George's Café, 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith – not too far from the Cloisters – offers a full English, popular with buyers and sales execs wishing to avoid the long queues for over-priced croissants inside the nearby Olympia exhibition centre.

Whenever I walk past it I tell anyone willing to listen the story of the weedy Irish poet W.B. Yeats kicking the creepy occultist Aleister Crowley down the stairs.

one of many esoteric outfits popular in London at the turn of the century – had its headquarters on the first floor, and Yeats had been coming here on and off for ten years or so to learn magic spells and rituals.

There was, of course, a “split”, and one morning in April 1900 Crowley turned up in a kilt, a mask of Osiris and with a sgian dubh (“black knife”) – pronounced “skee-en doo” – to seize possession of the Blythe Road temple on behalf of one faction, while Yeats, on behalf of the other, barred his way. The two men bawled magic spells at each other, Crowley advanced, Yeats stuck out a foot and the invader tumbled down the stairs.

But now Felix Taylor, whose literary career survived a brief episode as a student trainee with The Tablet, tells me it is no more likely that Yeats would have propelled the relatively beefy Crowley down the stairs than it would be for George’s to serve smashed avocado on toasted sourdough.

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