my own little sufferfest

I was pinged by fellow fitbit user Amanda today. She'd just overtaken me in the personal fitbit leaderboard stakes and I've already sent my congratulations. It's a strange concept really, using an internet enabled pedometer to measure mileage, calories, flights of stairs climbed and to be able to socially compete with total strangers.

Personally, I prefer the fitbit to all of the gaudy bracelet type systems, which shout 'look at me'. The fitbit is totally discreet and can work by simply being in a pocket.

I also looked at my cycling for the last month or so. Because of where I've been working, I haven't been out on a bike since 19 Jan, until today.

During January I managed 258 miles, which may sound respectable, but is somewhat short of me being able to meet a decent annual target.

So far in February I've just done one cycling session and that was today, indoors, on the turbo. I used one of the Trainerroad/Sufferfest workouts and videos, but have had to abandon my plan to do the Sufferfest competition that ran over end of January and start of February. I'm just nowhere near my bike.

Instead, today's turbo session was 'Hell hath no fury' which is around one hour twenty minutes. By the end I was starting to dissolve. It's described as a 2 x 20 minute workout and features women's professional cycle racing. Certainly no pushover.

I feel very overtaken today. In a good way, of course.

turbulence on the cable car

My great commuting plan came a little unstuck today. It's the first day of the Tube strike, but with my aerial commute using the cable car I thought I'd be able to avoid the problems.

There was a slight increase in passengers this morning, although I still had a car to myself as we took off for the flight across the Thames. Then at the cruising altitude of 297 feet, a special announcement about turbulence came onto the speaker system.

The cable care was swaying around, but I regard that as part of the fun of the journey.

We landed and I disembarked for the next part of my journey.

Except.

The wind continued to grow and by around lunch time it was difficult to walk around.

The cable cars had disappeared.

They'd all been tucked back into their little shelters at either end of the route. I was now stranded on the wrong side of the river.

Things could get rather tricky for me to get back to base.

about time I saw this

I've just seen that Richard Curtis film called 'About Time', which is a rom-com with an understated bit of time travelling thrown in. No need for Gigawatts of power or police boxes, in this film it's achieved by standing in a cupboard and clenching fists.

Although there's a central part of the plot around this, the film seems to be much more a study of a family with some commentary on the value of relishing every moment.

Coincidentally, I saw Curtis being interviewed yesterday and he explained that he was stepping down from directing so that he could, himself, live some of the values that the film espoused.

The plot is on the packaging, so we get a humorously narrated Domnhall Gleeson playing the lead and trying to get the girl played by Rachel McAdams. Bill Nighy is the father and there's a quirky purple clad sister too. And other cast make a suitably crafted Curtis potpourri of interesting family and friends.

Things do go wrong, but the film's plot line was mostly feel-good aside from the potential creepiness of the Groundhog day styled replays of certain events. Probably because I've been watching Nordic Noir I was expecting some specifically dark twists, but even the grim moments are played with a light touch.

It was an easy movie to watch and enjoyable in a mostly light-hearted way.

Oh yes, and Curtis knows how to do weddings. The one in this movie has to be an all time great.

Curtis has an amazing back-catalogue of popular Brit-coms like Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Bridget Jones, and there was even a little sequence at the end of the movie that did some sharp cuts to what could have been scenes from other Curtis stories.

The Next Train to Depart - (Review)

Live Theatre to see the sold out play by John Challis, “The Next Train to Depart”, commissioned as a new work by Queens Hall Arts, Hexham.

The tag-line described a ‘Brief Encounter for the 21st Century’. It's a two-hander set in the ambient sounds of Newcastle Central, where an aspirant poet meets a call centre worker.

Both twenty-somethings, she doesn’t remember their first encounter, when rendered mortal as the result of a Lambrini fuelled Hen night.

He writes initially over-the-top poems which he’ll perform under spotlight as the action progresses.

There’s a weave to the action. A dialogue that gradually tunes as they get to know one over several meetings. Maybe the call centre worker has the more poetic eye? Maybe the hours of observing from a table at the station have created an overload?

The performance by Adam Donaldson as Dante created an enigmatic poet, becoming more grounded through the influence of Alex Tahnée as Kayleigh. Alex presents a feisty spirit, a canny awareness of Dante’s observations and a great counterpoint to his outpourings.

Snappily directed by Melanie Rashbrooke, with scarcely an unused second or nuance, this was an elegant performance worthy of its current North Eastern tour, but also in need of being seen by a wider audience throughout the UK.

Somewhere like Theatre 503 should consider this for a London airing.

waiting at the station

I've travelled to the North through the rain then snow then rain again.

Now it's feeling gale force cold, but I suspect that's more about my southerner constitution rather than the actual climate here.

No one else here seems to notice.

I've just been waiting for the next train to depart.

...Could almost be the title of a play.

a near future experience

I feel as if I'm from the near future at the moment. Except I don't know the raffle ticket numbers.

It's the combination of commuting in the little space bubble, being on evening video conferences from a hotel room and then eating Japanese noodles from a pot.

Somewhere between cowboy bebop and fifth element.

I've noticed there's an exhibition across the river about life in 2050. I think I'll need to visit.

hot toddies at the Folly

One of the standard freebies in London is the little wallet to keep Oyster cards and other travel tickets safe. I usually use them as a main wallet, which is also a way of paring down the amount I'm carrying.

There's plenty of sources, beyond the ones from the train stations and I've been using a Royal Academy one recently. Of course they eventually wear out, but are surprisingly robust and can last for more than a year before the first sticky tape has to be applied.

It's always good to have a couple of spares, and today's 'snowy London Town' scene addition was from The Folly where we'd arranged to meet for an early evening supper.

The Folly is one of those slightly subterranean bustling bars and restaurants that seems to be perpetually busy. It's much bigger on the inside than you'd expect and has various zones with different designs varying from garden areas, lounges, long tables and stand up bar areas. We'd taken the precaution to book because even at an early hour the place fills with a boisterous evening shift of clientele.

We'd picked the venue partly because of its location, kind of equidistant from Bank and London Bridge. I'd walked from London Bridge station, over the bridge, thereby becoming the evening's lone person walking north against the solid commuter flow heading south*.

An entertaining supper followed as we chatted and schemed, before heading in opposite directions which would see us finish the evening hundreds of miles apart. London's closeness. For card carrying members, with free wallets.

* Pretty much the route used by Bridget Jones in that movie

Inside Llewyn Davis - cool for cats?

In Leicester Square, it was a last minute decision to go to see 'Inside Llewyn Davis', the movie about a struggling folk singer on the 1961 Greenwich Village circuit. We're talking the era of early Bob Dylan and the emerging folk scene from the Village inside of New York. I enjoy wandering the area around Bleecker when I'm in New York. So that's a double tick in the box. Music and district. The movie is also directed by the Coen Brothers. Should be another tick.

Yes, I expected to like it a lot. There's great cinematography with every scene evoking stylish album covers from the era and locations that look brilliant.

I just wasn't sure about the main story or character. Oops.

Our man, Llewyn played by Oscar Isaac is in a spiral of downward situations, most of which he tries to escape from by bailing onto the nearest fire escape. Not a complete unknown, he's seen earlier modest recognition with a co-singer who committed jumped off the Washington Bridge.

Llewyn sings fairly well and plays a lot of C, F and G chords. I know he wasn't supposed to be likeable, but aside from throwing the occasional strop, there wasn't any real passion or heart to create empathy.

There's other characters that add some spark. A double act by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan as a couple of folkies who help Llewyn along. That's Justin on the right.

Mulligan has other problems, but that's where, for me, the film goes rather too formulaic. I don't think she was given the best script here and tries to act her way our of being given a caricatured and sometimes illogical part. Later, when stoned jazz muzo John Goodman turns up, he's also give a part that is larger than life.

Then there's a few middle of the road folk acts that turn up wearing matching sweaters or singing novelty space race tunes. Whenever Llewyn has a chance to get royalties on a song or join an up and coming commercial opportunity, he makes the poor wrong decision. If there's a sign pointing to anywhere better, or anywhere redeeming, our man will miss it. Akron, Ohio, springs to mind.

I began to wonder if the film was all a big movie buffs' in-joke. Introduce a cat to make the main character show some loveable compassion. Show the main character is a bounder by him maybe getting his best friend's girl pregnant. Even the graffiti in the toilet at one stage asks,"What are you doing?"

The Coens are good at quirky humour and I suppose there was some in here. It could be possible to play an irony card too, but I don't think that for me it has really worked. Even the film's narrative loop seemed flimsy and somehow unsatisfactory. I was thinking, surely it can't just be that? as the final credits appeared. Maybe I did care more for the cat(s).

I can understand that sometimes music albums need to be listened to a few times to appreciate their greatness. I'm not so certain that this will happen for me with this movie.

margins of respectability?

Flying past Canary Wharf every day at the moment, I keep seeing the trader blocks in the distance.

I've already written about Wolf of Wall Street and although I'm not convinced it was part of the original plan for the movie, it's one that lingers because of some of the ideas.

There's the rampant sales culture about 'sell anything', the premise that the punters are fools, a totally unreliable narrative which we are expected to follow. There's fair warning right from the start when the Ferrari changes colour from red to white during a trip along a freeway in the opening scenes.

Then there's the almost entirely male wheeler-dealers and the women often regarded as little more than objects.

I'm reminded of a few of the other movies about the same era 1980-2008 which includes 'Wall Street', 'Boiler Room' and the tad more extreme 'American Psycho'.

One that has previously stuck in my mind (which even had a female Investment Banker) was 'Margin Call'. That's the one about the collapse of a Lehman-like bank.

Without it being a spoiler, and true to many Hollywood scripts, the character played by Demi Moore was the one who became the scapegoat.

The worrying thought in the back of my mind is that although this stuff gets made into movies it is probably still happening.

Who really knows what happens when the US prints another $40bn per month of QE? Or how this gets beamed around the planet and then every so often a currency in another country collapses?

In a few of the words from the amoral Margin Call...

John Tuld: There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Peter Sullivan: Look at these people. Wandering around with absolutely no idea what's about to happen.

Eric Dale: I run Risk Management. I don't really see how that's a natural place to start cutting jobs.

blurred vision

What with whizzing around London and working in various offices, I've really had to put the blog on the back-burner this week.

A few hasty iPhone grabbed snap-shots is about all I can declare.

No television, no external entertainment, pretty much head-down.

A blur, really.

the crane in rain

I said this would be a week of few words as I fly around docklands. The foggy iPhone picture of the crane from yesterday needs further development, so here's one of it around sunrise. Even the people punching the tickets on the Air Line were taking pictures of the bright early morning.

It wouldn't be complete without another one of the crane in rain.

London fog makes me feel so blue?

Of course, it's not always sunny around docklands, and this time we've some of the fog atmosphere, the way that London gets portrayed in old movies.

Pea-souper fog, umbrellas and bowler hats. As if.