Cat’s final Recklings gig

I’m procrastinating to avoid going shopping for clothes, even though this shopping will be in a good holiday-enabling cause.

So instead I will mention Cat’s final Recklings gig, last Saturday, at a darker-than-the-deepest-night venue in Brixton. It was a good crowd, at least for the 90% of us who were there for them and immediately decamped to the pub afterwards for beer and giant plates of German sausage.

I’ve also managed to catch up with a good number of people these past few weeks including Abbi, Maryam and – on Thursday night – Robert dropped round on one of his surprise visits to see me and Josh and collectively stalk our old classmates on Facebook. (“Everyone in that photo went to school together! What kind of people still do that?”)

I also saw Calvary last Sunday at the Lexi. Where to start with this? It’s obviously not a bad film in the way that Eat Pray Love is a bad film – you can’t just slate it wholeheartedly – and it was a lot more fun to watch than the last ‘good’ film I failed to get, The Master.

But I still didn’t get it. Is it so clever to have characters talk about “easy roles to play” because – WINK WINK – they’re in a film? Do we really need to have a character pick up an improbably austere payphone on a windblown cliff-top just so we can inter-cut the shot with his daughter chilling out on a luxury roof terrace overlooking the Thames? Perhaps as a DVD extra the words JUXTAPOSITION could flash on the screen at this point. If the aim is self-referential comedy, it would have been funnier. I don’t mind film clichés themselves, I just think this was taking itself far too seriously.

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