What's your favorite thing about being sick?
Being sick is pretty miserable but if I'm on the mend and feeling up to it then watching daytime telly can sometimes be novel. For a short while. (I'm assuming this is aimed at America where throwing the odd sickie is part of your holiday allocation).
And no not the song by Coldplay even though I happen to like it, but the whole adjusting time malarkey. Why do we do it? It's light in the evening until nearly 6.30pm now. The kids have long been back from school, factory and agricultural workers I'm sure finished hours ago so that leaves us office workers, most of whom are used to going to work and getting home in the dark during the weeks of mid winter and are revelling in the already expanding lighter hours.
Modern society has moved on. We no longer need the extra hours of daylight to bring in the crops or whatever. Kids aren't walking home in the dark so why screw up my body clock for a few days and give me one less valuable hour of my weekend until the autumn?
Gripe. Moan. Whinge. I'm going to bed now so I get to sleep before the 'early hours'.
Show us a beverage you absolutely can't stand the taste of.
Don't like beer or lager either. Wish I did as it would make it so much easier to get a drink when I'm travelling.
Muse.
HAARP
Decided to make the most of the fabulous four-day Easter weekend this year and get out and about in this wonderful city, despite the freezing cold, snowy and wet weather.
With a Spanish movie already under my belt it was time to take in a gallery and so Mosh and I headed to the Haywards on the South Bank for the Alexander Rodchenko photography exhibition which was excellent. He had an amazing eye for angles and perspective in his pictures and certainly pushed the boundaries 70 or so year ago.
There was also a free exhibition about comedy in art or humour in art and whether it transcends cultural difference or something but that was far from impressive. It didn't even amuse. Perhaps my height was a problem and it went straight over my head.
So used has been the book that one dish, African sweet potato stew, is something I can now cook without the recipe and of course I couldn't resist ordering it. It was beautifully presented, really tasty and, I was pleased to note, very similar to my own attempts.
Anyway, enough of food and onto the highlight of the day: the theatre. As soon as I heard about the cast: Ralph Fiennes, Ken Stott, Tamsin Greig and Janet McTeer I knew I had to go and see God of Carnage, at the Gielgud Theatre without knowing anything of the story.
It's a new play by French playwright Yasmina Riza who is probably best know for Art and is based around the meeting of two sets of parents brought together when one couple's 11 year old son hits the others with a stick, knocking two teeth out.
What starts out as a strained but civilised discussion on how to deal with the incident soon begins to unravel and descend into something that while comical and extremely amusing it also very revealing about human nature.
It is an expertly constructed and pitched play aided by four superbly timed performances. There are so many deliciously entertaining moments and bits of dialogue I could write pages but at the very least, it was enjoyable to be entertained by such a high calibre cast including an Oscar winner.
Am going to have to do something very low-brow for the rest of the weekend after all that.
Just been to see Spanish director Juan Anthonio Bayona's film the Orphanage. I'm not a big fan of scary movies owing to the fact that
they usually work too well but a recommendation from a friend swayed me. I settled down with my pop corn at the wonderful Curzon Soho determined to enjoy the film while not allowing myself to be scared half to death.
It is the story of a woman who returns with her family to live in the house that was the orphanage she grew up in. Her adopted son claims to hear children in the house and I won't say any more.
Don't be put off by the marketing image, it is a much more sophisticated offering than the posters would suggest. Skillfully crafted to create tension and intrigue with a couple of jump out of your seat moments thrown in for good measure. It is evenly paced towards a chilling, climactic and clever twist that gives the whole film a tragic depth that is rare is such a genre of film.
Go see it.
And so the axe is finally to fall on the Astoria my second favourite London music venue. It is part of a larger block being demolished to make way for a new underground Crossrail station.
I'll be sad to see the sticky-floored flea-pit go. It is probably the largest music venue in central London and has a reputation for putting on an eclectic mixture of entertainment from its famed G.A.Y nights at which the likes of Kylie have guested to heavy metal bands.
Mosh and I have spent many an hour watching gigs from the safety of the tiered balconies (brilliant for short-arses like me because I can actually see everything that is going on).
I've been trying to think of some of the bands I've seen and there is one particular gig that will forever stick in my memory - although Mosh will probably read this and tell me it was a different venue.
Not one to let the facts get in the way of a great story, it was Anthrax, who were on good form or 'rocked' I believe is the accepted term these days. And the reason the gig will always stand out in my mind is that the lead singer climbed up onto a 6ft high speaker stack at the side of the stage where the audience expected him to rock out bit, which he did, before launching himself into what can only be described as a stage 'high' dive. It was high enough he probably could have put in a somersault if he'd given it a bit more thought.
Miraculously the crowd below caught him. (I bloody wouldn't have, singer of a rock band or not.) It was quite cool though.
I remember when gigs at venues like the Astoria, Brixton Academy and Kentish Town Forum regularly had stage diving and crowd surfing. Of course it's all high security now and you have to go to much small venues to be within touching distance of the stage. Crowd surfing has gone the way of smoking and been pretty much banned even to the point where you sometimes see signs warning against it.
Health and safety gone mad I reckon but I won't go there as that leads into a whole different area to moan about.
There are proposals for a replacement venue when the site gets redeveloped over the new station but it will be all clean and shiny and, lets face it, not very rock n' roll.
When the diggers move in at the end of the year, it will sad day indeed.
If you could go back and change one thing you've done in your life, what would it be?
Submitted by Devinoid.
That sounds like a regret to me and that is living in the past, which is pointless. Move on with a greater degree of wisdom.
I have a bit of a thing about spies. Therefore, it is with mixed emotions that I read this
It could be seen as jumping the gun a bit, bestowing on Mr Armitage the gilted sexy spy title when he hasn't even been seen in the role yet, especially P-J took a bit of warming to when he took over from Matthew Macfadyen the orginal and still missed sexy spy no.1.
I will be sad to see P-J meet with what will inevitably be an untimely end - I believe in BBC parlance the correct phrase is 'explosive end' - but Armitage already has a bit of a reputation on the Rev Stanley purrr-o-meter for his role as leather-clad Guy of Gisburne in the BBC's Robin Hood.
Like I said, mixed emotions...
Disclaimer: This post was written to accurately reflect genuine anguish and in no way provide an excuse to look up images of good looking actors on Google. Absolutely not. No.
