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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.

I’m heading into an especially boring blogging phase, I’m afraid. There will be things to write about soon, but not quite yet. Sorry about that. I guess I could say that The Grand Budapest Hotel was a great film – which enthused me with its suave, camp zest for the ridiculous – but you probably already knew that, because I’m about a month late here. Believe it or not, Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York is less good. (We’ve been on a bit of a binge of bad Netflix movies recently. There was also Miley Cyrus’s LOL, which did at least feature several fondly promotional shots of Chicago’s CTA.)

In the meantime, I do have some genuinely heartfelt gratitude to embarrass people with. Lots of people have been very kind to me over the last few weeks, but two in particular went so far beyond the requirements of friendship that I now owe them more than I do the Student Loans Company. Thank you, Cat Hurley and Susannah Belcher. You are both wonderful.

Did You Know?

This blog will be ten years old this month. Ten years ago I looked like this:

Rome, 2004

Two things.

Projectors are cool

Firstly, I just got back from seeing Katie in Durham and helping to bring her stuff back home for the holidays. And it was so, so good to see her! And watch Stardust. And walk around Durham in the dark, talking about the Seven Bridges Problem and looking at the one constellation we can both name. And streaming old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes on the train home.

Secondly, Michele and I broke up. I’m going to have to copy and paste this news onto Facebook, because it’s suddenly developed a shyness about broadcasting such information, but I’d rather people knew. Because I’d want them to also know that we had a wonderful time together, and I hope and believe we will be friends for a very long time.

It’s the whole point of this blog, really – to mark the wonderful times 🙂