So much to talk about! I shall start with Peggle ‘n’ Pizza, a rather grand tournament held on Easter Sunday to find the one true Peggle master. For posterity’s sake, let the record state that the winners of the group stages were Oliver and Saoirse, with Dominic and Amber coming second. Tense semi-finals then saw Oliver and Amber triumph, and in the grand final Oliver emerged victorious with a score of 19,045 to 11,850. (See, this is way more exciting than football!) Oliver thus went home with the ceremonial Easter bunny ears. Hurrah! But will he be able to defend them in the future from eager young upstarts? We shall see…

(And it was a lovely experience too, frequently interspersed with moments of surreal confusion for me at the sight of unlikely Peggle couples. I shall try and get around to putting more photos up on Facebook shortly, but in the meantime a small selection follows. Oh, and mega-thanks to Joshua for applying his sporting expertise and devising a system for scoring!)

The pitch

A match of mixed emotions…

Hard at work

Friendships come and go, but Peggle victory lasts forever

Triumph!

The next day Lucy and I embarked on another ‘pick a random Tube station’ adventure, which was a brave thing to do in the face of planned engineering works and wholly unplanned person-under-a-train disruption. Nonetheless, we made it to Langdon Park on the DLR before realising that, in the nicest possible way, there isn’t really a hell of a lot there. (Sorry.) But that’s fine, y’know, because we ended up back on the other side of London and at Westfield – a place that delights and offends in almost equal measure. (You think ‘delights’ is a bit strong for a shopping centre? Then you haven’t seen the milkshakes…) In the evening we finally made it to the fabulous Lexi to see Religulous. I enjoyed the film, sure, but then I was fairly likely to? This doesn’t stop me recognising that the arguments are deployed in a pretty shallow way, although I sympathise with the problem of challenging absurdity intelligently. But I would like to see a film that I could take religious people to that could actually make an impact – the cinematic equivalent of Ebon Musings with added sparkle. (Give it a browse – if nothing else then for the Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists, an essay which so starkly demonstrates the difference between belief and faith it’s, erm, a revelation )

In the meantime, however, I’m more than happy to play Scrabble and watch Twiglet Twilight with one of my favourite theists. Now – how much right do I have to pass judgement based solely on the film? It’s cheesy, without a doubt, and I’ve heard it discussed in feminist terms for so long that I can’t not be slightly irritated by Bella’s unconditional devotion. Having said all that, one has to respect an injection of the dark and deadly into teenage romance, since ‘getting killed’ is a far more pressing and interesting dilemma than ‘getting dumped’. So I don’t know. Ho hum. Sanna’s family also invited me along to Pub Rock, a wonderful merger of ‘play’ and ‘pub gig where you get to sing along to the joy that is the final counnntdowwwwn!’ which I enjoyed muchly. By the end the lines between fantasy and reality were so blurry that we all fled to avoid an ambiguous Q&A in which it would be terribly unclear whether we would be questioning actors or band members, or – for that matter – whether ‘we’ were an audience or just drinkers down the pub. (In fact, some part of me is slightly worried that I still haven’t closed all of the mental brackets.)

You lucky people, you
If we weren’t in the show starting right away
We’d be in the audience too

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