London Still Rocks!

Rumours of my death are much exaggerated.. no, I'm still here, I just literally have been too busy! Apologies for the delay, please do read on.. Last Wednesday night, back with the much-neglected  London Literary Walks  - this one was The Modernist Walk , and we were meeting in  The Garden Gate, Hampstead . You can eat there, but I couldn't book for just one person, so had to take pot luck. Mercifully, it rained that morning - stopped later, but it really cooled the city down.. he picked a good day for a walk! Unfortunately, that far out, bus would take too long - so I got the Northern Line all the way to Belsize Park and walked from there. I was a bit late leaving, so would have liked a bus to the station - but the traffic problems persisted, so I assumed my buses would never reach me, and I ended up walking. Sure enough, not a bus passed me on the way. And so I was a little later than intended, arriving at Belsize Park, where I set out on the last leg.. with the sun ...

Last  night, decided on film again - and what looked good at the top of the  list was  Sudan, Remember Us , a documentary about the popular uprising in  Sudan  following the overthrow of a dictatorship, and the subsequent violent military crackdown . It'd be great to get a view of a country I don't know much about, and am unlikely to visit.. showing, of course, in the  Curzon Bloomsbury , the home of documentaries. Took buses, as usual - oh though, it was a disaster. I don't know what on earth happened to the traffic, I've never seen it as bad.. I stood (because the seats were in the sun, and it was boiling hot) waiting for the first bus for 25 minutes, watching traffic crawl past - I was on the verge of leaving when the bus finally rounded the corner. A relief to get on and sit, and there were intermittent cool breezes through the open windows.. Then the driver started to curtail the journey more and more, announcing we were stopping earlier and earlier; ...

Last night, back with  London Classical Music and Theatre Group  ( London Baroque Music Lovers  were also going, but I had to pick one - mind you, the same guy was organising) for the opening night of  Handel 's opera  Semele , in the  Royal Opera House . And of course, I would start seeing discount codes  after  I booked.. Eating at  Cote Covent Garden  beforehand. I left in time, arrived in Cote about five minutes late. Not a problem, I was eating early for an early opera start, and the place was almost empty. And oh, such delicious air conditioning! Had my usual two courses, headed straight to the opera house. Where I arrived at about exactly the time arranged on the Meetup page - and chatted with one of the others, there being no-one else there. Headed up, met my sometime companion, who was in the row behind, up in the Gods : It's a long enough opera - about three hours, plus a 25-minute interval after the first 90 minutes or so. Wel...

On Saturday afternoon, I attended Up in the Cheap Seats '  summer social, at  The Oxford Market . Managed to get myself out of bed in time.. bus was the plan, but it just ended up taking me as far as Waterloo . Google Maps gave me a few bus options from there - but when I looked at the departure boards, nothing was going across the bridge .. sure enough, a refresh of Google Maps told me that all buses were stopping there, because of a demonstration on the other side. Northern Line it was, then - and my exit options from Tottenham Court Road were limited, but I managed. I then had a shortish, but uncomfortably hot, walk to the pub. As I approached, someone waved - three had made it before I did. And taken a lovely table outside, shaded by a huge umbrella - we stayed there for the duration, and with a light breeze blowing, it was the perfect escape from the heat. I got wine at the bar - also ordered food, but was lucky to get my order in early; the others had to wait until h...

These two days are something of a Meetup extravaganza. Tonight, I was back with  Up in the Cheap Seats  for  Miss Myrtle's Garden , at the  Bush Theatre . Eating beforehand at  Shikumen  Chinese restaurant. I was delighted to get a text from the theatre this afternoon, with a link to my ticket - so handy.. A long journey, it'd have to be Tube if I wanted to get there in under an hour. Mind you, no danger of me working late - Fridays are known in the company as "patch Friday"s, because that's when they do a bunch of software patches. Which, of course, sometimes banjax the software.. and that's exactly what happened to me; starting at some time around 4.30pm, every time I tried to open a file to work on it, it crashed the software. I submitted a fix request to IT, nearly 5pm on the first day of our company's "summertime" allowance, where they give us an hour off, and legged it, knowing full well that no-one would see to it this evening anyway. W...

Tonight, decided on film again - delving into the group of (now two) films, I thought  The Ballad of Wallis Island  looked like the one: another comedy, in which an eccentric lottery winner, living alone on a small offshore island, hires his favourite artists to play a private concert for him. (If only..!) Thing is, the artists used to be a couple, and have since broken up, which adds to the fun - she's played by  Carey Mulligan . I suppose I had to get around to it eventually. Still showing in  Picturehouse Central . I was in the office, and planned to stay later than I did - but organising all my own stuff for the last few days has meant I had a lot more time to spare, and have already put in a substantial number of hours this week: more than usual. So in the end, I gave up pretending to have something to do, and left. I could walk from there - although it wasn't exactly pleasant, pushing through the crowds on Shaftesbury Avenue . As usual, I picked the Angus Steak...