Things I’ve watched: Mamma Mia, again, although this time with sing-a-long subtitles that almost no-one sung along to. It has totally reinforced my recent love for ABBA though. Also: Man on Wire, a documentary about the French tightrope walker who performed on a wire at the top of the Twin Towers in New York in 1974. He was so charmingly playing to the eccentric ‘philosopher poet’ stereotype, and it’s obviously a poor reflection on my Anglo-Saxonness that I spent half the film wondering how on earth he paid for it all. And speaking of such capitalism, I also finally saw Good Bye Lenin which was – as expected – a lovely film. I think I know now why watching films set under socialism makes me feel strangely (obviously falsely) nostalgic and wistful for the USSR – it’s just to do with the very idea of lives being so politicised and based on a political ideology, rather than the specific ideology itself. Aw. Probably.

Things I dig: Crime mapping! I don’t think crime has ever been this much fun – particularly as it proves my long-held (and recently supported by White Teeth) assertion that Willesden High Road manages to change from a ‘good’ to ‘bad’ side after the library. Yay! The other fantastic thing I have discovered today is a song with the following lyrics: Ken is the man that we all need \ Ken is the leader of the GLC! Could you get much more perfect than that?*

Disconnected thoughts, suitably obscured by presenting them in the form of hypothetical article titles from academic journals: The Rise and Fall of Alex Trafford: Lessons for the Comprehensive Future**; “Don’t Go Wasting Your Emotion”: Blogging Feelings in the Public Space; ABBA and paternalistic conservatism? An analysis of the lyrical content of People Need Love.

Watch out for: TfL fare rises to be announced tomorrow, sources suggest.

*You can’t put qualifiers on perfect, yada yada.

**I’ll take ‘and Fall’ out of the title if you get in touch to say hi

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