"pint of semi-skimmed!" "YEAH!" "six free-range eggs!" "YEAH!"
We are well into a busy week of events celebrating Céline's Kate's birthday on the 27th, it's unusual to be outdoors so much. Last night Rhoda greeted me by asking "What are YOU doing here?", which brought home the extents of my recent reclusiveness.
Wednesday I met Kate's mum for the first time and we had dinner in a pocket-sized Afghan restaurant on Islington Green. Very good food but no opium sadly. Thursday we went to The Beautiful & The Damned. It was only my second visit; on the previous occasion I'd drank a half-bottle of vodka on the 210 bus and taken an hour and a half to find the Boogaloo, and I felt slightly nonplussed by the whole thing.
This time we decided to enter the spirit of the night -me in black tie, Kate in her gran's elbow-length gloves and tasselled feather boa- and I had a great time. It's got a dedicated following, there were lots of girls dressed as 1920s flappers. Everyone looked good, they were showing one of Louise Brooks' German films, and the music helped us pretend that we lived in a world where Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, AIDS and Razorlight were unheard of. By the end of the night the flapper girls' dancing was positively furious, and I really did feel that when I stepped outside a loaf of bread would cost 3 billion marks. What do we have that future generations will feel longing for and try to mimic? I don't want to know.
It was Dickon's last one, which is a pity because the other DJ has a nasty habit of dropping in big band covers of Coldplay, Metallica, &c, as well as playing several songs twice. We arrived just as the live act were finishing; a very funny barbershop quartet called Scales of the Unexpected who did an exemplary Abba medley. An aside- both the robot woman on the tube, and a colleague who I was telling it about this morning, pronounced Highgate as HAG-git. Is this one of those London idiosyncracies, like Hole-burn, that I have managed to miss for five years?
The bank holiday weekend will be spent in Brighton and I'm very excited about it. It will be lovely to stay in one of the hotels on the front, after all the nights I've spent pumping up Nick's spare mattress. Malheureusement it's forecast to piss down the entire time. There's always the lanes, I suppose.
Recently, even more people than usual have been stopping me in the street to ask for money "for a phone call". I was discussing this with Mr Boon yesterday when I stepped outside to buy my lunch. A cyclist caught my eye and asked me if I could spare him 50p, whilst continuing to cycle past me.
Wednesday I met Kate's mum for the first time and we had dinner in a pocket-sized Afghan restaurant on Islington Green. Very good food but no opium sadly. Thursday we went to The Beautiful & The Damned. It was only my second visit; on the previous occasion I'd drank a half-bottle of vodka on the 210 bus and taken an hour and a half to find the Boogaloo, and I felt slightly nonplussed by the whole thing.
This time we decided to enter the spirit of the night -me in black tie, Kate in her gran's elbow-length gloves and tasselled feather boa- and I had a great time. It's got a dedicated following, there were lots of girls dressed as 1920s flappers. Everyone looked good, they were showing one of Louise Brooks' German films, and the music helped us pretend that we lived in a world where Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, AIDS and Razorlight were unheard of. By the end of the night the flapper girls' dancing was positively furious, and I really did feel that when I stepped outside a loaf of bread would cost 3 billion marks. What do we have that future generations will feel longing for and try to mimic? I don't want to know.
It was Dickon's last one, which is a pity because the other DJ has a nasty habit of dropping in big band covers of Coldplay, Metallica, &c, as well as playing several songs twice. We arrived just as the live act were finishing; a very funny barbershop quartet called Scales of the Unexpected who did an exemplary Abba medley. An aside- both the robot woman on the tube, and a colleague who I was telling it about this morning, pronounced Highgate as HAG-git. Is this one of those London idiosyncracies, like Hole-burn, that I have managed to miss for five years?
The bank holiday weekend will be spent in Brighton and I'm very excited about it. It will be lovely to stay in one of the hotels on the front, after all the nights I've spent pumping up Nick's spare mattress. Malheureusement it's forecast to piss down the entire time. There's always the lanes, I suppose.
Recently, even more people than usual have been stopping me in the street to ask for money "for a phone call". I was discussing this with Mr Boon yesterday when I stepped outside to buy my lunch. A cyclist caught my eye and asked me if I could spare him 50p, whilst continuing to cycle past me.