(no subject)
With the legal battle and a job interview (came 2nd as usual) amongst other things, it was a taxing week last week and I started getting that classic symptom of stress, the wobbling eyeball. So it was up to Cambridge for the weekend, and the symptom disappeared as soon as I left London. I'm used to catching the Cambridge train mid-morning or afternoon, either pre-practise/post-gig, and it's an odd experience to catch the train on a Friday night, when everyone from the grim surrounding towns is heading into Cambridge for their big night out. Although the fens were blighted by their typical wind and rain all weekend (legend has it that wind blows into Cambridge direct from the Urals), the boys were in nothing heavier than short-sleeved Ben Sherman shirts and the girls in considerably less.
I stayed with Susan; on the Saturday we headed out to the Fitzwilliam Museum, which I'd been to once many years ago as a philistine student. Got a bit more out of it this time around. The front hall must be the most lavishly appointed room this side of the Doge's Palace and for a fairly small town, the collection is remarkably good; Egyptian and Assyrian artefacts, Renaissance Madonnas with child, and some fine paintings by Brueghel, Hogarth, Hiroshige and Renoir amongst others.
The afternoon we spent in the St Radegund, a pub I'd never been to before. There were two pubs opposite my college's houses; the Radegund was the favoured drinking hole for the toffs and us state school kids tended to congregate around the rather more common-or-garden Bun Shop. When we walked in, one wall was covered in photos of rugby teams, rowing teams and Cameronesque drinking clubs from my college, and I instantly remembered why I'd never been there (to their credit, the centrepiece of the Jesuan shrine was a portrait of Laurence Sterne, the one good thing to come out of the place). But it's a rather nice pub in which to pass your afternoon; the kind of bric-a-brac filled, eccentric little place that seems to have been largely purged from London. They have signs notifying you that as a "silent order", they impose an obligatory donation to RNLI upon anyone whose mobile phone goes off. In the evening, we met the rest of the gang at the Flying Pig, another charming little pub out near the Junction.
Last night I watched The Watchmen as, being sick of 90% of Johnny and Alex's conversations being incomprehensible to me, I'd read the original a few days before and liked it very much. The film is as faithful as they all say; a few good things are dropped, like the sailor subplot, but it still runs in at nearly 3 hours. Extremely glossy and balletic, it sometimes veers into the very silly (a Leonard Cohen-soundtracked sex scene) and the downright tedious (ethical debates interrupted by yet another punch-up) but all things considered, they've done a fairly commendable job.
I stayed with Susan; on the Saturday we headed out to the Fitzwilliam Museum, which I'd been to once many years ago as a philistine student. Got a bit more out of it this time around. The front hall must be the most lavishly appointed room this side of the Doge's Palace and for a fairly small town, the collection is remarkably good; Egyptian and Assyrian artefacts, Renaissance Madonnas with child, and some fine paintings by Brueghel, Hogarth, Hiroshige and Renoir amongst others.
The afternoon we spent in the St Radegund, a pub I'd never been to before. There were two pubs opposite my college's houses; the Radegund was the favoured drinking hole for the toffs and us state school kids tended to congregate around the rather more common-or-garden Bun Shop. When we walked in, one wall was covered in photos of rugby teams, rowing teams and Cameronesque drinking clubs from my college, and I instantly remembered why I'd never been there (to their credit, the centrepiece of the Jesuan shrine was a portrait of Laurence Sterne, the one good thing to come out of the place). But it's a rather nice pub in which to pass your afternoon; the kind of bric-a-brac filled, eccentric little place that seems to have been largely purged from London. They have signs notifying you that as a "silent order", they impose an obligatory donation to RNLI upon anyone whose mobile phone goes off. In the evening, we met the rest of the gang at the Flying Pig, another charming little pub out near the Junction.
Last night I watched The Watchmen as, being sick of 90% of Johnny and Alex's conversations being incomprehensible to me, I'd read the original a few days before and liked it very much. The film is as faithful as they all say; a few good things are dropped, like the sailor subplot, but it still runs in at nearly 3 hours. Extremely glossy and balletic, it sometimes veers into the very silly (a Leonard Cohen-soundtracked sex scene) and the downright tedious (ethical debates interrupted by yet another punch-up) but all things considered, they've done a fairly commendable job.