescued from administration last year. Jarman’s London base was a tiny flat around the corner in Charing Cross Road, and it was in dingy but lovable Valerie’s that he held daily court to his brilliant circle of friends, swains and colleagues, dazzling them all with his charm, erudition and wit. I would sit at the next table, too shy to contribute, but drinking it all in.

Now the place has been closed and its simple furnishings and crudely painted murals have doubtless gone to the knackers’ yard. At least someone should put up a plaque.