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It’s a weird confluence, finding Dylan Moran exhibiting his artwork at Stanley Donwood’s gallery in Bath, explicable by apparently (as the man working the gallery told us) Moran and Donwood living near each other in Brighton. And, more specifically, Moran being in Bath playing Bottom at the Royal Theatre. Despite feeling a bit under the weather on the tail end of a cold, we make our way into Bath for it, and find a relatively small room with art up around it. The pieces are reminiscent of the doodles Moran used to project during his shows, and could easily be explained by being fragments of speech overheard in the world from which he’s extrapolated. We end up buying one (“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will be fatter”) which seems perfect for the kitchen, and as such I’m allowed to hook a bag from the window which contains a stuffed cat. Never say you don’t get respect as a patron of the arts.
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First Friday Social rears its head once again, and if I’m going to have a couple of drinks, I should probably line my stomach a bit as well, having not had time for dinner beforehand. I go for the burger, the kind of thing we used to get on the “burger and a pint” deal at the White Hart back in uni - it’s a very specific kind of burger, with a very specific kind of vibe. This one has slight ideas above its station, with the ol’ onion rings and barbecue sauce, but it knows what it is. Both too moist and too dry, brash flavours but still somewhat bland. The chips are fine. The bottle of mayo on the table is, as ever in these places, practically empty. Ah well. We get through, and I count myself lucky that there isn’t the old staple of the chocolate fudge cake available for dessert.
This is definitely the last time I’m going to be able to see CMAT in a venue this size. Surely this has been the blow-up summer to end all blow-up summers, with a barnstorming Glasto set and now selling out Ally Pally in less than half an hour. But, for some reason, she’s still doing this in-store at Rough Trade (the actual reason: Sabrina Carpenter is also releasing an album this week, so every sale counts for the charts). In 55 minutes, she manages to do 5 songs, in an impressive testament to her ability to gab. She learns a lot about a year 9 student near the front. A lot of time on her love of Sabby C. She simply cannot resist responding to someone shouting from the crowd and giving it full consideration. It is ultimately charming if not a little frustrating, but she is great company. The new songs are great, I’d Want U makes a rare appearance (complete with her reading the lyrics off a fan’s phone), and Stay For Something sees her ending the gig stood on a chair in the middle of a crowd fully rallied around her. It just wouldn’t be the same at Ally Pally.
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Oh boy. This one has really sat with me. Or I have sat with it. On the surface, a lovely gig. Christopher Owens, of Girls - a firm favourite of mine back in the day, their Broken Dreams Club EP being on heavy rotation in sixth form - playing acoustic in a tiny room. I never thought I’d get to see the day. A mix of covers and his originals sees his voice eventually take the shape it once did, its recognisable twang coming to the fore. He throws in a cover of Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space during a medley, and ends with a heartwrenching rendition of Across The Universe. But. I don’t know. As Mahoney said to me after, the moment he heard the coke sniffs, he know it was going to be a short gig. Owens looks rougher than his 46 years, and he’s clearly lived a life. He managed a 45 minute set, that on paper looked like there was more to it than that. The gig had the pall of it being the last time we’re going to see him, and while I hope that’s not the case, it has to be acknowledged as a possibility. Other shows on the tour have seemingly had full sets, so maybe we were just unlucky. We’ll see. In the event, though, he happily signed my Broken Dreams Club vinyl and I got to tell him how much it meant to me, and he seemed touched. At least I got to say it this time. Support from Sorry Monks, a one-man act cutting a Jon Ronson-esque figure as if he were a singer songwriter, with a voice to match.
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We’ve overdue a catch up with Zac and Martha, and they suggest the Bee and Pollination festival (of course they do, Zac being a keen amateur beekeeper) up at the UoB Botanical Gardens, an institution I never knew existed and I studied there for four years. Wild. I pick up some locally made honeycomb, marvel at a beeswax Millenium Falcon model, go for a tour of the gardens in the absolutely tipping it down rain, and end up slightly banjaxed into a talk about the impending dangers of the invasion of the Asian hornet. Which does, to be fair, sound terrifying! And the woman who sounded awfully like Pam Ayres doing free verse certainly sounded compelling. A cheeky bit of cake from the Chandos Deli-supplied tea room never hurt either.
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Marmo occupies a fun space in my mind of a place I keep going back to, but at a much lower cadence than e.g. BOX-E or any of the Bianchis group joints. Always a pleasure, but never a routine. This year’s occasion is Ruth moving back to Bristol and having Luc in tow, so I bite my tongue on the insatiable urge to ask him his prospects and his intentions and have a lovely time getting to meet him. Dinner is, as ever, a sensation of small plates. But first, Hayley is here and unsurprised that I’m ordering a bottle of Riesling for the table. A classic array of snacks to start - the sourdough served with a delicious golden butter, with a bowl of salt to season to taste (generously, all round); sadly no olives (Luc and Ruth being phillistines), but anchovies, drenched in oil but still dry when eaten; a burrata with a fennel pollen, oozing as it’s torn apart. Marmo is the only place other than Rezdora that I’ve seen serve gnoccho fritti, so I implore Ruth and Luc to treat themselves and they don’t regret it. The steak tartare - two portions between three of us, acts as something of a starter, beautifully seasoned with a little kick, a generous egg yolk moistening and binding it together. We share a couple of mains, a gorgeous tagliatelle of tomato and girolles, festooned with parmesan shavings, and a beautifully tender piece of hake with butter beans, mussels, and a most delicious cream sauce. But. But but but. The main event for me, personally, at Marmo is the dessert, specifically in the form of their chocolate mousse - my Off Menu dessert if I were ever lucky enough to be asked. The whipped cream is like no other, acting as both solid and liquid. I have no better way of describing its form. The mousse itself rich, densely chocolatey but light and fluffy as anything. I could devour ten of them. One day I just might. But for now, we have to high tail it back to North Street to meet Alasdair and introduce these two to Spirited.
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After years of seeing The National in venues like the Apollo and Ally Pally, it’s nice to see Matt Berninger absolutely fill a smaller room and make it look effortless. His solo work tends to be a lot gentler than his day job, with the latest stuff sounding very New Pornographers, but he makes the energy work. Nowhere Special is revelatory live, and the Serpentine Prison songs shine in a new way alongside the newer stuff. A couple of still developing songs get thrown into the mix, as do some judicious National songs (Terrible Love still an absolute phenomenom to witness live) and even a cover of Blue Monday. It’s a shame he’s got a wireless mic now, but probably for the best for all concerned. Ronboy is a sly choice for opening act, with a couple of stand out songs in Your Way and Oceans Of Emotion, and even cunningly bringing Berninger out for a duet towards the end.
Alasdair and I decide we should do something with our bank holiday weekend, and he suggests Chance & Counters. Why not! The original plan is to go to see Sorry, Baby at the Watershed straight after, but in the event we decide to do that another day and stay a bit longer. I have a perfectly nice Oreo milkshake with a respectable (but not fully massive) portion of whipped cream, and we play some Kingdomino and Hive. All good fun.
Very interesting to see the churn from the work in progress we saw a month or so - a lot of sketches completely added, a lot having been hopefully just put back in the drawer rather than fully discarded, and one sketch in particular still present but transformed by the change of a somewhat lacklustre original punchline to a very neat bit of structrual play. Since You Ask Me being in the middle of the show is the kind of thing that, if JFSP had Star Wars level fandom, would be causing outraged reddit threads, but it’s fun to see a bit of playfulness. And a meta sketch about the shift between sketch grab bags and conceptual stuff gives me hope that we might get something a bit more like that next year. But, even in grab bag form, this is stll one of the best sketch shows you’ll find on the radio.
Fun to come back to watch this a couple of years after seeing it in Edinburgh, and good to see it pretty much intact. I’m aware this is a paucity of imagination rather than anything else, but I do not understand how you cannot find John Kearns funny (despite the tweets after his appearances on Cats Does Countdown). It’s such a beautifully realised persona/character/whatever blend of the two you deem it to be. So rarely do you get to see a comedian have to reckon in real time, ten years into their career, with who they are as a comic, as their niche act comes into battle with a mainstream audience from Taskmaster. He can only, as he says, do what he does. I’m glad he chooses to. The way I lit up when I remembered the Marco Pierre White routine. God. He’s so good.
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Devoured in a train journey back from Edinburgh (and bought from Toppings in Edinburgh, as is tradition). Taking place in some sense over a single day but in another over 15 years, The Most beautifully captures a marriage not necessarily fracturing, not yet, but one where both participants have their own secrets, and the game of metaphorical (but aptly so) tennis that only one of them knows they’re playing. I’ll need further reflection on why, exactly, Anthony has set this on the day that Sputnik 2 - of Laika fame - launches, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. A slight but rich novel that plays its own game of tennis with the recollections of different events being batted back and forth between the couple in their own respective chapters, building up the fuller picture, or as full as is possible, I suppose.
Hello deep fried Mars bar, my old friend. It’s been so many years since we’ve done this, but as it’s Shuyang’s first time at the Fringe and indeed in Scotland, it’s only right to make sure he gets to try it. We are sensible this time. Three deep fried Mars bars between six of us. At, let’s not gloss over it, £6 a pop. The cost of living crisis comes to us all. They’ve jazzed it up since the last time we came, with each serving coming with some whipped cream and god help me even a little dusting of cinnamon. The cream is vastly appreciated, helping - to use a technical term - to declag the Mars bar. Much needed. It’s actually not as bad as I remember, although I do feel my arteries harden in real time. Maybe not every year, but nice to be back. This is how it ends.
Once again we end the Fringe with a Jordan Brookes show, and it’s another Fringe show that is nominally a WIP but has clearly found its shape quite happily. We’re closer to I’ve Got Nothing than Fontanelle here, high concept musicals begone and concentrated discomfort back on the menu. Nominally focused around him eating a croissant on a train (duh), obviously it spirals. At one point I distract him by checking whether I’ve still got my camera in my bag, which even knowing both him and what he’s doing still throws me. As ever with Brookes, the marvel is similar to Eddie Izzard - how does he manage to take what is, if you focus in, pretty much just observational comedy, and turn it into something so distinct and disconcerting. He just keeps hitting.
Well it wouldn’t be Edinburgh otherwise, would it. At this point, I’ve long grown out of finding Six By Nico to be a proper fine dining experience, but it’s entertaining and a fun tradition. It’s also nice to have one which isn’t just The Chippie, so I’ll take what I can get. This time, it’s a Mad Hatter’s Experience, which thematically gets a little lost but such is life. We all go for the wine pairings, a dangerous mistake, not least with me, Hazel, and George also opting for the apperitif (I am, though, somewhat a grown up and don’t then also get an espresso martini with dessert). A nice snack of a cheddar biscuit with truffle and a (tad salty) mushroom consommé starts us off before an underwhelming first course of a chicken fat donut, overly tough and with a bland filling of shredded school dinner chicken. The potato terrine and goats cheese parfaits, each with the requisite tableside adding of jus, are both fine if passing without much notice as we’re busy discussing our star ratings for the various shows we’ve seen this year. “Breakfast in disguise” is livened up with an edible waiter’s notepad page and some creativity in presenting one set of ingredients as others (the “egg” being made out of some beans, for example). The crispy pig head is quite nice, served with some lively fennel and (of course) an apple and mustard mousseline. Dessert is where the theme comes to life nicely with a homemade jammy dodger, a burnt toast delice, and strawberry sorbet. It remains, as Grace Dent once described it, the Pizza Express of fine dining, but it’s enjoyable enough for what it is.
She’s found the perfect skirt suit, and she’s not afraid to show it off. It’s hard to believe that I saw Sam Nicoresti in my first ever Fringe in her split bill with Tom Burgess, and then missed (in Fringe terms) her emergence as a major force in comedy, but it’s not hard to understand how that’s happened. I must watch Wokeflake at some point, but Nicoresti has written a follow up in Baby Doomer a wonderfully understated show about the profundity and mundanity of the trans femme experience (and, to be fair, the general trans experience) that quietly builds to big things, with heart and excellent jokes (a joke about how much straight people like cats is still lodged in my brain). I’m going to throw of the pretence and admit that I’m writing this post her Edinburgh Comedy Award win, and it was both well-deserved and eminently predictable. Lord knows what she does now, but I can’t wait.
What a delight to get to see Leila absolutely own the stage (shipping container) with Relay, the story of how they and Priya ended up conceiving a beautiful baby. I got to see an early version of this at OPPO quite a while ago now, when they were still working out what this would be, and to see it go from a loose collection of thoughts to a full-on show, with props and a keytar and songs, is a thrill. Leila is a naturally but spikily sympathetic performer, and to watch the audience just fall in love with them over the hour was wonderful, especially as this performance took place about half an hour after they were told by someone in Pleasance Courtyard that their baby wasn’t really theirs then, was it. Shocking.
A favourite for the last few years for the last full day’s breakfast/brunch, especially in the last year or so for the comparative lie-in after a late night at ACMS. I’m torn what to have, remembering how good various options have been in previous visits - last year’s French toast croque monsieur looming heavily on the mind and stomach. In a panicked moment of last minute decisions made when the waitress is taking our order, I return to what I first had here, the wild mushrooms on toast. Unlike similar dishes elsewhere, this is a hefty serving, a good slab of toasted brioche with a poached egg and basil oil to help lubricate the whole thing and some parmesan and spinach to bring it all together. It’s a feint towards healthiness, some mushrooms and some green, but it’s not fooling anyone. I had eagerly been awaiting getting to have my traditional second course of a salted caramel hot chocolate and whatever their scone of the day is, but unfortuntely I have been betrayed, as they are out of both. Instead, I pick the next least cloying food option of a carrot cake and the next most cloying drink option of a chai latte, both delicious but just not quite hitting the spot - my fault for building up my expectations.
A last minute to both the Fringe programme as a whole and to our itinerary (or at least for me, George, and Hazel - understandably the others are reluctant to go to an 11am show after getting home at like 2.30am from ACMS last night), a firm favourite in JLR. It’s the first performance in a short run of WIPs, so expectations were duly set, but you’re never going to not have a good time. The poems are developing nicely (rodeos, the puzzle app, the gender reveal all being favourites), one song which doesn’t fully explain why he’s brought a keyboard with him but I’m sure that will develop over time, and he’s still able to recall previous shows on demand, so we are treated to a chunk of A World Just Like Our Own, which is always a pleasure. A fun way to spend a morning at the Fringe, and the pre-show Sparks playlist certainly doesn’t hurt.
Another night of carnage at ACMS. Thom and Alwin Solanky hosting in delightfully ramshackle fashion. Other acts include a faux boy band, a salon owner, the Backwards Man, and a whole host of others including a surprising number of songs. I do Crow, which - while I think it did ok, all things considered - I feel confirmed my doubts that it was a tad too not-alt, both compared to other acts and also in noticing how much the things that might stand out in a smaller gig as being a bit weird are just par for the course in even the most bog standard Fringe show. Back to the drawing board for next time.
Vintage Key, utterly inimitable but for the fact that any material I write for the next week will be in his voice, and I must make sure I don’t do anything with that. Loganberry sees him bullwhipping between vigour and serenity, always keeping the audience on their toes. He’ll ask his tech to stop the music so he can talk to someone clearly, then be happy to cut them off at a moment’s notice. The new poems are great fun as ever, and the overall device of him grappling with a midlife crises spurred by Gabby Logan inviting him onto her podcast is a delight. A difficult show to watch just before doing ACMS and realising that I am in no way properly alternative and that everything I thought was interesting about Crow is just table stakes at the Fringe. Ah well. Who better to learn this from?
Grabbed quickly on my way back to the Airbnb to grab props for ACMS, this has sadlt become increasingly disappointing ovver the years. The second stalest burger bun I’ve had in living memory makes it a pretty uncompelling experience to physically eat. The burger itself is quite lacking in moisture or crispness, not an overly objectionable texture, just not very fulfilling. A tad overloaded on the onions, a tad underloaded on the burger sauce. Have they changed or have I?
This is, as Bec is at pains to point out, not a show. For a comedian whose shows are typically elaborately put together pieces with great structural care and thematic/narrative precision, this is a difficult thing to bear for her. If not a show, then, it’s more a forcing function to do something after 6 difficult-sounding years away from the Fringe where the next show simply wasn’t coming to her. Judged on those terms, I hope this is a success for her. The flip charts are, as ever, a lot of fun. There are a couple of other strong standalone pieces, and admittedly a few less so, but such is life. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of this material gets lost to time, but hopefully this is the catalyst for whatever the next show turns out to be. More than that, it’s just nice to see Hill back at the Fringe - she’s always been an excellent comic with a very precise mind and voice for things, and I can’t wait to see her back at full strength again.
Another masterclass in joke writing from Glenn Moore. If it doesn’t perhaps quite hit the heights of his 2022 show, that’s because those were some very high heights indeed. The narrative feels ever so slightly crowbarred in a way that other comedians make a bit more natural, but it mostly functions as a frame from which to hang everything, so I’m not particularly complaining. There’s a lovely conceit around this as well with the list of jokes to get people back on side and the joke that will turn everyone away, which would maybe work nicer more divorced from the narrative. Still, the clip of the jokes is astonishing, they’re almost all excellent, and sometimes jealousy inducing. Happy to be back.
It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Helen Bauer, but my god she remains an absolute force of nature to be reckoned with. One of the most naturally energetic stand-ups around at the moment, bounding with it and simply unable to wait to tell you what she wants to say. It’s a compelling hour about what it means to be single, being a larger woman, going to therapy, listening to podcasts at all times because otherwise you’re being left alone with your own thoughts and excuse me what. All the hits, but excellent written and delivered, lightly conceptualised but minimally instrusive. Big fan.
Ahir Shah finally comes to Edinburgh with a WIP that actually feels like a WIP, after 2023’s main-prize-winning effort. That’s not a criticism! I’d be loathed to talk too much about details given it’s a WIP, but I’d say there’s a lot of big laughs, a lot of big thoughts, and right now those two exist in broadly separate sections of the show. Not quite two disparate circles in a Venn diagram, but close. When he gets the structure right, this could be better than Ends. Of the big thoughts, they’re eruditely written and performed, and I found them oddly affecting at times, the devotion to the idea of having the person who loves you the most in your life day after day.
We must have at least one proper full Scottish breakfast whilst we’re up here, and in the absence of Renroc, we must find a new place. Café Elmrow is just round the corner from the Airbnb and the photos on Google Maps look good, so sure, we’ll give it a go. It turns out to be a slight bit smaller than we had anticipated, so we’re split up into a table of two downstairs and a table of two upstairs, but no matter, always good to have a bit of variety in the dining conversations. It’s a large breakfast here, to be sure. Pretty much all the non-healthy elements of a full breakfast are present and accounted for, with not a sight of a mushroom or tomato for miles. The vaguely healthiest thing here are the baked beans; the only hint of green the sprinkling of chives on a fried egg. Admittedly I order an extra tattie scone because you don’t give up those opportunities when presented to you. Those, a hash brown, and a large slab of toast that is more impressive visually than to eat make for a lot of carbs, but plenty of mopping-up chances with the egg and beans. The haggis texture is more to George’s taste than to mine, but it’s good to have it regardless. Useful to know for next year, but further research wouldn’t go amiss.
Reprising the Soho Theatre show from last Christmas (or indeed, this January for me), it’s hard to imagine that this didn’t originate as a late night Edinburgh show, to be honest. That being said, this is a much more tightly sprung show than free-form knockabout. It’s got some of the stupidest best jokes of the Fringe, the exact kind of thing I like. Adam Riches has nailed playing variants of himself, even when that variant is nominally Michael Ball. John Kearns plays hangdog beautifully. I never want to see the real thing.
Frankie’s back! There is, to be fair, a lot of overlap comedically with the first show (broadly summed up in an introductory animation, but I do still wonder how anyone who hadn’t seen that show makes sense of most of this, or even if they’re supposed to) but when those comedic ideas are so good, why wouldn’t you. He’s certainly happier in the character’s skin, so the other variety acts are out, but the audience game playing and dog puppetry are all here to stay, but remixed and built upon in some exciting ways. It’s just so much fun to be in Frankie’s presence. I’m very excited to see what JKW does next, either in figuring out how Frankie can survive long term without relying on people having seen every show, or whether it’s something different entirely.
With a vague notion in mind that I might have an espresso martini every night of the Fringe, and having not been able to get one at Skua, I’m glad that Shuyang finds us a cocktail bar en route to our next show where I may have one. It’s good! More on the coffee side than the sweet side, which is nice to have sometimes. I forget the intimate details of the cocktails everyone else orders, but there’s a fully edged up graph of tasting each others’, and they are all delicious (minus trying George’s beer, to be fair). Very useful to know this exists.
Skua was a first time discovery at last year’s Fringe, and as an immediate dining highlight of the last few years, I was keen to return and to introduce it to Alex and Shuyang. Our now enlarged party in tow, we make the trek out from the old town to a quiter surrounds, and then led down to a basement restaurant with black walls and ceilings, with mostly candlelight for luminescence. But what Skua lacks in brightness, it makes up for in the food itself. As with last time, we look at the menu of snacks and small plates and decide it is perhaps best to just order one of everything (minus, to be fair, the £75 whole fish special), along with a couple of bottles of wine expertly chosen by Shuyang. It is a blur of plates, admittedly complicated by my insistence on taking photos of everything before people dig in, but we soon find our rhythm as a table. Bread and olives and a plate of salami picante all go quickly; the chickpea panisse, generously apportioned with a cheddar dressing, is delicately sliced up before being handed out. I have an oyster to myself (there’s really no other way), which is beautifully seasoned. The “mains” come, Isle Of Wight tomatoes of high enough quality to not need much doing to them at all, just full of juicy flavour; the fishes we do order all provide fine contrast to each other: the smoked eel wrapped in pancetta, the mackerel with taramasalata, the fleshy cured trout. I’m a big fan of the beef tartare, a healthy portion thereof topped with a mound of parmesan. If anything can be considered the main, it’s the gorgeous cut of lamb surrounded by the lively green of sprouting broccoli and a foamed up sorrel sauce. We go back for more on the panisse and the eel, and the second plates quickly disappear too. I round it all off with a delectably sticky donut, practically melting on tearing, containing a vanilla chantilly and covered in a plum glaze. We stagger into the night in search of another cocktail before our next show, very happily fed and sated.
Within 5 minutes of Busy Body, Amy has correctly identified my social label shift over time from “nerd” to “sex god”, and as Alasdair is not there to contradict, the audience is forced to believe. It’s a relatively freewheeling show, which suits Amy’s style to a tee. It’s not quite a “getting old” show - at pains as she is to point out how irritating that is when someone young complains about it - but it’s certainly a show about settling into who you are and recognising how that happened. Lots of fun routines, a more serious bit about the rise of transphobia in the UK, and some operatic chops thrown in for good measure.
Phil Ellis is about to be a contestant on the next series of Taskmaster, and judging by this show, he knows what that means. This is still classic Ellis, but with half an eye on how this is going to work with an audience that might not know him as well (or, as John Kearns found out, might not care to get to know him either). The result is a quietly sentimental show underneath some uproarious laughs, audacious routines (featuring a number of… let’s say supporting artists), and it’s wonderful to see him finding his place with hopefully impending mainstream notice.
With the genuinely sad demise of our favourite café in Edinburgh (Café Renroc, so much so that on some level, our choice of accommodation location was dictated in part by proximity to it), we are forced to expand our breakfast horizons once again. I do the research and Duck & Waffle - no marks for guessing what their signature dish is, but the usual other breakfast/brunch options are accounted for. Hazel, George, and I head along and after entering a lobby that resembles the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks for the Instagram generation, we’re whisked through an oddly garish dining room and multiple open plan kitchen stations. Despite the aforementioned variety, we’re all pretty basic and go for the duck and waffle - a half waffle topped with confit duck leg, fried duck egg, and a mustard seed maple syrup. Our waiter gave us a strict set of instructions as to exactly how we should eat it, and fair enough it works. The waffle - much like the Waffle House the other day - is not one of those annoyingly crystalline ones, which makes it the perfect support for a leg of duck where the meat is tender and the skin is crispy and well-marinaded. The egg could be a little more yolky, and I’ll be damned if I could easily distinguish it from a chicken’s, but it adds a certain creaminess that the mustard maple syrup cuts through nicely. A hearty, fulfilling, rich brunch that holds up on its own - the somewhat gaucheness of the rest of the place is unnecessary.
I will never turn down an opportunity to see ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is my fourth time, and I’ve got two nights booked when Masli comes to the Old Vic in October. It’s a communal experience like no other, held together by the absolute guilelessness of Masli as the Victorian clown agony aunt, sincerely and desperately trying to solve the audience’s problems. It’s a shame that, tonight, the audience aren’t matching that sincerity or offering the depth required. They don’t trust her enough, and having seen this show firing on all cylinders all the previous times, I don’t think that’s her fault. The only way to make this show as good as it can be is to give yourself over to it, to just answer and let her work with it. When that does happen tonight, magic occurs. There’s this slow build of spinning plates that every now and then you realise the insanity of and then realise how little you’ve otherwise been thinking about it. I walked away, as ever, in awe and hopeful, but more specifically this time with one fewer sock than I came in with. What more could you want?
I’m such a big fan of Lachy. Voices Of Evil from a couple of years ago was an incredibly assured debut, he’s done OPPO a few times and has always been brilliant, and is just the loveliest boy. So it’s a delight to see him follow all of that up with a show that cements him as one of our most impressive acts on the scene right now. WonderTwunk is a beautifully macabre ventriloquism show, stepping up from the distinctly light-hearted Brew the witch to the genuinely quite sinister father figure here. The world building is immense, in terms of both situation and aura. It feels lived in. There’s a Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared air to the whole thing, the undercurrent of something not quite being right and grotesquely revealing itself to be so. Lachy’s ventriloquism is excellent, his vocal flexibility and ability to switch between voices is astounding. He’s such a committed performer. And then, underneath it all, it’s a clearly heartfelt expression of lots of different things, most obviously - to me, at least - the terror of feeling like touching someone you love could hurt them, and so not. How lucky we’re going to be to keep seeing new things from him.
It’s amazing that we’ve been coming to Pizza Posto for three years and they still haven’t solved some of the fundamental issues. There’s always a massive queue outside that is always massively unclear whether that’s for walk-ups or for reservations. Eventually George navigates this, and we’re in. The service is… in some ways quicker than usual, but certainly odder. They decide, as they seat six of us, that there should only be five place settings, and act surprised when we ask for another glass and set of cutlery. They forget a starter and a dessert, eventually take them off the bill, and then deliver the dessert. I don’t even get to have a chocolate Baileys espresso martini! But, the pizzas are good - today, a margarita with Tuscan sausage and parmesan - as is the tiramisu, it’s reasonably priced, and it’s pretty much equidistant between Pleasance Courtyard and Pleasance Dome and we always seem to end up with one night going from one to the other, so it’s a good option.
The first show of the Fringe! What a pleasure to spend it with Sharon Wanjohi, one of my favourite up-and-comers, having seen her at Party and booked her at OPPO. In The House is ostensibly actually a sales pitch for Sharon’s self-help book, which is a lovely conceptual device in that it is both a framework for her to deliver some overtly written pieces (one of my favourite things in stand-up) and to open up more thematically about the show’s subtext, without ever being weighing too heavy that she can’t just do stand-up for most of the hour. Clearly the last few months have been a lot for her, and it’s impressive how this is handled emotionally but without turning into the typical 45 minute turn, instead being well threaded throughout. Sharon herself is a powder keg, bursting at the seams with ideas and unstoppable in trying to get them all out. It’s wonderful stuff and a really strong debut.
Our traditional start to the Fringe, getting the train up from London in first class (we’ll see whether this is still doable next year, the first year without a railcard). Normally, we do this first thing in the morning when the menu options are a lot more variable, but with a 12pm start, we’re guaranteed a hot lunch. Today, an aloo gobi chana masala, which is at least a step up above a ready meal curry, and does the job perfectly nicely, and comes with mini poppadoms which is always a treat. A St Clements dessert pot, which is basically just a citrusy set cream, is fine if a bit rich and a bit too much. The main draw is eventually realising that it’s 3pm and I’ve inadvertently had two double G&Ts, plus as much tea as they can metaphorically throw at me, so fair play.
As is tradition when back home, a trip to the Waffle House, made all the easier by the comparatively recent addition of a Harpenden location. This time, it’s my belated birthday treat for Clo before I head up to the Fringe, snatching a rare opportunity to catch up in person before she’s back off gallivanting around the globe. I have the ol’ standard - a waffle with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. The only change they’ve made to this in the last 15-20 years is the addition of some white chocolate shavings, and that’s fine with me. The sauce is unlike any other I’ve had. The waffle is beautifully soft, none of that inferior sugar-crystalled nonsense here. The chantilly cream is massively apportioned (which as well it should be for £2.50). In an effort of underindulgence, I don’t ask for extra chocolate sauce, but contra to that I do order a malted chocolate milkshake alongside - well, hung for a sheep as a lamb. The second half of our time there is mostly spent with me trying to buy My Chemical Romance tickets, which adds a certain frisson to the proceedings, and eventually I’m on my way.
Our friend Ellie is in a choir, and said choir is doing a benefit for Medical Aid For Palestinians at the Old Vic, and it’s a Saturday night, and it’s free, so why not. We’ve seen SHE Choir before for their annual Christmas concert, and Bristol Choir Brigade is new to us. They’re each doing a set per half, and it’s fair to say SHE Choir are the better of the two. The key (stylistic) difference is that Bristol Choir Brigade use backing tracks where SHE Choir don’t, which tends to lead to more interesting arrangements from the latter (or, indeed, less obvious timing and pitch issues). As someone who is generally suspicious of a capella arrangements of popular music, I did actually enjoy it! They join together for a pretty impressive finale of Lay All Your Love On Me, and off we go into the night.
I was hoping for more from its reputation.
still playing
This is the most awkward I’ve ever seen Alasdair whilst watching anything, let alone a film. He simply could not handle it. I still love it. The final scene of Matt Berninger still completely in the zone singing Terrible Love having made his way entirely through the audience and into the foyer is just perfect.
I remember watching James develop this show in realtime, realising that old material could be refocused to act as an epilogue to the “trelogy” as it was then before it was Repertoire. The bread research is exactly the kind of overtly written material I love; Kettering Town FC is just pure silly fun; ready to eat apricots was long his calling card for the US talk show circuit. But the new stuff, the duck routine at the end, is some of the best work of his. Watching that live for the first time in 2017 was the moment I decided he was my favourite comedian, and it works nicely on film too. A lovely bit of visual work for the wraparound at the end to tie a bow on the whole thing. The fact that someone so brilliant was the first person to release four simultaneous specials on Netflix is still a marvel, and we remain blessed to have it.
A 95 minute PSA to not be in a successful band. It genuinely seems like hell, even if there’s I’m sure a lot of more pleasant moments not being included here.
Good, actually! A classic case of a trailer doing an awful job of selling the tone of a film. Some gags don’t work, but there’s enough that you barely notice, and some made me absolutely cackle. Stick around at the end - the tradition of end credit entries continues unabated.
Still watching
Oh boy! I really loved this, hitting the same kind of spot The Breakfast Club does. I could happily spend all afternoon in their company.
Still watching
In a comparative rarity for Rough Trade in-stores, this was actually free, no purchase of an LP required. The dream. That wasn’t - to be clear - the reason Mahoney and I went. Well, maybe Mahoney. For me, it was a combination of Alasdair being in Birmingham for the weekend, a gnawing feeling that I should be doing more, and mainly that The New Eves are the support act for Black Country New Road when we’re seeing them later in the year, and I do like a good bit of advance research. It’s a bit touch and go, from the promo pics. This could be a bit “long white garment” folk, and I’m not sure, even for free, that I could do 30-50 minutes. The opening spoken word is not the most encouraging sign, but it quickly gets into a groove that actually is quite enjoyable. Every song seems to swap a new instrument in (at one point, the drummer whips out a flute) with a base of drums, bass, electric violin, and cello, and some fun playing with modern post-punk tropes within that. I will happily enjoy seeing them again at BCNR, and should probably listen to the album at some point. Minus points for the weird pronunciation of “astrolabe”, though.
The silent film influences are more present than I maybe appreciated the first couple of times around. I would love to see how much of the script for the final act was unwritten or just shorthand for “let me and Keaton play”.
Show two of Repertoire. The Goose And The Sloth is one of my favourite things he’s ever written, and is a prime example of my belief that all good stand up shows have at least one moment that acts as a sorbet away from the main thrust. The whole thing builds nicely on the formula he established in Recognise without just being a retread. The opening off-stage intro is a delight.
Back to the beginning! One of the finest hours of stand up I’ve ever seen live, and it still comes off well on tape. Delightful to hear Nish and Ed Gamble laugh throughout, Nish before James has even said anything. There’s a blinder of a quadruple callback in the first 10 minutes, and one of my all-time favourite lines uttered on stage in a stand up show. Ceaselessly inventive and it remains an aspiration.
A fun quiet Friday night flick!
Frankie and Matt tend to enjoy a nice steak at Pasture each December to celebrate the end of the year and, historically, compare notes about our end of year conversations at work, but is now a more general catch up. It felt like a good idea to have a more urgent catch up, and spotting a deal to get 40% off the food at The Ox, seemed a shame not to go. It would, to be fair, need to be about 40% off for it to be reasonably priced, so we can chalk this up as a draw. After getting a glass of red, whatever’s affordable, we dig in. I start with the roast bone marrow, beautifully fatty and textured, served with a delicious caramelised onion and sourdough. I also sneak in some leek and smoked cheese croquetas at this stage, because why not. They do the job nicely. The main event, let’s go big (metaphorically) and small (literally) - I plump for the 6ox fillet (may I remind you, 40% off), and double down on everything else - let’s get fries, some peppercorn sauce, some garlic butter, some leeks and greens. It’s not quite Pasture, but it’s all good. The sauce and butter are both generously apportioned, the meat cooked how I like it, the leeks and greens maybe needing to be a bit creamier (let’s be real, if I’m going rich, let’s go rich). The only disappointment is moving onto the chocolate mousse, gritty and lacking in punch. It does, though, remind me that I need to go back to Marmo at some point, so that’s something. All in all, though, a satisfying meal with excellent company.
Still watching
I forgot Brie Larson was in this, as I do every time, and it’s always an immensely welcome surprise.
I’ve not read Detransition Baby, so I’m coming in relatively clean to Peters’ work, but obviously it is unsurprising that this is a collection of stories about, in one sense or another, the trans femme experience. More surprising is that for a short story collection, it’s really a novella and three short stories, the titular novella the vast majority of the book, a tale of lumberjacks and the gap between being gay and being trans. For my money, though, the jewel in the collection is The Chaser, which does what the best art does and really puts me in mind of I Saw The TV Glow: even if I can’t relate to the central allegory directly, it speaks so truthfully and specifically to a wider range of experiences that it’s impossible to not feel seen. Maybe that’s just me, though.
Having had a long day at an intern graduation ceremony with no lunch, and a bar tab at Dirty Martini waiting, I did need something, and really fancied a burger. I’ve not been to Bleecker before, but there’s one a 10 minute walk away and I reckon I can dip out, have a burger, and return again before anyone really notices. I’m going classic - a cheeseburger, some fries, a chocolate shake. It’s good stuff! The style of onion is notable, going for proper circles of white onion, not onion rings, not caramelised, just as-is, and that combined with a delicious house sauce, well melted cheese, and a juicy bun really worked for me.
Joining Alasdair halfway through a rewatch of Acaster’s Repertoire (although I imagine I will shortly be back to the first two as a result). He’s so young! I didn’t think that at the time, obviously, not having seen the older version of him, but christ. A lot of fun routines in this one, even with the royalty-free cover of New by Paul McCartney being subbed in for obvious reasons.
We’ve been given a surprise budget to spend on the interns as they’re about to leave, and having done stuff like minigolf and board game cafés, we figured let’s just go for a nice meal. That’s easier said than done on the budget we had with 10 people, but I’ve never let that put me off! Pieminister it is, a good old friend where the prices are predictable and it’s big enough to fit us all in. There’s a slight cock up with their deliveries that day, meaning a lot of the pies we’ve pre-ordered aren’t available, so they give us the first round of drinks on the house for our troubles, which certainly helps the budget a bit. I go for the Deer & Beer, as a change, which is - to my uncultured tastes - the same as any other pie. Delicious all the same, but I’m hardly writing home about the differences. I have it proper Mothership style, with the mash and peas and gravy and cheese and crispy onions. The dream. It does the job nicely as a farewell to this lovely cohort.
Sad to report a horribly 90s transphobic joke that I’d completely forgotten, so that does I think ding it a bit. A lot of classic jokes that I still say to myself, though.
Still watching
We fancy a quick bite for dinner after My Beautiful Laundrette, and what’s not to love about having Cotto just around the corner. It’s a delightfully bitty meal - let’s get some sourdough and butter (beautifully salted) in, let’s get some olives in. I get some beautiful wild garlic arancini, drenched in parmesan and perched atop a basil aioli. A classic Bianchi’s panna cotta for dessert and an espresso martini altogether too late in the evening, balanced out by a limoncello because Magda strolled past the window, clocked we were in, and sent some over. What a thrill to be treated to well.
Watched as a 4k restoration at the Watershed with an intro from Stephen Frears, Gordon Warnecke, and (remotely) Hanif Kureishi. A fun, touching film that is about 70% kitchen sink and then 30% something quite special. Love the terrible fight acting!
One of my quickest watch/rewatch gaps in recent times, I am properly enthralled unto this. It so achingly captures what so much of that experience is like - again, as with last time, I can’t directly relate to the central allegory, but there are so many peripheral things that are there that just scream at me.
Third act is unnecessary, but the first two thirds is sadly compelling, which does underscore why the TV show worked in the first place. An odd bit of cakeism.
We Are Scientists have long been one of my favourite bands to see live, even beyond their musical chops - they are one of the best acts in terms of just fun stage banter, each gig building up its own little world of in-jokes. (This isn’t, I should point out, a requirement for me: I have fond memories of seeing the Pixies in 2019 and the only thing Frank Black said all night was “thank you” at the end, 34 songs and one encore later). In an in-store setting, they are a touch more restrained in order to fit more songs in, which is understandable, but they’re still a lot of fun. A good selection of new tracks and the old favourites. It is an absolute sweatbox in there and I am drenched. I’m fairly certain I have warped the the vinyl sleeve I am clinging onto. I edge towards the back when they start playing After Hours, knowing that that is surely the end (the delicious irony!) so we can hit the head of the signing queue and get over to Bristol Beer Factory in time for the second half of the Euros semi-final and before the kitchen closes.
An essay that ostensibly begins about anxiety and Sudjic’s response to the response to her first novel (the excellent Sympathy, highly recommended), but quickly morphs into something a bit more interesting - the way female authors are read compared to male authors. It’s a subject I’ve long been interested in. There was a strech in 2020⁄2021 of reading a lot of contemporary female authors - Sudjic, Naoise Dolan, Megan Nolan, Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, inevitably Sally Rooney - where it really felt like they spoke to me in a way, or at least were writing about subjects, that contemporary male authors weren’t. Sympathy, for example, so precisely captures the feeling of staring at a locked Instagram account of someone you… fancy? Have a crush on? Semi-obsessed with? That limerent feeling. Capturing that in a way that e.g. Ben Lerner is not particularly writing about. In the face of, as Sudjic puts it in Exposure, the chorus of male voices in the back of female authors’ head about what right have they to assume people will relate or that this is worth writing, against the male authors’ ability to presume a standard world view without being assumed to simply be recounting their own lives with names changed, I hadn’t considered truly how hard those novels must have been to write. But they are, potentially, all the more affecting for it. It’s been a few years now since Sympathy Road; I hope Sudjic is soon able to overcome whatever anxieties might be present in writing her next.
Fun to watch this again after A Complete Unknown, like some weird monkey-paw mirror of the one who doesn’t become Bob Dylan. Icily shot in Greenwich Village (with an odd familiarity now) and with some beautiful musical performances and some properly big laughs.
Clo has returned home from her months of travelling and, of all things, running a hostel bar in Guatemala (sure, as you do), and how else could we possibly mark the occasion than by a trip to Bar Azita, a Mediterranean tapas bar and her favourite haunt in Harpenden. As is tradition, we order altogether too much, but less too much than normal to be fair. Highlights include the jamon croquetas, some chorizo, some mackerel, and a delicious olivieh dip for the equally delicious chips. Dad, Clo, and I knock back a couple of bottles of very drinkable rosé, and I help myself to a chocolate fondue for dessert whilst Clo and I join together in a PX. A delight.
Back again to the same show, this time as tradition with the family. I think, honestly, I took more from the show a second time, potentially just in knowing the shape of the thing and getting to enjoy the subtleties of it a bit more. It’s interesting to see it a second time, getting to notice some of the seams of the show. There are also additions! At least compared to my recollection from May, there are two really nice new toppers being added that add a bit more structural cohesion to the show. The specific moments that took my breath away the first time still, broadly, do that. One of them remains I think the most impressive technical trick he’s done, even if the joins are a bit more visible the second time around. But, just, overall, I really love what the show does and says, and it’s not that how it says that is secondary, but I have found myself thinking about the questions it asks of you an awful lot since.
Half-watched, half-napped to during a post-boozy-lunch - not quite how it should be seen, but so many good gags.
I don’t think I can quite bring myself to count this towards my Radiohead and Radiohead-adjacent streak - just one step removed. Tom Skinner, drummer in The Smile, and Robert Stillman, frequent The Smile collaborator and opening act, are for some reason playing a somewhat last minute gig in Bristol, and is - with no disrespect to them - surprisingly undersold. Which makes for a lovely gig, to be honest! Stage eschewed, they played in the round on carpets in the centre of the room, and it was a wonderful vibe. Tom Skinner is up first, and is unfortunately slightly thrown when his looping set up stops working 5 minutes in. He seems to feel the frustration more than the audience, who are shouting words of encouragement as he vociferously apologises. A brief break and then a strong recovery of him and Stillman improvising beautifully together. I would describe some of the pieces, but I asked Skinner afterwards and they don’t otherwise exist, so there. Then, Stillman up for his solo set, an intricate blend of saxophone and tape loops. Nice to get to meet them each afterwards, and nice to have a comparatively short notice night out.
17 years. A thing that I really love: Alvy and Rob - with absolutely no explanation or need to explain or even reference to the fact that this is the case - both refer to each other as Max. It’s a delightful touch.
It’s all good fun - Brad Pitt is handsome and unconcerned, Javier Bardem is handsome and concerned, and the woman is also narratively there. The final race is one contrived to be the most narratively compelling race possible - and it succeeds! - but as a result this doesn’t massively convince me to watch the real thing, as any real race is inevitably going to be less narratively compelling.
The yearly rewatch, for over half my life now.
This is the second year now that Richard has managed to get an HPE representation at the Bristol Pride March, and it remains a lot of fun. A decent turn out from the office, lots of face paint and rainbow merch, and a banner that really next year could do with some sticks to hold onto. It’s a blisteringly hot day - shorts, sun cream, hat, the works - which makes for a fun if sweaty march. Slightly more bottlenecked than last year, causing us to take a while to get started and get through the route, but in general just a really fun morning.
Ah I mean it’s a series of diminishing return but it’s still a lot of fun, and there are various jokes I still reference on a weekly basis.
It’s Bristol Seafood Week, and I’m not able to attend any of the main events, but Harry and I are discussing it and work and spot this one at Salt & Malt, and we’ve never really made it out together for a dinner, so why not! I don’t realise, in advance, how much they are taking the descriptor “feast” seriously. But when we arrive, we are sat at a communal table and have to wait for everyone to get there for the food to begin. We’re sat next to, with all considerably due respect, the worst woman. A woman who cannot enjoy anything for what it is, the kind of person who thinks the way to show sophistication is by being critical of everything rather than enjoying it. It is insufferable to listen to for the first three courses, and then we get dragged into conversation with her and her partner for the rest of the evening, which at least keeps her off the topic of the food. For my mind, it’s a wonderful meal. Across five courses, we enjoy/she criticises smoked haddock croquettes with a beautiful, rich thermidor sauce; scallops marinading in harissa butter; Cornish crab cakes with a quite spicy cayenne emulsion; Brixham hake with a decent pouring of café de Paris butter, and somewhat confusingly matched chip shop chips; and obviously somewhat less fish-themed but some gorgeous Cheddar strawberries with a white chocolate parfait and lemon and thyme meringue. I left very happy with myself, and genuinely feeling sorry for someone who can’t just enjoy things.
A delight to find out that Fiona Shaw was in this, not knowing that going into it. A strong debut that captures the heat of that region and that mood.
A compellingly grey performance from Fassbender, and generally just the kind of thing that ambles along nicely.
It’s the women’s Euros and that means the pub to watch games with Hugh and Ellie. Happy days, for Bristol Beer Factory is just down the road from us all, shows the games, has a good amount of seating, and most importantly has Cord Kitchen slinging food at you. Alasdair loves this for the vegan currywurst and chips. I’m going for the chicken Kyiv loaded fries, for the full artery-clogging experience. Obviously you’ve got your fries. You’ve got your fried chicken torn into chunks. Where’s your garlic coming from? Not just garlic butter, but a “double garlic aioli” too! I have no idea what makes it double, but I am delighted to report that it is. That and a glass of wine, just to fully throw any ideas of what my image is out the window, will suit the occasion nicely as we lose to France 2-1.
The next in this financial year’s quarterly socials at work takes us to Circomedia for a circus workshop. We did this last time a couple of years ago, so there’s a faint feeling of familiarity coming back to this old church (the high ceilings being perfect for the acrobatics). There is no cringey introductory perfomance this time - instead, we’re straight into a buffet lunch and onto the activities. Split into groups, we get to do some balance exercises (alas, this time I do not get to be the head of a human pyramid, but I am at least in the middle); some tightrope walking; some trapeze (no flinging ourselves from bar to bar, just some posing); and last but not least, some plate spinning. I manage it exactly once. I’m thrilled.
A mostly arresting film that does sag a little towards the end - I do love a shaggy dog film though. Janelle James is brilliant in a small role as ever.
Airport business book through the lens of Taylor Swift (or should that be the other way around?). A perfectly passable read, charting Taylor Swift’s career and trying to apply that to how companies and brands care about marketing or innovation or so on and so on. A classic blog post dragged out to 50,000 words style book, which little in the way of original research. It’s also interesting to consider how the book itself plays into the marketing strategies it claims to have special insight into: the treating of Taylor Swift throughout her career as being her own machine. And, look, I am a Taylor Swift fan. Not going as far as describing myself as a Swiftie, but I like her! I went to the Eras tour! I’m not having a go! But the treating her as a singular strategic genius as if she doesn’t have a whole team behind her is really weird - she’s not sat there figuring out the vinyl release strategies, there’s a whole team behind her for that. And that’s ok, that’s how it should be, but this need to hold her up as some one-man band who’s responsible for every last detail is an unhelpful overcorrection to the view of her as manufactured.
Mostly just captivated by the mannequins just hidden in the lecture scenes.
Working through these two so I can fit Years in this week on MUBI GO. Does surprisingly live up to the first in some ways, if maybe not in others.
Did work for me, especially with a surprise Christopher Eccleston turning up halfway through (and blond!), The DV cam suits it nicely. Fun to consider it in the context of the time, post-9⁄11 and Afghanistan, pre-WMD scares. Also fun to consider it post-covid.
We have reached the point where the albums I first fell in love with when I started getting into music properly are all turning 20. Hooh boy. Anyway, the yearly seemingly personally targeted nostalgia-fest that is Bristol Sounds is back upon us, and the Kaiser Chiefs are playing through all of Employment, an album which 11 year old me remembers as being banger after banger, and to be fair, 31 year old me isn’t massively disagreeing. The crowd around us at the beginning are pricks, and that combined with some overstimulation causes Alasdair to have a panic attack, so a lot of the first three songs are a little bit lost in the context. After that, though, perched on the edge of the crowd, we’re back, and it’s wonderful. Ricky Wilson has clearly started taking care of his voice, and it’s all in good form. As with Busted last year, lyrics I would have told you I couldn’t name would come to the tip of my tongue a second before I needed them. The first set ends with a beautiful rendition of Caroline, Yes and Team Mate, maybe my two favourite album tracks on Employment. As the rain picks up, the crowd begins to thin out a bit, but we’re sticking it out for the rest of the hits - Never Miss A Beat sees Wilson in almost Brett Anderson form, and Ruby is a bona fide crowd singalong barnstormer. A frantic The Angry Mob finishes us off, and we stagger back towards the house with grins firmly plastered on our faces. Support from Lime Garden, suffering from the joint disadvantages of being on in the daylight, not being the Kaiser Chiefs, playing to an audience who are not massive gig goers and therefore not on board with a support act, and, in the nicest way, not quite having the songs or stage presence to overcome all that.
I retain my habit of listening to podcasts or audiobooks on long journeys after concerts - something about not immediately overwriting the musical memories with something pre-recorded, an ill-advised and futile attempt at purity of experience. Ah well. I pick up Alternate Realities, a three episode series following a journalist’s $10,000 wager with his conspiracy-theory-befallen father, the hopes of which are that this will draw a line under it all and keep the family together. It’s all very interesting, really, and provoking in the sense of wondering what I would do, calcifying the worry of what if that does happen to one of my parents. And, to be fair, it doesn’t seek to stretch its story beyond the three episodes in which it fits, but I would have somehow liked more? It’s a bit anticlimactic - an episode explains the premise, an episode digs into the fracturing family, and a final episode examines the results of the bet. And it’s over. Maybe that’s how it should be, though, a stark ending to a stark tale.
At the end of the hottest week of the year so far, Alasdair, Mahoney, and I find ourselves in the sweatbox that is the Brixton Academy - no air conditioning, no open doors, 30 degrees outside, let’s do this. We are none of us tall men, but knowing we will need access to water throughout the night decide to accept our fate and not attempt to get anywhere near the front. We park up in front of the sound desk (oh god, the ability to lean) and are soon pummelled for 2 hours by one of the best live bands going. There is a point about half way through that I genuinely think I might faint, but after that I rally. It is banger after banger, with all the expected main set songs (Tonite, Tribulations, Someone Great, Home), the two newer cuts New Body Rhumba and X-Ray Eyes that I’ve not had much before, and some nice treats thrown into the mix (45:33 parts 1 and 2! Starting with Oh Baby! American Dream! North American Scum!). This is my fifth time seeing LCD Soundsystem and I still haven’t got Us V. Them, but one day. Having sweated through the rest of it, when we get to the inevitable and beloved final triple of Dance Yrself Clean, New York I Love You, and All My Friends, all bets are off. The drop in Dance is still one of the best moments in a concert you’ll ever find. The extended outro of NY is so much more intense than on the album version. And the sweaty, joyous, emotional rapture of All My Friends (albeit at a noticeably slower tempo in their comparatively old age now), the backing vocals being screamed back at them, is everything. Sadly not everything is Working Men’s Club, a frontman too busy posing at being cool to actually manage anything of interest.
I cannot pretend that on some level anything in this book feels like new information to me - Meta is a cancer on society; Mark Zuckerberg is at best short-sighted and uninterested, at worst sociopathic; Sheryl Sandberg is a wild hypocrite. Like, on an instinctual level, I wouldn’t have told you that Careless People could have informed me any further on those points. But, christ. The idea that Instagram was tracking when teenage girls posted and then immediately deleted selfies and in that moment advertising them beauty products is just abominable. I do agree with Wynn-Williams that even if not coming from top-down, bottom-up I do think Facebook (later Meta) was full of idealists who thought they were making the world better, or at least one day could. I don’t know when the turning point was between “not realising the deep impact this stuff could have” and “realising and exploiting that”, but it clearly happened. Wynn-Williams writes compellingly about her own role in this, understands her part in it, so Careless People is plenty readable. If you’ve paying attention, most of this won’t be new to you, but the insider account has its own merits and even those following the saga most closely will still find new things in it to feel uncomfortable about.
Killing time in London before LCD Soundsystem, and Alasdair wants to go do some birdwatching in the park. I settle down in Royal Artisan Bakery for the duration, with a book and an underwhelming tuna melt. It passes the time.
In order to make life easier for LCD Soundsystem, we’ve come home to Harpenden to stay over, and Mum’s decided to treat us to The Giggling Squid, which I last came to during Eat Out To Help Out, so it’s fun on some level to reflect on the differences there over 5 years. I don’t have a huge amount tonight, starting with some spring rolls shared with Alasdair, and going for the sticky chicken - fried and marinated in some kind of honey glaze, quite good, a bit moreish, but I can’t have too much - with various bits of veg and rice. The Sweet Jungle Colada mocktail, though, is eminently moreish, knocking back two of those. Nice to have a meal out with Alasdair and Mum and Dad, though.
Seen projected on 35mm at the Prince Charles Cinema. One of my absolute favourite films, it’s simply gorgeous. I do think my position on the Kinsey Scale is that the top note is Maggie Cheung but the base note is her dresses. The whole thing is a swoon in cinematic form: the woozy, smoke-filled spaces; the slow motion; the shot of her walking up the stairs as he walks down. The clocks. The framing of the two being both in shot but one only in a mirror, together but divided. Quizas, quizas, quizas…
Surprisingly lovely, unsurprisingly funny, exactly the kind of thing you would want from Basden and Key. A really charming, low key little thing that bats well above the films of its class.
Ruth’s latest visit to Bristol coincides nicely with a Wellness Friday, so that’s an excuse to go to a new French restaurant on Wapping Wharf with someone who isn’t my notably vegan boyfriend - not an ideal pairing, the vegans and the French, so glad to avoid that mismatch. Lapin has a generous lunchtime set menu, of three courses for 30 quid, so that sounds pretty good to us. And, it turns out, tastes pretty damn good to us too, as do the Hugo spritzes we order to quench our thirst on an already hot day. Before the set menu, though, the snacks. Obscenely delicious baguettes and salted butter, beautifully marinaded olives, and a comté gougére each, melting in the mouth as they collapse under the weight of further cheese. Up first in the set menu, the rabbit rillettes, served with crisp sourdough and the most divine pickled carrots to add a much needed tang to cut through the decadence of the rillettes. A perfect combination. How could it be a French prix fixes without the main being steak frites? They’re not slacking here either, it’s a beautiful cut of meat, with a properly peppercorn-y peppercorn sauce and golden fries. Amazed that I finished all of that off, we march onto dessert, the St. Emillion au Chocolate, sitting somewhere between a mousse and a parfait, but with a distinct amaretti hint. Not quite hitting the same highs as my favourite chocolate desserts, but it’s not a difficult job to eat it. Suitably stuffed, Harry mentions he’s in town if I fancy a drink, so off we go to have a mini mentoring reunion.
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Oddly, for Glass, a comparatively straight-forwardly written novella for the most part. Some of her more specifically stylistic writing does appear at points, and as ever to deliberate effect, but there’s a feeling of wanting to more directly make a point in this novella about a young woman’s battle with cancer and the way that turns her into a different person, the wish that she could be a different person, how life may different if that were the case. Heartbreaking in just the right ways.
Having long been a fan of John Finnemore in general and of Souvenir Programme in particular, and having listened to every episode ad infinitum to help fall asleep (not the damning with faint praise that that might convey!), it’s a genuine thrill to sit in a horrifically unconditioned old church hall(?) amongst maybe, I don’t know, 60 other people to watch almost all of the cast (minus an absent Laurie Lewin) run through this year’s JFSP special. The first surprise was whether this would take the form of the 2023 special - a standard collection of sketches as per the first 8 series - or the 2024 special - a more experimental piece, a la series 9. In the event, it turns out to be the former. We get a slightly updated and topical sketch from a few series back for this room only, and then into the rest of the new sketches. As it’s effectively a WIP, it seems unfair to dig into the details too much, other than to say they are exactly what you’d hope for from this style of JFSP. Fun premises, actual punchlines, the usual hangups and recurring underlying obsessions that clearly fuel Finnemore. Whether it was because it was yet to be written or merely to not spoil every sketch for us, for the Since You Ask Me… we were treated to the classic Treasure Island (“Polly wants a bison!”) edition from the first series, which is impeccable on the radio and even more fun live. My primary thought as we headed back to Paddington was mostly that it was very weird putting faces to the voices to which I’ve been listening for 10 years on the radio. And that’s a hard one to explain with my aphantasia. It’s not like I can see them when I listen to it now, but there is a difference somehow between the old state of not knowing what they look like and the new state of, well, knowing what they look like. This isn’t even a complaint about how they look, they are all very handsome. Just… a new familiar to find.
I am sadly less impressed with War Horse than I wanted to be. And I did want to be! It’s obviously not a new play at this point, was well regarded at the time, and I’m aware that I’m seeing this as a touring production down the line and - with no offense intended to the touring company - that does potentially leave a certain gap between it and the original. The direction and puppetry are both impressive - there is a thoughtfulness to the staging, and it is always incredible how quickly you stop seeing the puppets as puppets and start seeing horses instead. But there are some pockets of pretty abysmal writing and acting: at one point, as bells ring in the town square in an otherwise bucolic scene, someone exposits “You know what that means: the German kaiser has refused to withdraw troops from Belgium”. I mean, bleak. It lost a lot of narrative momentum in the second half, becoming oddly unfocused. But! The final moments are incredible effective (although this is very much a “hitting my direct trigger” thing (see A Monster Calls)), so I will give it that. Nonetheless, though, a shame.
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Oh boy. This is something that I have been looking forward to for something like nine months now. The idea of Thom Yorke pulling apart Hail To The Thief and putting it back together again around Hamlet is so up my street that I’m still not quite I’ve not manifested it into existence. Quite late in the run, we make a weekend out of Stratford upon Avon and my god was it worth it. The set, beginning with blazers hung from the ceiling, is comparatively minimal but brought to life through multiple levels and amps in place of theatrical blocks. The lights go down, the ominous tick of the drum machine behind 2+2=5 kicks in, and we begin. It’s a tightly edited script, bringing a 4 hour epic into about 1h40, and so it does rely on some familiarity with the play, but I found it an effective abridgement. Musically, the band are obviously not quite Radiohead, but they are good. Yorke’s arrangements/orchestrations do the whole thing justice, and I’m fairly certain every song but A Punchup At A Wedding is accounted for in one form or another - some, like The Gloaming, get used as ambience; others like Scatterbrain and Sail To The Moon, both in emotional peaks of the show, get treated pretty much in full. I think the highest praise I can give HHTTT is that it would absolutely hold its own as a top class production of Hamlet even without the Radiohead involvement, never giving the impression of a cheap, quick crossover. The cast are top notch, the direction zips it along nicely, and the production values are incredible. As the bombast of the second half of A Wolf At The Door rises in volume and intensity for the final crescendo of the show, it’s hard not to feel swept away.
I’m sure Stratford-upon-Avon has a lot going for it, but it didn’t seem like a particularly throbbing hub of culinary delights. Needing a pre-theatre dinner, and having done some vague research but not much, when I realise that the Royal Shakespeare theatre has a rooftop restaurant with a strong selection of seemingly vegan options (if admittedly not explicitly marked), that seems ideal - it’s where we need to be, they’ll have to get us out by the start of the show, and the menu looked quite ornate. In retrospect, that should have been the first clue - all the hallmarks of a chef who has learnt how to make complicated dishes, but hasn’t learnt why. The bang bang chicken is barely coated and a little tough, although the dressing and the foliage are quite nice. There’s a wide gap between expectation and reality from the menu description of “slow-cooked confit lamb shoulder, bubble and squeak mash, edamame beans, pea and mint salsa, red currant jus” to the plate that eventually lands in front of me. A stolid cuboid of reconstituted lamb does, to give it some credit, fall apart quite easily, but it’s over-salted to the point that I cannot finish what’s left once I’ve exhausted the not overly generous jus. The mash is dried out and seared into a circular mold, losing even more already-lacking moisture from the dish (this seems to be a theme, with Alasdair’s looking very dry and eventually we conclude that the parsley oil mentioned on his menu has been forgotten). The edamame beans and sauce are delicious in a vacuum, but they belong on a different dish entirely, clashing with everything else on the plate. It’s all disappointing enough that I don’t trust any of the desserts enough to move from a 2-course set menu to a 3-course set menu that I’d been anticipating ordering in the first place. The whole ordeal also very much dragged on, which I’d expect better of a restaurant in a theatre explicitly offering this as a pre-theatre set menu. To end on a positive though: in lieu of dessert, I had a tiramisu martini, their twist on an espresso martini with Baileys, Disarrano, and cream, and it was absolutely perfect.
This plays out as a feature length version of an I Think You Should Leave sketch, and the problem is that I always forget that I like - but not love - I Think You Should Leave.
Love a good book talk, me. Normally that’s a trip to Bath to go to Toppings, but tonight! In our very own Old Vic, we have Tim Key talking about his new collection of poetry and dialogues, LA Baby. He’s done a few of these now, for this and the last book (Chapters), and it’s always a surprise who he’s going to get to do the interviewing. John Kearns, Jessica Knappett, and Sam Campbell have all popped up before. Daniel Kitson’s doing it in Exeter a couple of days before. Who’s it going to be for us? Delightfully it turns out to be Amy Gledhill, a firm favourite. She has a wonderful ability to play both sharp and naive, which is fun in this kind of setting. Lots of good chat about what was actually going on for Key at the time - filming the new spin-off of The Office (U.S.) - a few poems read out, a belter of both an audience Q and indeed A (“is the spin-off any good?” “to be completely honest, the jury’s out”).
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Despite having an absolutely stonking cold, I force myself out comparatively late at night to the Prospect building for what is billed as an intimate outstore performance from Little Simz in support of her (absolutely banging) new album Lotus. Now. In absolute terms, I absolutely do not think we can agree on “intimate” as being an appropriate adjective for even the second, smaller room in Prospect, the Crane Room, at a capacity of 1500. But, relatively, Simz is playing two nights at the O2 in London later in the year, so I suppose this as good as it’s ever going to get - after all, gone are the days she reminisces about on stage of playing Thekla years ago. Due to the aforementioned cold, I aim to get there not very long before on-stage time, which means I am stuck at the back of what is basically a concrete rectangle. I can’t see for shit, there’s pricks all around me, and I’m already not in a very awake mood. So I tell myself, even knowing she’ll be saving Gorilla for the last song, I can leave any time I like, and given most instores tend to only be like 30 minutes, if I leave at that point, I’ll have got my money’s worth. From the moment Simz is on stage, though, there isn’t a moment I would rather leave than stay for another song. Reeling through an 18 song setlist, having already done an early show, her enthusiasm and energy are infectious (hopefully moreso than my cold). Even only on a single listen, my favourites off Lotus (Thief, Young) hit hard live. The setlist is wide ranging, if sadly lacking in NO THANK YOU cuts, but as we ride the wave of a Gorilla finale, including an acapella version of the first verse before launching fully back into it, no one is arguing.
Getting out the house for a bit of fresh air to hopefully help the cold, I go to quickly catch up with Jenny and Coby, whom Alasdair has already spent some of the morning with. It’s a quick pit stop for Coby after swimming, but it’s nice to see them briefly. I have a dark sea salt hot chocolate, which, yeah, is fine. Let’s be honest, Sweven is where every Daily Mail reader imagines the kids are wasting their money on fancy coffee, and they seem to have paid little attention to any other drink. If you’re already on North Street, take the extra five minutes to walk to Zara’s. The brownie I have later is very fudgy, of which I approve.
Cast Jon Hamm in more comedies you cowards.
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It was actually quite good in act 2! It just got away from itself afterwards and also beforewards.
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I do actually quite like M Night Shyamalan’s late period, like this and Old - “here’s a premise, I’m not going to do anything more than that, have fun”.
Zac and Martha are coming over to our neck of the woods to try the new Studio Ghibli themed cocktail menu at Spirited, and have suggested grabbing a bite to eat beforehand. I wrack my brain for where to take them, and realise that Magari is perfectly on their way to us from town, and Alasdair and I have been looking for an excuse to go back for nearly a year now, so why not. One of the newer shipping containers on Wapping Wharf, Magari is a fantastic little pasta spot. A very limited menu is a good indicator of quality, and it matches up to its promise. I decide not to have a starter, but I do nab a bit of Alasdair’s bruschetta, which is perfectly crisp without being tough or displacing its toppings. The main event for me is the sausage ragu, well-apportioned with chunks of meat, well-seasoned without being overly salty, meaning the pecorino on top sits nicely amongst it all. If I had one complaint, it’s that it’s served with only a tiny fork, which makes spiralling the pasta which is thicker in width and depth than the fork can handle rather difficult, let alone a spoon to prop up with. Still, a minor quibble. Tiramisus for the non-vegans amongst us for dessert, with Martha and I opting for the classic and Zac opting for the deluxe option of adding some honey and an amaretti crumble. It does look good, but I think I made the right choice with the classic - the lily doesn’t need gilding.
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Always a pleasure to get a new Birbiglia stand up show to watch. It is very funny, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a certain lack of cohesion compared to the admittedly high water mark of The Old Man And The Pool. But even sans the most satisfying narrative device, there’s a bunch of great individual routines, and it’s another entry in a very new sub-genre of stand up: recollections of the comedians invited for an audience with the Pope in 2024.
Mahoney insists that my birthday present for him this year is to buy myself a ticket to join him at Willi Carlisle’s gig at the Louisiana a few days before the big day itself. Who am I to say no? I run out of time to do any prep work for this, having never listened to Carlisle before, and looking at recent setlists, there’s be a lot of ground to cover first, so I decide to go in blind (deaf?). Mahoney tells me that I should expect something almost akin to an Edinburgh show, and that intrigues me. He’s not wrong. Carlisle is an affable performer, long motor-mouthed monologues between songs in a country drawl, amusing without trying too hard. He moves between traditional folk songs and his own material, from solo vocals to banjos and guitar. It’s a rallying cry for acceptance, of queer identities and the van life. His new album is out at the end of June, and I very much look forward to getting to listen back to Big Butt Billie, a song that manages to rhyme “great satan” and “never seen a finer they/them” on falling in love with a non-binary server at a diner. It’s good gear! Shame about the crowd, including the guy who decided that cheering wasn’t sufficient to express his enjoyment and instead alighted on barking. Support from Ags Connolly, a man from Oxfordshire with the voice of a proper honky tonk country singer. Enjoyable stuff.
Still a treat after all this time. Captures all too horrifically the pretentious adolescence.
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Last watched in uni, I think*? Devastating to watch a film set at University of Bristol be so consistently actually filmed not in Bristol, but here we are. A thrill, having recently also rewatched The History Boys, to find James Corden and Dominic Cooper playing school mates.
(* I did, though, go to see the musical adaptation of Starter For 10 at the Bristol Old Vic last year, starring Mel Giedroyc of all people, where the opening song contains the chorus “woah-oh-oh University Challenge! Woah-oh-oh, which team’s gonna win?”)
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Once again we mark the passing of another two to three years with a Derren Brown show. Once a familiar staple in the family routine (and indeed still so - I’m seeing this show again with them later in the year), this time I’m going to see it in Bristol with Alasdair, which is a treat. More so than any other thing I write about here, I don’t know how best to write about this without spoiling anything, so here we go. I don’t think it quite lives up to Showman as a conceptual whole, but that is a very high bar. There is, though, a central set piece - that is somehow not the finale! - that impresses both on a technical level (how are those two objects that identical?!) but in ambition also. For the lucky participant, the show is briefly all about them, and I think leaves them with something really special. It’s an interesting intersect of his later TV shows, more focused on self-improvement (although can it be called that when he’s improving someone else’s self?), and his live work. Meanwhile! In a routine around dousing, Alasdair gets swept along with the crowd and by the end of the first half he has moved from our seat in the circle to being in the aisle in the stalls. He is disconcerted; I am delighted.
It turns out a couple of people from Alasdair’s work are also going to Derren Brown at the Hippodrome and have suggested getting a bite to eat at Renato’s beforehand. I’m amenable. It’s good pizza! Previously, I’ve mixed it up between the New York style and the Detroit style pizza - maybe it’s the recency bias of being in New York, maybe it’s the having had too much Detroit pizza at the Barrelhouse over the last while, but today it’s just a couple of slices of New York. Just cheese. Topped with oregano. A garlic and herb mayo. A nice, cool pint of Sky Above. The dream.
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Really worked for me (as ever for Anderson, to be fair) - he’s growing up, and the cynicism is sneaking in more and more each film. You love to see it. You also love to see Michael Cera doing a Norwegian accent. Maybe goes up a star on reflection, we’ll see.
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Sidney Lumet walked so Kenneth Brannagh could… eventually cast Russell Brand in a sequel?! Maybe don’t!
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Last year, across a combination of performances at the Fringe and an afternoon in Pleasance London, I managed to see all but one of John-Luke Roberts’ ten Edinburgh shows. The missing one was the elusive It Is Better, a show first conceived as a record during lockdown and very rarely performed live post-Covid. It is a record I own three times over, for various reasons, but have never actually listened to, so I was delighted that Luke was coming to Bristol on tour (and excited to have had advanced warning of that fact by virtue of him messaging me to ask about good venues) with that very show - the collection is complete! So, racing over to the Alma Tavern after an excitable and bruising 30th birthday sports day for a friend of ours, we start with the greatest hits and some new material (including, of course, some of the Spice Girls), and then onto the main event. It’s a lovingly put together show that to some degree brings Stdad-Up and Builds A Monster full circle, with the re-emergence of the Dad “character”, the result presumably of a pandemic spent processing. A typically JLR-esque framing device holds it all together, some beautiful interior jokes, and a surprisingly affecting ending. Superb stuff, and I should really listen to the original.
What a happy accident to discover that, when Nish sends out a mailing list blast noting that there are very much still tickets available for his tour show in St Albans, that is on a night that I am in the area as a result of the Spurs stadium tour. An easy diversion to spend a weekend at home and swing by St Albans on the way. In the event, the day finishes unexpectedly early so I get to go back to Harpenden, have a nap, and then head out again. This is the same tour Alasdair and I went to see last September, but it’s wonderful to watch it again, updated to account for the world somehow becoming more terrible in the interim, but all the central points still holding. Nish is such an excellent comedian - has been for at least 10 years at this point, of my seeing him - but he’s just going from strength to strength right now. His writing is so well considered, the material absolutely sold by the confidence and fluidity of delivery, the passion and fire evident in every word. So few people are doing this kind of angry, impassioned left-wing comedy (in the rich tradition of Marks Thomas and Steele), and we’re lucky to have him. Amy Annette does a great job in the support slot - it’s amazing how much you can get out of asking individual members of the audience what their favourite bread is. She’s eminently relatable to a whole swathe of the audience, and sets the energy levels perfectly. A quick hello in the dressing room before they need to head back to London, and god bless Mum for the 10 minute lift back to Harpenden.
Somehow, through work, we’ve swung a trip to Spurs stadium for the interns, including a stadium tour, a private tech tour, and the skywalk. After all that, and having been awake since 4 in the morning and have only had a 6am McDonalds, I’m quite peckish. Luckily we’re hanging around in the M Café, which I think is designed for the media/press at the stadium? In any case, today’s hot dish is a chicken curry, which is surprisingly substantial! As it should be for that price, boy. The chocolate cake is actually very good, a lovely double texture of gooeyness and cakiness. I suppose I would recommend it if you end up as part of the sports media corps?
The collision of two different parts of the job: one, being the Bristol intern lead, the other, working for the company that is responsible for basically all of the infrastructure at the new Spurs stadium. We’re taking the interns for a “development day”, and this - genuinely coincidentally - is the day after the Europa league final which sees a Spurs victory and thus a lot of happy if hungover faces the next day. We do the normal stadium tour, and even as a non-football fan, I do find it interesting seeing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff like the changing rooms, and the level of detail being put into the psychology (the respective temperatures of the home and away team changing rooms, stuff like that) of things through the technology is ripe for nerd sniping. Beyond that, we get a custom tour of the data centre courtesy of the Spurs CTO, a lovely man who answers my product marketing questions with good humour. Then it’s the sky walk, and I honestly don’t see why people are scared of it, but you do you. Weird to get to the top and they’re just blaring 30 seconds of anonymous songs at a time to avoid paying PRS fees.
I liked this! But it had been a stressful day! Maybe I just needed comforting! George Clooney is still very much an actor’s director. The third act reveal of “oh Hitler’s in this!” was, admittedly, a curveball.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is one of my favourite books of the year so far, so I’m delighted to see that Toppings Bath have got him in for a book talk. With the greatest of respect to whichever member of staff was on interview duty, it was not the greatest of interviews. Latronico was incredibly erudite, waxing poetically and philosophically about the events in his life and in this world that led him to writing this novel, the ups and downs of having your work translated, and the future of big tech. Unfortunately, these answers are uniformly met with a moment of silence and then a completely unrelated pre-written question, rather than responding to the thoughtful answers presented. Still, it was inspiring getting to listen to and ask a question of Latronico, and I greatly await his next work.
Tom Hanks has never met a lower-middle class person and that’s ok.
Fun enough, definitely runs out of steam towards the end. The multiple endings are a fun gimmick, especially run together at the end. More films should end on the line “I’m going to go home and sleep with my wife!”
It’s a week of catching up with people, it seems, and this time it’s Niki! Laden with dietary requirements and also pregnancy hormones, she slightly apologetically suggests somewhere not very interesting but certainly safe for knowing she’ll be able to eat the food - this is of course fine with me. Luckily, the Lounge fits the bill and is all of a three minute walk from my house, so I’m not going to argue. I’ve never been to this specific Lounge, which is I was confused to learn recently the original Lounge. Any charm or history it may have has been wiped out over time and private equity investment, sadly. It’s all fine. Aggressively mediocre. I order a smashed burger, and it comes out looking so sad, so shrunken. It tastes ok, because it’s kinda hard to make a bad burger, but it’s not massively inspiring. Likewise the chips. But hey, they at least bring out a bottle of mayo when I ask for some, rather than an insultingly tiny thimbleful.
Raph and I are long overdue a catch up, and in a mutual convenience we settle on Fluffy Fluffy after work. Unfortunately, we arrive too late for them to still be serving the savoury menu, so we’re straight onto dessert - ah well. I’ve been meaning to come here since it opened, as it arrived in Bristol not very long after I happened to find one in Leicester last year, had the tiramisu pancakes, and wanted to have them again. The moment has arrived. It maybe doesn’t quite live up to my memory of it (although, to be fair, I wasn’t particularly remembering it as fine dining), but it’s still good, the texture of the cream doing a lot of the heavy lifting as to why I liked it. The pancakes are indeed fluffy (fluffy), and the coffee syrup does set it off nicely. I have a mango soda with it, and this is diminishing returns as I drink all the mango puree basically by itself (delicious) and am left with just soda water (less so).
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The people complaining about AI in this are really falling on their face given how much it’s, you know, not AI generated.
Alasdair has returned from his extended stay; neither of us want to cook; we’re going out to see Tall Tales; Other have posted on Instagram that they’ve had cancellations and that’s difficult for them - it’s a perfect storm. I had forgotten how good the olives are, marinated to within an inch of their lives in lemon juice and then lightly salted. The crisps and dips - a satay sauce and an aioli - are incredibly moreish. But I must make them lessish because there’s so much more to come. I go for the special, barbecued red mullet, some battered and fried, some not, with an abundance of greenery and a gorgeous sauce. Almost overshadowed by the confit potatoes in the “million layer” style, with a pesto mayo. But still, after all that, the main event remains Zak’s doughnut, today with a lemon and poppy seed drizzle. I savour each and every morsel of it, the most delicate bites I have ever taken. I could eat these on a conveyor belt. I must be stopped.
Despite having tickets for the much larger, further away, seated, mid-week Cardiff gig as part of the main Scissor Sisters anniversary tour, I was thrilled to see a Bristol warm-up date announced for just after I got back from New York, in what was once SWX but is now apparently Electric Bristol. The fact that I was stuck in front of some real pricks who had clearly had too much coke and still enjoyed myself is testament to how good this gig was. Eschewing the “one set of the album, a second set of the greatest hits” approach, this is a happy jumble of the two. Starting with the imperial stomp of Laura, it’s an instant transportation back to my final year of primary school. The number of big, good singles they had from that album that I knew in 2004 is quite something. I am beyond thrilled to get I Can’t Decide thrown into the mix, along with She’s My Man and, of course, I Don’t Feel Like Dancing off, in my opinion, their superior follow-up Ta-Dah!, but that’s not this tour, so I take what I can get. The hits go down a storm, the album tracks still get a good response, and they end the main set with a heartbreaking Return To Oz. There’s a moment in Take Your Mama where Shears hits a slightly but noticeably bum note, and his amusement at noting and correcting it is contagious and a good sign of how live this really is. This is still the size of venue they should have been aiming for in the first time, considering that Cardiff still I don’t think is sold out, but here we are. Tom Rasmussen is a fine support act - “oysters for lunch, ass for dinner” is oddly catchy as a chorus, and it’s the right energy and vibe for this night.
Having rewatched S1 and S2 of Twin Peaks, it was good to finally many years later actually get to The Secret History of Twin Peaks, nicely coinciding with the personal development of accounting for how much Mark Frost was quietly responsible for a lot of the things people love about Twin Peaks, even though David Lynch was the more public facing of the two. The Secret History is fascinating in how it both indulges and refuses to indulge the desire for explanation of the lore. It would be, in some way, easy to put together a book that puts it all out on the page. And, yes, there are some sections like the one documenting the history of Big Ed, Hank, and Norma that feel like gap-filling. But on the whole, Frost uses this to vastly expand the scope of the lore, adding more questions than he answers. The Native Americans, the assassination of JFK, UFOs, and more (Donald Trump!) get brought into things, and absolutely fantastically at some point Frost has Richard Nixon uttering “I am not a kook”, so fair enough it’s all worth it for that. Built up of a classified dossier with annotated margins, collecting newspaper clippings, FBI and CIA files, diaries, letters, etc., it’s a formally fun book in that regard. Do not read seeking answers, but to spend more time ensconced in this world. I’m looking forward to getting to The Final Dossier post a The Return rewatch.
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My return to the UK happily coincides with Mum’s birthday, so I conspire with Dad to surprise her by him picking me up from Heathrow and me being in Harpenden for a birthday dinner. We go to Pasta Cibo, which used to be the go-to family restaurant, and I have not been in at least 10 years. Thankfully, literally nothing has changed at Pasta Cibo in that time. The over the top tat all around the walls and ceiling, including the creepy clown doll; the menu that genuinely includes “Spaghetti ‘Lika Mamma Used To Maker’”; it’s all there. I have pretty much what I would have had back then - whitebait to start, a margherita pizza for the main, nothing for dessert (they buy them all in, Punky Penguin ice creams and all). It’s nice to be back.
Feels like an evolution on Intimacies (which maybe, if I recall correctly my own opinions from a couple of years ago, felt more of a leap from A Separation). I admired the jarringly disruptive jump between parts one and two, an excellent wrong-footing that enhances the thematic thrust of the book and a means of unreliable narration that felt fresh to me, at least. It’s clean, measured prose and it’s effective as a result. A deep tangling and untangling of interior lives and what we give of ourselves to others, the routines in which we hide.
After a 7 hour red-eye flight where even being in business class has not helped the lack of sleep, I am relieved to have a lounge to go to. It is a new sensation for me to go from landing on a plane to being in a shower within 30 minutes, and it’s almost worth the price of business class alone. I’m still genuinely unable to eat anything after my final day in New York binge, so I am content to curl up on a chair with a cup of tea and a book for a while, eschewing the multitude of hot and cold breakfast options. Eventually, Dad comes to pick me up so I can go nap in my own bed at home, and the job is done.
More food! Enrobed in White Company bedding in my own little pod, I sink into a fully reclining seat, put on Paddington In Peru, and await the Club World meal service. Today I have already eaten too much food and drunk too much alcohol. Let’s have more of both, please! The welcome glass of champagne starts me off nicely, before a healthy gin and tonic with dinner. I pick my dinner options strategically. A creamy broccoli soup doesn’t overwhelm me, even with the croutons, and was perfectly nice. Not being able to handle any more pasta, I go for the braised beef short rib, with potato fondant, green beans, carrots, and some kind of gravy, all absolutely fine! Better than the premium economy food, which is better than economy food, but it’s all relative, isn’t it. The blueberry bread and butter croissant pudding, with a fine-dining-esque smear of vanilla custard nearly finishes me off, but I survive to vaguely doze off for a bit - massively helped along by a hot chocolate topped off with Baileys. In the morning, I am treated to some tea and orange juice with a breakfast ciabatta, some muesli, and a chocolate muffin that I realistically get one bite into before realising that it simply wasn’t going to happen. Next time, I’m getting business class in the day time and not worrying about being able to sleep or not.
Watched on the plane back, which probably contributed an extra half-star or so to the rating. Hard not to compare it unfavourably to Paddington 2, but a fun enough romp to pass the time in a vacuum (so to speak).
The perks of having actually paid for business class in advance rather than being upgraded at the last minute is spending time in the lounge. I can’t tell you I took full advantage of this (see immediate prior entries), but I did my best. I checked out the buffet and had a small selection of anti pasti, all of which was fine. The main draw was the fact that all of the alcohol was self-pour. Just bottles of red/white/rose/champagne, multiple variants of each, waiting for you to serve yourself. Any spirit you can think of was represented. Even after a couple of glasses of wine, when I really did not need anything further, I still had to try the build your own bloody mary bar. A not great cookies and creame cannoli, an oat cookie, and a weirdly rainbow coloured battenberg cake makes for a hodge podge of a dessert, but I am satisfied.
We continue the day of eating! We spotted Pastagasm, just a block over from the hotel, on our first night, and made a note of it for future reference, despite having most of our meals booked already. I really shouldn’t have, I could barely eat, but I also couldn’t leave New York knowing it was there and not trying it. In a tiny, garish spot with purple neon signs and black and white chequered tiled flooring, I am served a healthy (quantity)/unhealthy (nutrition) quantity of cacio e pepe in tonnarelli, parmesan piled on, and it’s very good! The sauce clings to the pasta nicely, substantial but not thick, bound together perfectly. Delighted that in Bianchi’s fashion, I’m given some (very rosemary-y) focaccia to mop it up, and I make sure to do so. I would have loved to have tried their tiramisu, but I genuinely don’t think I could have managed a spoonful. Good to have a reason to come back to New York, I suppose.
Continuing the mid-checkout-airport time-killing, we figure that Grand Central would be a good shelter from the rain. We quickly conclude that in order to be able to sit down, we’re going to have to actually buy something from somewhere, and this seems like the first reasonable place (Alasdair semi-jokingly suggests the oyster bar, but even I couldn’t manage it at that point in the day). A perfectly fine yuzu seltzer passes further time.
In the awkward period between checking out of the hotel and it being time to go to the airport, we have to kill time - ideally indoors because it’s absolutely pissing it down, so no just getting to wander the streets of New York. Alasdair finds an indoor market near where we’ve been for an early lunch, and that seems to have a cafe in it. There are many delicious looking things, include some kind of earl grey choux pastry thing. Unfortunately, I am stuffed, so an actual earl grey tea is the one, as I read a magazine full of one page articles amidst multiple pages of ads and photo shoots. The time passes.
So begins a day that, in a holiday full of eating too much, is the day of eating too much. To kill time before the airport, we go for brunch at Little Ruby’s. For a place full of “bowls” and “avo on toast”, it’s amazing how little they are prepped for vegans - in the UK, that kind of place would be on it. We each have a pineapple mint juice (lovely, too small), and unencumbered by dietary requirements, I am quickly able to metaphorically jump on the breakfast sandwich - a slightly spicy sausage patty, topped with all manner of accoutrements: fontina cheese, scrambled eggs, pea leaves, a lemon aioli. All of this crammed in a potato bun (which the server “reckoned” was probably vegan before checking to find out it definitely was not). It was good! It’s a rich breakfast, I’ll give you that.
The culinary centrepiece of the whole holiday. Eleven Madison Park - the only vegan three Michelin star restaurant in the world; for Alasdair especially, this is a big deal, as even when we go to other Michelin star tasting menus and there’s a vegan option, it’s typically the veggie dishes minus cheese, which is a shame when the whole point is that everything on the plate is there for a reason. The first time I have been to a three Michelin star place (not even a two before!). I think I now understand. Let’s start with the drinks. There is a binder of a wine list, centimetres thick. We come to the conclusion that the wine pairing might be too much to us (although in a genuine rarity, we do treat ourselves to a glass of champagne to start the evening), so we propose an alternative to our waiter - can we please have three cocktails each throughout the evening, whatever you think will work at each point? Of course we can! Absolutely no problem at all. We are treated to the snap pea cocktail, the banana cocktail, and the strawberry cocktail, all more complex than those sound but I shan’t reel off the ingredient list here. Suffice it to say that we were feeling it at the end, especially then the aperitif was brought out with dessert and the bottle explicitly left on the table for us to top up our glasses as we saw fit. But there was also the bonus cocktail! Prepared at the table, no less! Which, I admit, we both temporarily thought was the first one that was ordered on our behalf, and got excited that all three might be made like that. But no! This was actually just a bonus part of the first course proper (preceded by a bread course that we spent the rest of the evening remembering even 20 minutes or so and exclaiming “oh but the bread!”, a mushroom brioche with truffel and morel butter that melted and flaked like a dream come true). This was their spring celebration, a pea salad with mint, and the best damn lettuce you’ve ever had, with an almond ricotta for dipping. I shan’t recount every course in detail, we don’t have the time - a precise and delicate jenga of asparagus, artichoke fried like the sun, soba noodles made upstate, a luminescent romanesco. A single hasselback potato, prepared tableside and seasoned with a smoked potato powder and “land caviar”, is concentrated goodness of the highest order. Dessert is a multifaceted affair of a strawberry and raspberry mochi, a vanilla cream, and strawberries for dipping. There’s an amuse bouche of a sesame chocolate pretzel, dangling from a tree. The whole thing is simply remarkable. But. But but but. None of that is what I’ll take away from this evening. Sat next to us for most of the evening was a couple with a young daughter, maybe seven years old or so - who, to everyone involved’s credit, was on impeccable behaviour the whole evening, happily enjoying it and reading Matilda and The Twits when she was less engaged. When they reached the dessert, our waiter said to the little girl “we’ve got a special treat for you” and handed her a chocolate bar - “open it!”, she was told. She did, to find a golden ticket to give her a tour of the kitchen, the Roald Dahl story of her dreams. The sheer attention to detail and to providing an unforgettable experience for that little girl, simply remarkable. We were not so lucky to receive a golden ticket, but we did go home with three jars of granola (one each of cherry bakewell, and a third of black forest gateau). I’ve not eaten mine yet, but I had a bite of Alasdair’s and it’s like crack. Genuinely a high water mark for restaurants, as well it should be.
You could spend a day here and still not see half of it. It’s mind boggling. I have no particular nostalgic attachment to The Met from things like Night At The Museum, so I’m taking it as it is. Beyond the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, we focus our time on the Greek and Roman collection (such marvellous statues, some really good album artwork material, not that that’s the only lens through which I appreciate art), but also the history of musical instruments, featuring what is presumably just the contents of Bill Bailey’s rehearsal space. The modern art collection impressed with a giant Jackson Pollock (“it restates the negativeness of the universe…”).
I was mostly aware of Friedrich’s work through Stewart Lee using it as a reference point in his 2016 show Content Provider, but even outside of the Stewart Lee-ness of it all, I was captivated by the piece itself, even at the time. I wouldn’t have necessarily gone out of my way to see an exhibition, but finding that it was on at the MoMA when we were in New York seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. It turns out I’m even more of a fan of Friedrich’s work than I thought. The depth of colour in paintings like Ruins at Oybin are phenomenal. They took my breath away, sincerely. Obviously the main event is Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, and it is amazing to see in person.
This won’t be a long one. It’s a slice of New York pizza. Cheese. Add some oregano on. Bosh.
Had the first third of this on in the hotel room getting ready to leave for the day. Came back at the end of the day to find that the same channel was showing the film again, so caught the final third. That is enough to log it here. American television is dreadful, you cannot believe. Not very good, but Stephen Root is in it!
Still watching
Having had a surprisingly big lunch, when we have a lighter, earlier dinner, we do so knowing that I’m going to treat myself to a Milk Bar trip for something to have later in the evening once firmly ensconced in my pyjamas. I don’t, however, know at that point what I’m going to have. The last time I visited, I was only able to get a slice of cake, as their drink machine was out of order. So this time, in an ad hoc manner, I decide to double down. First up, a cereal milk milkshake, which is one of my favourite milkshakes I’ve had - topped with cornflakes, it really genuinely does taste like cereal milk. To follow, much later, is a slice of their quadruple chocolate cake - the sponge is oddly dry, but the ganache is lovely and does actually bind the sponge together quite well. It takes me the next morning to finish it, but what’s the harm in a little chocolate cake for breakfast on holiday?
I am determined, in the pre-planning of this holiday, to make sure we’re going to as many restaurants as possible that Alasdair can enjoy. So when former Simpsons head writer turned fast food critic extraordinaire, Bill Oakley, recommends Superiority Burger on his story as being so good he didn’t realise it was vegetarian, well here we go. We are shattered from a long day of eating and sun and the Guggenheim, so we decide to head straight here for an early dinner before crashing in the hotel in the evening (via, with any luck, Milk Bar). Simple, easy, quick. Let’s do this. I think because of the sun, when I see that Pimms is an option, I’m right on it, and only when it arrives do I remember that I’m drinking an American-proof cocktail and hooh boy is that stronger than what I’m used to when I think of a Pimms over here. The burger arrives, and it’s pretty much the platonic ideal of a fast food burger - the patty well-seasoned and slightly crumbly, the muenster cheese melted, the sauce doing its lubricating job. The fries are chunkier than I’ve tended to see in America, and what a relief. Alasdair has a chocolate mousse cake which I’m not ashamed to say I sample, knowing that soon I won’t have to stir from bed ‘til morn.
Mostly capitvated by Maro Michalakokos’ “Oh! Happy Days”, an installation that is apparently influenced by Beckett but ultimately is just fun as two giant fluffy burgundy mounds that, given the central support structures, seem like feet.
Slightly in mind of Takashi Murakami (but, again, when all you have is a hammer…) but a bit more restrained, and as such a bit less interesting. I prefer the more strictly geometric pieces over the more abstract.
The central exhibition at the Guggenheim on our visit, wrapping itself around the building’s helix structure. The Guggenheim is one of my favourite buildings certainly in New York, maybe the world. Getting to just slowly ascend, the way the spiralling view of the ceiling transforms into the spiralling view of the ground. I take very easily to Johnson’s work. The lower levels of the rotunda are filled with culturally focused abstract art - some beautiful pieces built around shelves and books, an eventual obsession with red, white, and blue in self-portraits. But then the top of the rotunda is full to the brim with with plant life and greenery, itself taking over the whole space with hanging vines.
A meal without Alasdair! I was saddened to see that Joomak Banjum, one of my favourite new discoveries last time I was here, had since closed. I was then trilled to learn that the chef behind it had opened Ddobar, serving an incredibly well-priced omasake menu featuring his now supposedly renowned Yubutarts. I can’t say I had heard of this phenomenon, but given how much I loved Joomak Banjum’s combination of Korean dishes seen through a French patisserie lens, I was all ears for this continuation. Admittedly on this random Saturday lunchtime at bang on opening, I was the only one there, but still, a remarkable efficiency of getting 11 courses in me and the bill paid in less than an hour. 11 bite-sized (ish) courses that nonetheless left me full at the end. The first few coures take a bit more variety - a shotglass of cacio e pepe, some beautiful scallops in a brown butter dashi, fluke served with a wasabi foam and apple - but then we hit the tarts. Imagine sushi but instead of the - let’s be honest with ourselves, quite boring at this point - rice, a small choux tart with an appropriate filling. The hiramasa, paired with a yuzu creme; the botan ebi with egg and ikura; the replication of the effect of a classic New York bagel with a slide of salmon on a tart with everything seasoning and horseradish filling. This continues through variations on lobster, tuna, duck pastrami, before we hit the wagyu beef - something I don’t think I’ve properly had before, and oh boy is it good. Served with maitake mushrooms and a truffle royal sauce, this didn’t need a tart; it stood alone, confident in what it was. And then! After ten courses of tiny, perfect bites, they offer me a giant swirl of soft serve earl gray ice cream. It’s delicious, and I do finish it, but it’s too much, and when they ask me if I’d like anymore, even I suprise myself by saying no. A single glass of white wine sees me through it all; I don’t think I’d have had time for a second.
I can’t say I’m massively familiar with Paul F. Tompkins work, other than knowing him from BoJack Horseman, but I am aware that he is well loved by people who like the same kind of things I like, and we’re looking for a comedy show while in New York, so why not! This promises to be a good old fasioned variety show, and by god it is. There’s a live band! A guest singer in Medusa, who’s got a hell of a voice. A guest magician in Artoun Nazareth, who is perfectly enjoyable even if I’ve seen all the tricks before, with a lot of the same patter. But obviously the main event is Tompkins himself, with some fun opening stand up (including telling the needlessly overenthusiastic American audience to stop applauding people and buildings who aren’t here) and later on a timely character act of an Irish priest campaigning for an Irish pope. It ends, bizarrely, with a rendition of (Ya Got) Trouble from The Music Man, complete with Tompkins in straw boater. It’s a song maybe best known to my generation as the inspiration for the Monorail song from The Simpsons, and it’s impressively earworm-y as a result. All in all, we got the variety we demanded, and that’s that.
Finally! Some oysters! I knew The Smith wouldn’t let me down. A bite to eat that is not quite quick, but is very much pre-theatre. So I knock back a couple of oysters (again, they offer a selection, I have no idea how on earth I would ever be able to differentiate them) with a variety of dressings, and they absolutely hit the spot. In an effort to keep rotating through different cuisines, I’ve also yet to have a steak this holiday, so why not! I go for their house special, a flat iron steak (appropriate for the district, I suppose) with peppercorn sauce, fries, and spinach - a classic. Medium rare, of course. It’s a steak, not really much more to say than that, it’s all done well (but not well done, wahey). But it’s enjoyable with a cocktail and the anticipating of a night at Varietopia.
I suppose you don’t really need a reason to go to Brooklyn - it’s like Manhattan with shorter buildings - but if you do, a Michelin starred wine bar owned by James Murphy is certainly a good one. I think it’s genuinely brilliant, that the typical thing of a rock star deciding they want to own a restaurant has turned into an absolute triumph long beyond any sense of name recognition. It eclipses his reputation, which is a thrill (that being said, as a side bar, I did on my first visit here manage to bump into Murphy in what was a perfect little interaction, and that has reduced the pressure each time I’ve been since). Another slight challenge on the veganism front, but not impossible, and it also means I get some delicious Hidden Falls brie. To start, scallops, beautifully prepared with a shiro dashi. Some of the best I’ve ever had. For my main, the “spring allium rice”, which is a risotto full of cultured butter to its very heart, with a selection of garlic, ramps, and onions to perfectly cut through the richness. I am livid that the Americans have somehow done a better sticky tofee pudding than us, not too datey, a sumptuous caramel sauce, and a resounding tuft of whipped cream to top it off. The service is impeccably friendly, the playlist is banging - what more could you want?
A fun collection of short stories that does not attempt to be more than that (cf. the number of collections that feel the need to interconnect). Williams seems to love a neat conceit built around wordplay, but the highlights here are the ever-so-slightly heartbreaking ones - a skywritten proposal, a shipping forecast gone awry - which really make the most of the form, ending before the ending, leaving you with the ambiguous uneasy feeling in your stomach as you wonder what happens next.
Alasdair wanted to spend a morning birdwatching in Central Park, and who am I to disappoint him. I, though, cannot pretend to be a keen birdwatcher. So instead, I spend a relaxing morning sitting on a bench in Shakespeare Garden reading my book. I so rarely get to go somewhere to deliberately read; it’s always just on the train or in bed or snatching a moment somewhere. To take advantage of somewhere like Central Park, with I’m sure dozens of comparative idylls to sit back and read in, is such a base pleasure to have.
The GOAT of American cookies, and a thrill to see that they have a vegan (well, catch-all dietary) cookie for Alasdair to enjoy as well. I go for the double chocolate cookie - in for a cent, in for a dollar - which is more spherical than flat. A monster of a thing. More gooey than crunchy. No bad thing! I pair it, counterintuitively, with an iced chocolate which isn’t even on the menu but they seem chipper as to figuring it out, and to be fair they do.
We have eaten altogether too much food, both on this holiday in general but specifically today. This means we are both disinclined towards going anywhere to eat a substantial meal, and really going anywhere at all. So the tapas in the lobby bar feels oddly appealing, especially if we can hit happy hour, which we just about manage. A couple of gin and tonics ordered, we peruse the menu and order the bare maximum of what we think will be enough, and we still over-order - god bless America. My hero dish, so to speak, is the jamon croquettes, which are to be fair quite good, the right mix of crispy exterior and fluffy interior, served with a suitably rich aioli. Alasdair opts for the pan con tomate, which I nab a slice of and is very good indeed. We share some shishito peppers, as well as the “house olives blend”, which actually turns out to be a whole mix of olives and peppers and gherkins. Not bad, but I think we were both in the mood for just some olives. We tip a suitably indifferent barman and head back up to our room to lie down for a good long while.
Finally! A hot chocolate! A sign on the counter warns me that, in order to fully activate the starch, the hot chocolate is very hot. They’re not wrong - I only attempt to tackle it a subway ride and a walk to the hotel later. It’s a very deep hot chocolate, more bitter than sweet, even with the whipped cream (scooped from a tub - a tub!), which honestly took me by surprise in a country where even the bread is full of sugar. It’s quite nice, but lacked the zing of a good, balanced hot chocolate.
Having popped into Grand Central for Alasdair to get the iconic photos, it would seem rude not to drop down into the dining concourse to get a snack for later in the day. I weight up my options, and after a tough call between this and Magnolia Bakery, I opt for Doughnut Plant, because I really want to have the Valrhona chocolate donut again. Later in the evening, I devour it standing in the hotel room (no crumbs in the bed!), and it is everything I want. The donut is well-coated in a thick, luscious chocolate glaze; the dough itself tears apart nicely, not too dense, but with some heft behind it. The dream.
After relistening to the (incredible) Claudia Winkleman episode of Off Menu a couple of months ago, I began to research tuna melts in New York. An early consensus formed around Golden Diner, so who am I to refuse? Unfortunately, this is maybe the only real food disappointment of the trip. This is, to be fair, potentially slightly influenced by being too full, but I still think in a vaccum, I wasn’t overly impressed. The sandwich was over-stuffed with tuna mayo (which, to be fair, was nice, but it was also cold? In a tuna melt?). It was like they’d toasted some cheese on some bread, and only then added the tuna and, for some reason, crisps? Very confusing. I get it with a pickle and some fries, both of which are perfectly fine if nothing special. On a very hot day, though, the very refreshing lager is doing a lot of heavy lifting, so I don’t regret it all too much. Maybe another time.
We don’t have time for the whole museum, but the monument itself is in our reach. It’s a genuinely quite impressive piece of architecture and memorial, and surprisingly low-key for the Americans. When we visited, the fountains were off due to maintenance, but this had no massive impact on the effect.
It only seems right to visit, as we’re this side of the Atlantic. The monument itself is understated, some statues captured in motion in the park. The really touching part, though, is the museum itself. I found it - not oddly affecting, of course it’s affecting, but yeah. I don’t think I quite anticipated that it would hit me like that. A real monument to the perserverance of those who came before us and fought so I don’t have to particularly think much of this every day. There are a collection of books for visitors to leave specific memories in response to certain prompts. Alasdair takes the opportunity, and something stops me. I don’t quite feel able to, some combination of feeling like I’ve nothing to say, too much to say, and in either case not having the words to say it. A lot to think about.
Another New York mainstay for me at this point, from all the way back in 2019. I cannot resist the lure of the Buvette waffle sandwich, so much so that a) I am eating this all together too close to lunchtime for my own good, and b) I am dragging Alasdair along to really the only place this holiday where he really cannot have anything to eat. I am willing to burn that much goodwill for it. Two beautifully crisp but fluffy waffles, sandwiching bacon, gruyere, a fried egg, and maple syrup. An absolute smorgasboard of flavour profiles that mingle beautifully. I am and remain obsessed. Maybe one day I’ll come back and actually be sat at a table rather than the bar, but it’s all fun.
The first of the American Michelin stars! Last time I came was a quick drop in for lunch with Alex; this time, a more relaxed, sprawling evening with Alasdair. Unfortunately, I’m not able to go for the tasting menu as it requires the whole table to take part and there are simply not enough vegan options, but no matter. I’m mentally prepared to spend as much money on pasta as the tasting menu would cost, so it all evens out. A cheeky amuse bouche of a miniature brioche bread with an onion pureé and crème fraîche starts us off, before I start doubling down and order the gnoccho fritto, three puffs of fried dough topped with parma ham, mortadella, and guanciale each. All need to be savoured; none are. I’ve already eaten enough for the week, so I only order two of the pastas: the anolini di parma and the cappellaccio ripieno di piselli. The former, a simple but effective stuffed pasta, filled with meat, and a light cheese sauce; the latter, my favourite, fragant with split peas and fresh mint. For dessert, a double caffeine dose of an off-menu espresso martini and their tiramisu, one of the best I’ve ever had, described on their menu as “enough for two, better for one”, and I’ve never been more glad to have a vegan boyfriend. A couple of chocolates for petit fours, and off we stagger to the hotel.
A poetry collection that traces the events and cast of characters across a London house party. A lot to like here, that transcends the context I am lacking. Some lovely reflections on being young and finding your place.
It feels like an obvious thing to have on a New York to-do list: go to a Broadway show. We had a look at what was going down, ruled out an awful lot of shows that looked good but were 700 bucks a ticket (looking at you, Othello). But! What that left us with was a real treat - Glengarry Glen Ross, a play I’d wanted to see for some time, with a remarkable cast (Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean), and pretty much West End level prices. The dream. In the end, unfortunately, we didn’t get Bob Odenkirk due to illness, but his understudy did a fantastic job and should be rightly applauded. Everyone else is playing mostly if not entirely to type - Culkin is a ratty, overcompensating salesman; McKean is more doddery than usual; Burr is all machismo and bravado. The American audiences are atrocious for applauding every scene, but what can you do. A fine production, and interesting to see the original as opposed to the film, sans Baldwin scene. Another interesting contrast between the US and the UK: it seems much more an expected thing that the cast are obligated to do the whole stage door thing, even for a matinee. It’s just a given. Which means I’ve got my playbill signed by Burr and Culkin, so that was fun.
The brief for this afternoon is a vegan place near the theatre, and we are thrilled to find PS Kitchen. It’s only lunch time, so I treat myself to a Shirley Temple, which is oddly nostalgic (memories of my friend Jack’s bar mitzvah [at least I think it was Jack’s, there were a lot in year 8]), and hits the spot without putting me to sleep in the theatre a couple of hours later. It’s a quick bite, but it turns out by no means a small one - I order a chicken caesar wrap which emerges from the kitchen the diameter of my forearm. Impressive though that is, a lot of it is greenery. Good greenery, don’t get me wrong, but greenery nonetheless. I’d describe the pie chart of greenery and non-greenery, but that would just be a cross-section of the wrap itself. The vegan chicken, though, is very good, nice and crispy; the dressing is well distributed; the tomatoes eventually come to the fore. A few of Alasdair’s chips, and the job’s done.
Very much my jam. Celebrating all sorts of fun and classic design work, from the physical (the original Macintosh, Herman Miller chairs) to the digital (Susan Kane’s original iconography, I NY). Very weird turning a corner at the end of the exhibition and being confronted with a road sign for Chiswick.
Big fan of Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites, a rainbow-coloured array of hanging sewn together soft toys that apparently emit aromas on a regular cadence.
10:30 - 11:20
So happy to be able to watch it, we came back again for more. Front row seats the moment the museum opened. Delighted to be there for a turn-of-the-hour moment, and delighted that the kept the whole of the Bad Santa alarm clock scene.
In my hunt for a hot chocolate in this goddamn city, I once again pop into somewhere recommended on Eater’s list of best hot chocolates in the city only to find that they are no longer doing a hot chocolate - it seems to be much more seasonal than in the UK. They don’t know what they’re missing. In any case, we had time to kill and a need for something to eat and drink, and their maple cruller looked very appealing. It tasted even better, practically melting in the mouth under the flaky maple glaze.
The nostalgia tour begins! I first went in 2019 when the then-new Off Menu podcast had Acaster and Ed Gamble recommend it. A not insignificant reason for our return was to have some oysters, but alas my hopes are dashed when it turns out there’s a six oyster minimum, and I am not a six oyster man. We stick to the mains, then - or, at least, I do. Alasdair suffers his veganism through a plate of broccoli, a plate of fries, and the pained expression of a waiter seeing a larger tip going down the drain (we do our best to make it up). I, on the other hand, treat myself to the duck meatloaf with a cherry glaze, and root vegetables served in a variety of styles, including some delightful crisps. Unspecified on the menu is that it’s served with mashed potato, and our server does not stop me from also ordering the “potato pureé” (further mashed potatoes). Even he, an actual American, describes it as swimming in butter, and my god he’s not wrong. But the hint of horseradish gives it a nice kick, and when in Rome. For dessert, an absolutely devine salted lime pie, a perfect ratio of crust to filling, served with some surprisingly unsweet (it is, after all, America) whipped cream and a breathtaking “passionfruit caramel” that I am savouring until the last bite. It’s good to be back.
When we check into the hotel, we’re told that our room booking includes a free glass of wine in the lobby bar between 5pm and 6pm every day. We don’t need telling twice. Making our way in before getting changed for our dinner reservation elsewhere, having spent the day rushing around New York in the heat, we are served a delightfully chilled glass of anonymous white wine each, which absolutely hits the spot. The next day we return and, after much umming and ahhing, figure out the etiquette of tipping on a free drink - to be fair, our bartender is lovely and it feels rude not to. I hope he had a lovely birthday upstate (as he tells us, he loves NYC but you do have to get out of the city once a quarter).
I’m a sucker for the MoMA design store, and it’s practically a museum in its own right. A fantastic collection of obscure and artistic products, with an inevitable range of Teenage Engineering synths and a whole host of kitchenware that we would absolutely kit the kitchen out with if we had either the money for the objects themselves or even the cost of importing them all.
You try keeping Alasdair away from an exhibition with a title like that. It’s not not for me, but I can’t pretend textiles are my favourite medium. I am quite enamoured by the pieces where the original sketches/designs are paired with them, and dare I say it I find the latter more interesting.
15:55 - 16:35
I was so delighted to turn up to the MoMA and find this was being exhibited. So much so that we even came back the next day to watch more. I absolutely love The Clock. It is a masterpiece. It is hypnotic and compelling and an absolute exemplar of the core medium of film, the juxtaposition of discrete images to imply causation and connection. You watch these intercut clips, knowing they are unrelated, and still start trying to unconsciously thread together a narrative; actors reoccur at different ages. The thrill of seeing a film you recognise (In The Mood For Love ) turn up. I could watch this all day.
Our first museum trip of the holiday, we head straight to the top floor for the MoMA’s retrospective on Jack Whitten. A well-staged exhibition in which I find a lot to like whilst some of it does leave me cold. The more cosmic works, taking abstract pieces, tiling them, and reassembling them in different configurations really worked for me, especially seeing how that evolved over time and remained relevant even through to an iOS influence. Other pieces do less for me, but it’s well organised and Alasdair takes to it a lot more, so time well spent.
One of the great pleasures in life is having friends in places you like to go on holiday. I get to catch up with Alex and Shuyang, and also enjoyably get to introduce them to Alasdair and vice versa. We end up at Spicy Moon, not far from their apartment in the East Village, a veggie/vegan Chinese joint. Still pretty full from the earlier bagel, we go for the lunch deal, with some fried vegetable dumplings, in a luminous green wrapper, and the vegetable ramen which is absolutely unnecessarily stuffed with noodles. Like, too many noodles. It’s delicious, laden with tofu, bean sprouts, and other veg. I devour the broth, even if I simply cannot approach finishing the rest. We make a move and go see the changes Alex and Shuyand have made to their apartment, making the most of our brief overlap.
The conceit of a 200-odd-page email, unbroken, as a novel is fun, as is the typography that puts me in mind of Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch. Goodlord unfortunately ends up going in a pretty similar direction tonally and narratively as Little Scratch, which is not an incorrect direction, nor one that should be discouraged, but a shame when it already feels so in debt formally. The constant referral to the email’s recipient by name also delightfully recalls Second Place by Rachel Cusk (oh Jeffers!), so I am well-disposed towards it. I will look forward to seeing what Ella Frear gets up to hence.
You can’t go to New York and not get a bagel. Surely. I have long been thinking about the bagel Alex picked up for me on my last visit a couple of years ago, and there’s a Brooklyn Bagel Company outpost not far from the hotel, so we head over for a quite sizeable breakfast - for as much as I’ve been reminisicing about that previous bagel, I’d forgotten just how substantial they are. I go for a pretty much classic - smoked salmon and a scallion cream cheese, with some capers and red onion, on an everything bagel, lightly toasted. It is perfect, and I will later pretty much not eat lunch. Alasdair finds they have a tofu-based vegan cream cheese, so gets to enjoy that on a blueberry bagel, and we both have an orange juice which really does hit the spot.
After a 7 hour flight and navigating our way from JFK to our midtown Manhattan hotel, we need a bite to eat - mostly to keep us up to a normal hour to avoid horrendous jet lag. Alasdair has found Planta Queen, a very short walk from the hotel, which is an all-vegan Japanese restaurant (a general New York/American theme: restaurants tend to be all or nothing on this, either fully plant-based or with minimal adjustments possible, as opposed to the UK’s pretty consistent multiple options in any restaurant). It is also Maki Monday (a decidedlt different concept to Maccies Mondays at work in the old days), with $9 maki rolls all round. I go for the Hawaiian, with pineapple and avocado, served with a mango aioli. I think I prefer Alasdair’s torched and pressed avocado rolls with a miso truffle glaze. The bao slider of crispy fake chicken is pretty good, but the star of the show is the 1000 layer crispy potato, with sour cream and caviar (take the quotation marks around the above as read). Both too full and too tired for a dessert, we take our leave to finally crash.
Something something two nickels about a film about a star of the music industry having a film made about them but with a twist. I like the notion of making a documentary about someone but in LEGO, but why did it have to be Pharrell? Much like Better Man, the chronology is all over the place, but it’s at least oddly frank about him running on autopilot and churning out blandness for a while.
Where do you draw the line between a novel and a collection of inter-connected short stories? Wherever it is, Universality is certainly straddling it. It does, I suppose, form a cohesive narrative across its chapters, but with each one written from different characters’ perspectives and indeed formal styles. I do enjoy the shifting sands on which it’s written, even if I’m less convinced by its conclusion. But I enjoy the ambiguity of it.
Once again, I enter the fine dining stylings of BA’s premium economy offering. I’m not going to do the same conceit as last time. Sparkling wine to start, many other alcoholic drinks as we go. A perfectly acceptable ricotta mezzaluna dish, with a perfectly acceptable salad to start, and an actually quite nice passionfruit panna cotta for dessert which really does feel like you’re eating a tropical Solero. A chicken pastry thing for a pre-landing snack which does the job. It’s just nice to have actual cutlery, to be honest.
An odd one, but the platonic ideal of a plane movie. Didn’t make as much of the admittedly batshit conceit of having Robbie Williams played by a CGI monkey, other than an on-the-nose joke about it every half an hour or so. The chronology bothered me, an admittedly not Robbie Williams superfan (Rock DJ coming up as a musical number in the Take That era? Come on now). Loses a star for not having CGI monkey Robbie Williams go to a UFO convention with Jon Ronson.
Oh boy. I think if I watched it again, it could easily go up two stars. But for now, this is maybe a bridge too far away from cohesion for me.
Second time seeing this, second time in the Watershed. Quite possibly his non-Twin Peaks peak (sorry, no, really, sorry), the perfect level of bleakness and levity and sense and nonsense. Silencio.
Still watching
A nice opportunity to catch up with Zac at St Nick’s market on a Friday lunchtime. With all the available options, we’re feeling a big box of meat. Low And Slow it is, once we’ve snaked through the always impressive queue. I have my classic order - the pork pitmaster fries, loaded with pulled pork, cheese (early in the process such that it is not a topping and suitably starts to melt under the heat and weight of everything else), pickles, crispy onions, and a dual drizzling of the house barbecue sauce and their pickleback mayo. There’s even a superfluous chopped herb smattering just to make sure you’re feeling at least something green has entered your system in the process. It’s delicious and too much and at least three days’s worth of your recommended sodium intake, but it hits the spot.
Frankie’s, once a brief pop-up in Kask Kitchen last year, is now semi-permanently established in the space, running two weeks of every month (with the other two being reserved for other pop-ups and events). This is music to my chicken-and-waffle loving ears, having been to that initial pop-up and been salivating over the prospect of ever having it again ever since. This is a trip long in the planning with Tom, trying to co-ordinate our availability with Frankie’s itself, but here we finally are. It is sheer indulgence in comfort food form, filling a gap that genuinely I don’t think anywhere in Bristol is doing right now. The menu is straightforward - four variants on chicken and waffles, and a few sides. In this instance, Tom and I are not looking for variety, and go for the maple syrup variant each. No regrets: a smooth, uncrystalline waffle topped with three generous pieces of fried chicken, the meat juicy and tender but maintaining its coating perfectly. A rich maple syrup is cut through with chilli jam and a heavenly bacon butter that implores you to spread it evenly such that every bite has some, but yet also to concentrate it on a single bite such that you might fully experience its depth of flavour. We completely needlessly pair this with the frickles and the parm million layer potato, drenched in marinara sauce, pesto, and parmesan - needless but necessary nonetheless. For dessert, the zeppole, fluffy Italian donuts served with, in our case, one portion of strawberries, raspberries, whipped cream, and Italian meringue, and one portion of whipped marscapone, coffee syrup, and caramel, making a glorious tiramisu-esque concoction. My body absolutely crashed about 90 minutes later, but it was so worth it.
We’ve been on something of a kick on the Lonely Islands-associated stuff. This doesn’t hit the heights or have the consistency of Seven Days In Hell, but there’s enough fun moments throughout to keep it fun.
A film designed to be watched accidentally on Film4 at two in the afternoon on a bank holiday with frequent commercial interruptions. But we watched it deliberately on Plex with no ads at all. And, you know what, it actually is quite a lot of fun.
Still watching
A film in which, within the first five minutes, my secondary school is lauded as a bastion of academic excellence and my university is derided as barely worthy of Oxbridge’s castoffs. But oh how brilliant.
David Lynch season at the Watershed, having just finished a rewatch of Twin Peaks S1 & S2 (and Alasdair’s first watch through). The underlying horror of the series dialled up to 11, with very little in the way of comic relief (minus David Bowie’s brief Louisiana accent). I realise now in retrospect that I should have watched this before The Return, but here we are.
The sad moment of realisation that the reason I enjoy this is it’s a platonic ideal of what I want engineering management to be.
Too much seeing them now, not enough don’t.
It is a bank holiday weekend - no, better, the Easter bank holiday weekend, an extra day on top of it all - and Alasdair has had a very important week of having a major job interview, and that is something to be celebrated and rewarded. And what better celebration and reward than good food? We’ve yet to pay a visit to Pasta Ripiena this year, and their lunch deal is insanely cheap for what you’re getting. Three courses, £26, let’s do this. Alasdair has his own specially prepared vegan menu, and I am slumming it with the normies. A beef crudo bruschetta sets the tone, beautifully seasoned with a hint of horseradish, the parmesan shavings doubling down on the umami rather than trying to counteract it. For my main, a casoncelli of venison with a peppercorn sauce, with some dried and pickled porcini mushrooms setting it off nicely. I barely have the self-discipline to wait for the inevitable slice of focaccia being offered up for sauce mopping, but I try. For dessert, a mint panna cotta with confit of rhubarb - elegant and simple, necessary after all of the above. And then, for some reason, an espresso martini on Good Friday - it’s what he would have wanted.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Bristol Museum, and I’ve never in all my time in Bristol actually made it to the yearly Wildlife Photographer Of The Year exhibition. It’s nice to have Alasdair prodding me to do so. The hypocrites will not allow photographs to be taking in the exhibition, so I have no records of what I particularly enjoyed, but the overall quality is immensely impressive. The birds are typically the cutest, the bugs typically the creepiest if most detailed. Genuinely very impressed by the junior categories, absolutely fair play. I do wonder what the advent of widespread AI usage is going to mean for a competition like this, but that is beyond the remit of this not-quite-blog-whatever-it-is.
Still watching
Celebrating Alasdair being a grown up and having a job interview, we go for a drink at our new favourite bar, Spirited. Despite the predominance of whiskey, our choice of tipple is their espresso martini, which is one of the best in Bristol. It doesn’t quite match Fauzy’s, but you’d be a fool to set that as your aim. It’s a cosy little spot, and a delight to have just down the road.
Watched as a palate cleanser after Blue Velvet - undiluted Lynchian nonsense in the most fun way.
The first in a series of David Lynch films at the Watershed. They’re all so young it’s like watching Muppet Babies. A masterclass in having to just roll with the dream logic of it all.
We have an embarrassingly small budget for a team meal at work, but the beauty of being a manager is that we’re double counted - I get to take my team out for a meal, and in turn I get to be taken out by my manager for a meal. The system works. So the CDI leadership team heads out to the pub that is a four minute walk from the office, to sample the £12.79 lunch set menu. It is exactly what you could expect. It’s fine. It’s fried. It absolutely goes through me. Beer battered mushrooms to start; beer battered halloumi to follow; and a thankfully un-beer-battered apple pie with custard for dessert. It’s all adequate, but it’s a nice catch-up with everyone, and it was a couple of hours not at my desk. That’s a win for a Tuesday.
I’d forgotten literally everything about this, and it’s an absolute delight from start to finish. Occasionally dips into the sadly prevalent American thing of “let’s not bother writing this, let’s just improv”, but obviously with a lot of the musical elements, it has to be quite tightly written for the most part. As with Seven Days In Hell and Tour De Pharmacy, I don’t inherently care for “fun celebrity cameos!” but the sheer number and quality of them is overwhelming, so crack on.
Still watching
Still watching
Making the most of being near London, as I do, I’m able to fit in a quick lunch with Andy before my train back to Bristol. With the constraints of “being done by 2.30” and “next to either Kings Cross or Paddington”, Andy goes on the hunt and finds us Hoppers, which he’s been to once before. It’s a flying visit, so I don’t get to fully sample the menu, but dive straight in with a black pork curry and a titular egg hopper. They are not particularly up front about the spice level, and that’s not a problem per se, but oh boy did it hit me when I wasn’t expecting it. Lovely! But unexpected. The pork was beautifull tender, and the curry itself still flavourful betwixt the heat. A thicker curry than is maybe scoopable by a light pancake, but that’s my problem I suppose, at the end of the day. We have enough time, amidst an always lovely catch up, to have a Watalappam pudding, a caramel-y, coconut-y, bread-and-butter pudding-y concoction, with a candied nut and coconut cream.
Whilst briefly back in Harpenden, Mum and Dad suggest breakfast out in town, so why not. We go to their new favourite caff, where it is evident they are regulars from the welcome they receive. I am not overly hungry, so I have a toasted tea cake, which to be fair is very good, the right amount of fruit, lots of butter and jam. It’s not quite a greasy spoon, but it’s also not posh, which is a nice change in Harpenden.
Somehow, despite having just done a full tasting menu, Milly and I could do with something… chocolate-y. Luckily, we know Italian Bear is open late and is literally just around the corner. I am not as foolhardy as I was the first time I came a few years ago, so do not order both a hot chocolate and a dessert. Instead, I go for the pancakes, three of them, each with their own milk, dark, and white chocolate drizzle, topped with whipped cream and strawberries. They are - inevitably - sweet, bordering on the sickly. This is not a bad thing, but I have a high tolerance; others might not be so lucky. It could do with a little more lubrication, a certain clagginess of the combination of a scotch pancake and melted chocolate, but still. Small complaints. It is delicious, and just hitting the spot.
One of my favourite London secrets is Carousel, a wine bar nestled away on Charlotte Street which upstairs is its own thing, but downstairs acts as the host for weekly guest chef residencies from across the world. It’s a favourite of Milly’s and mine, and an ideal fallback for when we can’t think of anywhere else we’d like to go when catching up. This time: Andy and Tiff from The Catbird Seat, a 20-course tasting menu gaff in Nashville, TN, presenting a cut-down version of their menu with a mere 7 courses. It’s phenomenal from the off, with a selection of snacks including a walnut cookie (that looks like a walnut!) filled with chicken liver paté and a blackcurrent jam that from the first bite tells you what you’re getting tonight: in good ol’ US of A fashion, this meal is going to be in your face. There is no room for subtlety here, you are getting big, bold, punchy flavours. But what saves this from getting tired is that there is variety in just how each course is punching you. The smokiness of the bacalaito, the wonderfully dense salt cod fritters; the citrus of the blood orange granita topping the oysters; the hot sauce cutting through the foie gras and cheese tart; the umami of the pork loin balanced by the richness of the whey sauce and roe; the creaminess but lightness of the Pimms and rhubarb sorbet. The treat of Carousel is that it’s all being plated in front of you at a giant kitchen island, and that Andy and Tiff are coming around and having a chat with you. They are genuinely interested in how you are finding it and happy to talk about what’s going on behind the scenes. Throw in a wine pairing for me and some soft drinks for a recuperating Milly, and this is the ideal backdrop for a good old catch up - and hopefully for many more in the future.
My friend Mahoney introduced me to Man/Woman/Chainsaw with the statement/question of “I can’t tell whether they’re actually good or not?” before inviting me to go see them at Rough Trade last year. I understand the confusion - they are every young Windmill scene with overwrought vocals and a violin player, abominably young, and with the rich scent of privilege behind them. But they are very good indeed. I massively got into their EP after that gig, and have been very excited to see them again since. So I find myself coming to London for the occasion. Put it this way - this gig made me genuinely wonder whether it’s even worth going to shows any more, because I fundamentally hate modern gigging. The screeching teenage girls, the middle aged men trying to film the whole show from the front row, the kids trying to mosh to music that should not and indeed cannot be moshed to, the constant talking - it’s all awful. So that this gig is still an early highlight of the year says something. They play with such intensity and cohesion on stage, it’s quite something to behold. I hope that for their debut album they can afford the production values that songs like Grow A Tongue In Time and EZPZ deserved but didn’t quite receive on the EP. They lack, on record, a heft and an atmosphere that elevate them live. Get Up And Dance, a currently unreleased song, could be huge if done right, as could they as a whole. I can’t wait to be moaning about paying 40 quid to see them at SWX in five years time. First support act Expiry are fine if unremarkable, but Dog Race are a deceptive sight to behold. The lead singer’s voice and performance are not what you’d expect of her, but it’s quite arresting.
Dad, for some reason, suggests grabbing a pizza when I get back from Bristol because, and I quote, “Mum will be out doing ballet” and that is reason enough. Zio’s is a comparatively new (by Harpenden standards) pizza place on the corner of Station Road, and I recall having had it as a takeaway some time ago when returning home. We dine in, with a beer and a pizza, nothing fancy. I have a pizza with buffalo mozeralla, which is certainly well-apportioned, toppings-wise, but to the shame of its structual integrity. The problem with adding buffalo mozerella is that it doesn’t melt at the same rate and therefore adds moisture and unevenly distributed heft. The dough itself (in the Neapolitan style) is a bit yeasty, a bit bland. It’s not a bad pizza, by any means (is there any such thing?), but I’ve had more fulfilling ones.
Oddly without viewpoint (I mean, other than “man shooting other man is bad”) or motivation.
A bafflingly low production value documentary that somehow seems to have taken pride of place in the Netflix algorithm. It’s not uninteresting, and I suppose it is to the film’s credit that it doesn’t drag the narrative out beyond stretching point. And, you know what, sure, why not, I’m happy believing that’s a real portrait of Shakespeare, screw it. Just, yeah. How did it achieve such prominence?
Still watching
Last watched, as I recall correctly, on the tail end of a bad cold quite late at night at the Showcase a couple of days before the end of my last proper term of uni, 9 years ago. It holds up, even accounting for the deep pang of nostalgia for my peak months. The push and pull of what’s actually going on is played beautifully, the casting is bang on, and even if the tension is not necessarily the same on the sofa as it is on the big screen, it’s still formidable.
I saw the film adaptation of The Front Runner a few years ago when it came out, and thought it was fine if a pretty by the numbers political drama. Interesting to see now that the source text is actually a lot less… that. Rather than a direct telling of the final days of Gary Hart’s campaign, it’s a much more discursive work around the role of the media in politics, to what standards we hold our politicians, and what we all hath wrought as a result of letting this specific example happen.
The day after the work social, we have our own little Thunderball team meal - the sun is out, the skies are blue, it is all together too warm. We originally intend on going to Squeezed, as is the consensus amongst the group, but that is unexpectedly closed. We pivot, as all good agile scrum teams do in the face of adversity, to Salt & Malt for some classic Friday fish and chips. The 7 person order is complex and inevitably takes a couple of corrections to get everything right, but in the end we are sat by the harbour and all enjoying ourselves. A large cod and chips for me, with some tartare sauce and some mayo, and it’s just a lovely time. I feel like I’ve had better chips from them before, but no complaints. We head off for a stroll and an ice cream, in the knowledge that work is paying in both time and money. Cheers, HCOCTO.
It is time for our long-awaited first big work social of 2025, and it is to Flight Club we return for the first time in a few years. I remember it as being really good fun last time (the origin story of the baby guinness becoming the HPE house drink), and it is moreso than I recall. Admittedly, by the time the food comes out, I have already knocked back a glass of white and two salted caramel espresso martinis, so, you know, factor that into my judgement. The food is not quite a matter of quantity over quality, but my god there is a lot of the former. It just keeps coming out! Platter after platter of bruschetta, and falafel & hummus, and pork belly, and cauliflower tempura. Then the pizzas! All of which are fine, even according to my correctly snobbish Italian team mate. The desserts of macarons and brownies are a tad underwhelming, but none of us are particularly mindful at this point. I move onto the water quite early, as it is still a Thursday, but even before my second drink I committed a semi-major faux pas, so here we are. Would it be a work social without that?
Still watching
This was fine! Things happened, the occasional competent joke was made, the music was good enough!
God I cannot wait to be back up at the Fringe again. This is a lot of fun - it captures well a lot of the ups and downs of the Fringe, and the five comics that Laws follows here span a range of familiarity for me, from “never heard of” to “have been drinking with until 2 in the morning”, so it’s lovely to see a bit more of that.
More to the point - just, go to the Fringe. Go to the Fringe and see five shows a day and give generously to the Free Fringe buckets and find just how much is out there that you didn’t know existed. It is the best thing i the world.
Also, of course my friend Morgan turns up for one scene and manages in that time to get his shirt off. Fair play to the lad.
Still watching
Ok, but why?
I have successfully project managed getting us in and out of the IKEA storefront getting the things we went in for, and very little extra, in under 45 minutes, with minimal scope creep. This is rewarded by getting lunch pretty much the moment the IKEA café switches away from breakfast. What else could I have but the meatballs, complete with mash, gravy, peas, and lingonberry jam. Plus, y’know, some garlic bread. And some Daim cake. And some whipped cream. That all comes in under a tenner and is all actually quite good. I feel nostalgic for my one holiday to Stockholm having the real deal of the meatballs, and for the Mallorcan holidays where Daim cake was in ready supply, and isn’t that the sign of good food? Just ask Proust.
I swear I will be going to other gigs this year that are not the band Divorce. A quite last minute waitlist ticket from DICE means I’m going into this with a spring in my step, which is quickly unsprung by the crowd around me, most noticeably the guy who insistently filmed 2 minutes of every song, which… I’m not the guy who complains about how you should “put your phone away and live in the moment”, I take a few photos here and there, but this guy was whip-panning around the stage like he was Damien Chazelle, right in my eyeline the whole time. I genuinely had to move for the encore. This should nominally be about the gig itself, so let’s move on - they’re really great musicians, who are playing very well in sync, and clearly having fun with it. The whole of the new album, plus a few others, which means all the quiet bits are also nicely represented, harmonies and all. A big response to Checking Out as the final song of the encore, and the roof could have been taken off. DUG are exactly what they appear to be as a support act, leaning much more country, but are remarkably personable and I’d happily go see them again in the future.
Look. Listen. I have no problem with vegan food. I order it, I eat it, I even cook it. But this was… disappointing. Nestled away on East Street and picked to meet our friend Jenny and honorary nephew Coby over lunch, VX is a proudly vegan café with vegan fast food. I went for the breakfast burrito, which nominally had some sausage in it, but I barely reached the point it was buried in there because the beans and the cheese was so offputting that I was really pushing through. The chips were oddly seasoned and the mayo - which, given we have pretty much nailed vegan mayo as a species at this point, shouldn’t have been the problem - was adding a weird tinge to the whole thing. Stick to Oowee Vegan for your vegan fast food needs; I know I will.
I try not to eat just before doing a gig, and as such am always thrilled when a) a venue does food and b) I am on early enough that the kitchen hasn’t closed by the time I’m off. Both conditions are satisfied at The Greenbank, getting to gig with Alasdair and Jordan Brookes. I go for a classic margherita pizza, and it is fine. The cheese is more elastic than flavourful, and it’s still a bit molten, but I enjoy it in the post-gig buzz regardless.
Consistently funny throughout, but I forgot we only lasted one film in the LEGO Movie franchise before the stop motion realism was dropped.
Still reading
It’s our second anniversary! We choose to celebrate at Bulrush, a long favourite of mine and a new experience for Alasdair, and I think the first time we’ve gone together to a Michelin starred restaurant in Bristol. It is a pure delight from the off. As with all good elevated dining, there are the most complicated snacks you’ve ever seen in your life, and when the first thing you eat is a savoury carrot XO donut, I mean my god. An eight course tasting menu, spanning asparagus, plaice, and a beautiful scallop. The “main” course, as it were, is one of my favourite things you get at places like Bulrush - one key ingredient prepared five or six different ways. In this case, venison, done as steak, sausage, tartare, and more. Served with a black pudding danish no less! I overindulge and go for the optional cheese course, served with a PX-infused date chutney and some honeycomb, and by the penultimate bite of my petit fours madeline, I am stuffed. The non-alcoholic drinks pairing is a treat alongside this, with highlights being the rosé cordial and the non-alcoholic espresso martini, which Alasdair describes as being effectively a Michelin star milkshake. As if that’s a bad thing. An absolute treat.
A hectic Saturday morning in town and I am absolutely knackered, and I think in the moment that the answer is food. The harbourisde market is in full force (if slightly relocated due to the renovations on the fountains) and I capitulate to Gurt Wings. I eschew my usual (loaded tater tots) for just some chicken tenders, which are much bigger than I anticipate. I am defeated easily and early. They’re fine, but it’s all too much.
The dog was a very good boy, yes he was, yes he was.
An infuriating watch, mostly by design -
Eating at OPPO for the first time this year. I don’t care to get into the argument whether Detroit pizza is really pizza - at the end of the day, it’s dough and it’s cheese and it’s some kind of sauce, and why can’t we all just get along? I do like the Barrelhouse’s magic mushroom one, which has no tomato and is suitably doused in balasamic glaze, which I pair with a slice of the classic pepperoni, with a garlic and dill mayo. I do miss when they used to have the Tuesday deal, not least with the inconsistent but always appreciated act discount, but we move.
A lot of time for this - quietly understated, and Ronan is as good as ever. Love the hair colour as chronology device, whilst still leaving a decent amount of ambiguity up to interpretation.
One of those annoying instances where the hype is absolutely correct. Four breathless hours of television, each with their own highlights, but I think the common consensus of episodes 2 and 3 being the stand outs holds up. Obviously it’s all subjective, and I would never claim that you couldn’t dislike Adolescence on its own terms, but I think it’s telling that a lot of the criticism comes from a place that the show itself is trying to depict - the idea that all this stuff is out there in the manosphere, that teenage kids are consuming it, and that you - someone older, an adult, a parent - might not even know it, that we’ve stumbled unaware into the abyss. Incredible performances all around, not least from Owen Cooper in the lead as his debut role. The final episode, arguably a coda of aftermath, is somewhat anticlimactic, but even in that performs as a moment of reflection, a depiction of life going on.
Does not feel its runtime (a compliment!). It’s a whole load of stuff thrown at the screen and a good amount of it sticks.
One of the word of mouth hits of last year’s Fringe that I didn’t get to see (but did have as a compere when I was performing at ACMS) now on tour. All the accolades and comparisons thrown at Kent-Walters in reviews from the Fringe are well-deserved and correct - the Vic and Bob influence, the menacing fun, it’s all there. It’s a character act that more than sustains itself across an hour, through a good use of variety (audience interaction, musical numbers, character acts within a character act) and a full committment to the back story. Kent-Walters is a generous performer, figuring out a way to tread the line of being a menacing character but keeping the audience at ease. And it’s just fun! The second half was a pub quiz, presented as a preview for his next show, which I’ll be going to see in Edinburgh, but we’ll see how well that survives. If it does, we’re in for a treat.
I am having a stressful time at work and Alasdair spots the Instagram story from Tess that there’s Friday evening availability. What a lovely way to end the week at my favourite restaurant in Bristol, maybe the world (and, I suppose I should add, my favourite person). It’s the kitchen table menu, of course it is. One of the many things I love about BOX-E is, having been an uncountable number of times, getting to taste the subtle differences that Elliot applies to his favourite bases. It wouldn’t be BOX-E without some hake, but seeing exactly how he’s done it this time (berlotti beans, salsa verde, and a lovely bit of pickled fennel) is the treat. I indulge in the wine pairings (it’s Friday after all) and it is a wonderful evening of de-stressing.
Our friend Hugh, bored in the absence of Emily being in Andover, texts to see if we fancy the pub. We do! But, dilemma - we have been napping, rather than making dinner. So to Hen & Chicken we go, where we will be able to both go to the pub and eat some food. I go for what I had at Christmas, the parpadelle with venison ragu, and it is once again quite nice. I also go for the brownie, which is very “gastropub brownie”, for better or worse. In other words, I am reminded that I can do better myself, but the price I pay for not having to do so is this.
We kick off 2025 in gigs quite late in the year! I first caught Divorce supporting Everything Everything last year, and was quietly captivated. They are back now with their debut album and here are a few songs from it, supposedly stripped down but it’s the whole band with all their real instruments - not even a reduced drum kit in sight! All My Freaks is the energy highlight of the thing, but it’s all good fun. A quick chat in the signing and I’m off home at a reasonable hour - god loves an in-store.
Still watching
Rewatched for the first time in quite a while - still a big fan of a lot of it, even if maybe not as enamoured as back in 2014.
Hmm. Was hoping for more, but fun in its own way.
Rewatched at the Watershed post its big win, with Alasdair. I think the way it bifurcates is beautifully done and adds a remarkable amount of heft to the final scene. Ruined by George Ferguson’s wife sat next to me talking all the way through it.
We bravely set out as early as possible on a Saturday morning (around 11am) to Stokes Croft so I can buy myself a new guitar - suffice to say, this is not a common occurence. But if we’re going up all that way, we might as well make a morning of it and get breakfast somewhere. There are many options, but we are gamblers and decide to see what happens if we chance our arm at The Crafty Egg, known for its interminable brunch queues. Luckily, as we are just two of us, we skip past the large (and now pissed off) large group of presumed students who have been clearly waiting some time. I am going hard today - straight into a massive chocolate milkshake and a “Meaty Poutine”. They do, bless them, try to garnish it with a few chives and miscellaneous green stems, but that’s very much trying to make the essay longer by changing the margins. Sausage, bacon, cheese, fried eggs, and a homemade brown sauce get thrown together into a skillet with some roast potatoes, with a side dish of just gravy. It’s all a lot, and I do not finish because I can feel my arteries close in on themselves. The potatoes aren’t quite cooked enough, which makes it a bit tough to get through, but the condiments of the sauce and the gravy are wonderful.
Watched at the end of a very long, stressful week, and felt all the better for it.
Once again, they’ve deigned to give us some money to take the interns out for a social event, and minigolf seems like a good choice. We go to Treetop Golf in Cabot, all blaring music and neon lights and laboured puns. There’s two courses, we do both, it’s exactly as fun as you think minigolf is going to be, no more, no less. The food is fine. I score a free game on the ball return thing, so fair play, they’ve locked me in to going back at some point.
Kind of dramatically inert for a lot of it, as you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. It doesn’t, not really, but maybe?
A last minute cancellation of OPPO means 1) Alasdair and I have a new spare evening, 2) we need something to eat because we would have eaten at The Barrelhouse, and 3) I’m on the wrong bus. All of this can be remedied, though, by going to Lucky Strike! Clever us. Lucky Strike was, if I recall correctly, originally a cocktail bar which then did a joint pop-up with the folks from Tomo No Ramen - a good start. At some point earlier this year, that collaboration ended (amicably, by all accounts) but they continued serving ramen. It seems an identical menu to when we went under the Tomo regime. Who am I to argue. This time, though, I go for the chicken katsu and fair play they’re nailing it. The sauce is the perfect thickness and spiciness, the breading on the chicken falls off in just the right way. A bit overloaded on the pickles, but that’s by the by. I’m a tad less impressed by the chocolate mousse for dessert, served with a blood organge compote and sesame tuile, but I have very high standards for that. A perfectly pleasant change in plans.
Still watching
Won me over eventually, at the point at which I just decided to stop caring to try to track every bit of detail and just let it wash over me instead.
An enjoyable read, if more deeply than superficially - the premise is fun (the protagonist finds an unidentified blob in the garbage behind a bar, takes it home, and semi-inadvertently turns it into the perfect boyfriend, or is he etc. etc.) and it’s used to make some interesting points, but there’s some often clunky prose and dialogue and it’s sometimes hard to find what sets this apart from anything else. Maybe more a novella?
Still reading
Ooh boy it’s bleak out there. Ten Men is a memoir of a year of casual dating by Kitty Ruskin in which we quickly come to realise - or, rather, remember - that there’s a lot of shit men out there. It’s hard not to feel this is to some degree a form of misery porn by the fifth or sixth man whom Ruskin takes home only to endure at best unfulfilling sex, at worst awful sexual assault or rape. That’s not to criticise Ruskin in any shape or form. You have to hope for all of our sakes’ that the answer cannot be to simply stop trusting or trying, but equally it’s understandable why an increasing number of women (and, indeed, men) do just that. She deserves to be able to believe that not every man is like that. It sounds like, from the conclusion, that this is more happily the case now - a relief, for sure. As with a lot of books around this (see also: Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates), there is a grimness you are forcing yourself to endure by reading it, and at this point none of it should be new to you, but that shouldn’t be a reason to turn away. Read it, feel it, do something about it.
I have had a varying relationship with Six By Nico over the last seven years. Back in Edinburgh in 2018, in only its second outpost (before it had lowered itself below Hadrian’s Wall), I was enthralled. The concept was simple - a themed six course tasting menu, changing every six weeks. And for a mere £28! I mused that if they’d open one in Bristol, I would probably go every six weeks just to check out each theme. Well, many, many other outposts later, they have finally reached Bristol. In the meantime, I have been a few times in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and London, and the Grace Dent review for The Guardian (“the Pizza Express of fine dining”) lives rent free in my head. I now treat it as an experience rather than a meal. Inevitably, for the Bristol opening, they are doing The Chippie, which I have now had simply too many times, because it’s their go-to when opening a new one or they’ve just run out of ideas. It’s interesting that it has changed subtly over the years, but not by much. It’s, yes, very much the Fisher Price version of haute cuisine - you cannot move for espumas and foams and gels. It’s, as a result, fine. The food prep exists on a conveyor belt in a way that is trying to ape the precision and reproducibility of Michelin star cooking but ends up closer to a McDonald’s assembly line. They’re not convincingly on top of Alasdair being vegan with the snacks, which is concerning to begin with but settles once the first courses come out. The thing is this - I don’t know how well Six By Nico can survive Bristol. The price is no longer £28, it’s £44. They’re now much bigger on the up-selling, with more snacks, add-ons, optional courses, cocktail pairings, etc. If I add in the cheese course for £9, that gets you to seven courses for £53. For 2 pounds more, I can go to BOX-E, arguably one of the best restaurants in Bristol, and have the same courses but immeasurably better, more interesting, and made with love and personal care. The same is true for any number of other places. All in, with the snacks, extra course, and the cocktail pairing (fair play, surprisingly strong), you’re knocking over a hundred quid. Will I be back at Six By Nico? Sure, why not. The mood might strike some time. But 24 year old Sam’s vision of collecting every theme like they’re Pokemon feels a very long time ago indeed.
Inevitably remarkably one-sided, but a perfectly serviceable mid-budget drama.
Really liked this for the majority of its runtime until the epilogue which really rather soured me on the whole thing. Unlike the rest of it, it was showy for showiness’s sake, and completely self indulgent, which you’d almost be able to get away with if it wasn’t after 3 hours of the rest of the film.
One of the places where I absolutely know my go-to order and I have no intention of changing it. A trip to the pub with Matt whilst Alasdair is away to catch up on our respective work troubles, whilst we enjoy admittedly over-priced 2/3rds (or, I do, as Matt is driving) and for me, the loaded chicken fries with gravy. The things are drowning in it, and I love it. The chips are sufficiently crisp by themselves that they are not overly soggy-ed by the gravy; they are generous with the chicken, meaning a plentiful ratio; the gravy is hot enough to melt the cheese; and the spring onions on top genuinely do add a little something, a crunch, rather than just being garnish. Long may this continue.
You know what, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It’s fun to look at, but it’s all empty calories.
Still watching
Solidly good fun, moreso when it’s just enjoying the premise rather than getting bogged down in the details.
Still watching
Suffers a little from “The Zone Of Interest syndrome” - it feels like a lot of the rapturous reviews (and just look at the distribution of ratings on Letterboxd) are conflating being good and being important. It is at least more narratively compelling than Zone, but come on, this is not the 100th best film ever made just because it deals with a historic atrocity.
Still watching
Sue me, I like Sorkinesque harried backstage “before the big show” drama
Having absolutely no particular interest in the veracity of this as a representation of Bob Dylan’s life story, I enjoyed this. It left me wanting to actually go and listen to his music, so that’s a win, and Chalamet is typically strong. Elle Fanning takes the cake, though.
Not as bad as everyone else says - if you think this is the worst film you’ve ever seen, you need to watch more films. But! That doesn’t mean it’s good! Or should be nominated for Best Picture! Quite the surprise to me that the least explicable musical moment in a film where a song about gender reaffirming surgery is performed in a Bangkok clinic with the lyrics “from penis to vagina” is that, at one point, a swing version of Supreme by Robbie Williams features heavily.
A celebratory sending off breakfast for Clo as she embarks on her indefinite travels around South America and wherever else she finds herself. I tell myself on the way in that I’m not having anything big. This is a lie - I end up with the full English. It’s actually quite a good one, in the pecking order of things. Black pudding is present; tomatoes are not. The bacon is proper streaky bacon stuff; the sausages are actually meaty. I could have done with a few more beans, but the hash browns are top notch. It’s a good, solid breakfast, and there’s nowt wrong with that.
Clo is throwing it all in to go travelling indefinitely, and for some reason she is very keen for me to make it to her leaving drinks with her friends. I return from the theatre in London at a reasonable enough hour (thank you Elektra for being a one-act-er) to pop in at least for a bit. I am not drunk enough to stay for long, but too tired to get drunk enough to stay longer, so I order me, Clo, and some of her friends who are near the bar at the time a mix of baby guinnesses (me) and tequila (Clo). I vaguely dance for a bit, and then make my leave. Clo’s friends are all thrilled to meet me and have apparently heard so much about me, which is genuinely touching. It is nice to meet them too.
Hrmm. I do enjoy this, for the most part. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in there, the use of dangling microphones and FX pedals adding effectively annotations to the text, the half-singing/chanting nature of Brie Larson’s delivery, the rotating stage design. I don’t, though, think it necessarily exceeds the sum of its parts, nor are those ideas necessarily well linked to what the play is trying to say. Not well versed in the play, at times I am just having to vibe out whatever’s happening and hope it will all make sense in the end. It’s a staging that is trying very hard to hit you on a gut level, and it does manage that in a way. Brie Larson is excellent, as is Stockard Channing, duh. I can imagine that, were this a two act play, the audience return rate would be interesting to watch. I think, in the end, I enjoyed it as an experience, but not quite as a play.
As someone who actively avoids looking in a mirror if they can help it, this.. this was a difficult watch at times. Profoundly affecting, and a real measure of Lynch’s ability for self-restraint.
It’s fun, in retrospect, watching the three of Coogan, Bryson, and Winterbottom figure out what would become the cornerstone of The Trip in realtime.
(Absolutely no recollection of having watched this for a second time in like the third week of uni, according to Letterboxd)
An acutely observed coming-of-age novel, of the first time you fall - in love? in something with another boy, wanting to be with them, be them, destroy them, the conflation and confusion of love and jealousy, the vying for attention and approval of them and others. This, doubled up with being the headmaster’s son, its own use case of seeding a need for rebellion, the mix of wanting but not wanting that affirmation. Oh the turmoil of it all! Amherst does this so well, an impressive debut indeed.
Considering I am in Zara’s on average four times a week getting a hot chocolate to take home with me, I very rarely stop in. But Ruth is around and we’ve got time to get coffee before it’s time for her to head back to Manchester, and I can sneak this in in a work morning. I have my standard, a dark mint hot chocolate (complete with marshmallow, obvs), in a beautiful ceramic mug that you just don’t get the benefit of when taking it to go. We have a good catch up over the state of work, and part ways knowing that she’ll have to come back next time she’s in Bristol, and that I’ll have to come back tomorrow.
My friend Ruth is briefly back in Bristol and is taken with exploring North Street more now I’m down here, so Alasdair and I invite her out to Cor for the evening. Alasdair spots the person who hired him for his communications job in healthcare working as a waitress, and so the tone for the evening is set. As Cor has a strong vegan menu, and as it’s a small plates/tapas place, it’s up to Ruth and I to share. I guide us through some Cor classics (the lemon cannelini beans with caviar, the potatoes with café Paris butter) and try some new options (the crisp celeriac with polenta mash, a stunning savoury goats cheese canele), before being too full to really eat much beyond the dark chocolate truffles for dessert. Lovely to have such a place a 2 minute walk from the house.
Suitably interesting, if mostly for the guided but light touch questioning that prompts the direct narration from John himself. I love how much he loves new acts, to be fair. A really interesting moment where he takes against, instinctively, an artist self-describing as “queer”, and watching David Furnish explain it is, hmm. Yeah. Fascinating.
Broadly readable for the most part, but with a real tail-off towards the end. Never fully convincing from the off, though - perhaps a problem with being involved in the stand up industry, the set-up, characters, and overarching narrative don’t really ring true. Yes, there are terrible men in stand up (and, to be honest, a brief moment where I wondered whether one of the characters was an avatar for a specific one I know), but this reads too closely to a fanfic of what it must be like from the outside. There’s an amount of fiction-as-wish-fulfillment in it, every character too broadly drawn and every plot contrivance too perfect. I’m no one to suggst that Raeside isn’t allowed that for herself, but it doesn’t make it interesting. A shame.
We’re doing the Watershed’s seasonal Valentine’s Day pub quiz tonight, so I’m here a little early to grab a quick bite to eat. I am not feeling a burger, I have been metaphorically burnt by the fish and chips too often, and I’m more hungry than just some chips. I try, for the first time, the penne puttanesca here, which is perfectly adequate. I do think it’s obscene to charge £1.90 for cheese as an add-on, though. I do really like the Watershed - I used to describe it as my favourite place in Bristol - and the food is normally anywhere from good to slightly better than good, and I’m aware that’s damning with faint praise but here we are.
I must confessed I missed the apparent virality of The Feminist, the opening short story in Tony Tulathimutte’s debut collection, but I can’t say it surprises me in hindsight. It fits in that Cat Person vein, something that allows everyone to confront the horrors of straight white men online whilst patting themselves on the back for being better than them. It’s interesting, then, how Tulathimutte uses that as a seed for the remaining stories, each building on that in some way thematically and narratively to implicate all of us in the same base, repulsive instincts. There’s some formal experimentation, which is fun, and one story (no spoilers) has such a beautiful example of a narrative trick that I genuinely laughed out loud on a train at the gumption of it all. Very excited for more.
It’s always a question, isn’t it, as to how well stage adaptations of TV shows can be. I came into Stage/Fright with a tendency towards the benefit of the doubt for Shearsmith and Pemberton - Inside No 9 is the kind of ceaselessly inventive show that implies a lack of being beholden to a singular idea of “what it should be”, the death knell of any attempt at adaptation. Beyond a macabre and slightly tricksy script, the audience in Wyndham’s would have expected very little. The opening scene, with Shearsmith mercilessly killing every annoying member of a theatre audience around him in a set of auditorium seats mirroring ours, was a happy early convincer that I was in good hands. For the rest of the show, there’s a slight over-reliance on fan service in the form of pretty much just staging Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room (a fine episode, but a touch overrated in my humble opinion, or at least the fandom bangs on about it more than they need to), but then sometimes that’s transformative, as in the precursor to A Quiet Night In, with a new guest star each night (for us: Sarah Hadland, barely able to get through it without corpsing). The second half is more cohesive (albeit with another of their oddly prevalent instances of non-consensual touching) and plays nicely with a lot of tropes of film and stage. It feels like there could have been more done with the setting, and maybe it’s just high expectations of two writers who are well-minded to that kind of thing (consider the live episode, or 3x3), but while it wasn’t inherently lacking, there’s the gnaw of not quite living up to potential.
In an effort to avoid the rain and to kill time between dinner and a show, the nearest thing to the theatre is Ole & Steen. I have a peppermint tea because sometimes I don’t have a hot chocolate, and a chocolate mousse-y cake-y thing, which to be fair is quite nice, if way too rich (admittedly after a quite rich dinner, so maybe that’s on me).
On the gold-paved streets of London for Stage/Fright, we return to BAO Soho, this time knowing it is sensible to have a reservation in advance. Somehow, though, this doesn’t really improve our experience. We’re still left queueing behind people who are trying to walk in; once we’re in, we’re forgotten about for a good 15 minutes without even water. I know it’s not normally that bad, we’ve been before, but it’s a shame. To some degree, I’m repeating my order from last time, finding a range of the bao buns and some of their other small plates. The food, distinct from the service, is very good, and it does almost make up for it. The baos themselves are, as you’d hope from the name, the highlight - a confit pork and a beef short rib both really hit the spot, the fried chicken a bit let down by the (presumably) less traditional sesame bun but still delicious. The pig blood cake with egg yolk is delightfully difficult to eat as it disintegrates, and the sweet potato fries with plum ketchup are deceptively moreish. Honestly, though, the highlight is the pineapple float, with a salt crystal laden Yakult foam. That’s the thing that stayed with me most from our first visit, and I’m vindicated in having it again.
A precision-strike on the late millenial class, so targeted in its observations but so general in its reach. I am almost entirely the people described here. I enjoy the trappings of what I imagine high taste to be, the minimalism, the combining technology and creativity, the wanting to move to Berlin (which, I genuinely nearly did circa the age of 27), and all of that. The social circles that expand and contract, the places and times spent with those circles, the nagging feeling that there must be more meaning. Latronico takes all this and pours it into a never-named couple living initially in Berlin and then moving around, the prose efficient but still drolly humourous. Beyond the generational satire, though, is a small but magnified observation that has stuck with me since: I miss when Instagram was just peoples’ lunches and holiday photos. When I deleted Facebook and abandoned Twitter (2017 and 2022, respectively), I retreated into Instagram because it wasn’t full of links to doom-laden articles, videos of atrocities, political snark. It was about the people underneath. And now, as I idly doomscroll through Instagram stories, it’s the same thing. Maybe something will replace it. Maybe it’s a sign of great privilege that I can live my life not having to care on an intense level about these things going on in the world around me. But in just 120 pages, Latronico absolutely nails the kind of person I am and my cohort is. (Sidenote: in its opening chapter, Perfection uses a special edition of In Rainbows on vinyl being on display as a specific marker of a certain type of person/couple, but it must be assumed he is thinking of the bright, vibrant colours of the standard edition, rather than the greyscale charcoal drawings of the limited discbox edition. I hate that this is a thing I am commenting on here).
We seem to basically rotate between Pazzo, BOX-E, and Bianchi’s for major days like New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day. This time, it’s Pazzo’s turn to host us and my god have they put together a set menu that is simply banger after banger after banger. A classic Bianchi’s Group aranchini as the snack, with wild garlic and pecorino. From there, the taleggio rarebit, so beautfiully rich but cut through by the shallots. The piece de resistance is the spaghetti alfredo with a guanciale and garlic chicken Kyiv (which, fair play for putting this much garlic on a Valentines menu), but let us not underappreciate the innovation of the tiramichoux for dessert, draped in a coffee caramel sauce. We are seated within earshot of the bar, and Dom is getting his hands dirty, so across the room we call for drink recommendations, and end up with a custom cocktail for Alasdair - god bless that man. Round it off with an espresso martini and some truffles, and what a valentine’s night.
Still watching
A quick bit of sustenance during the Lupe pub quiz - I go for the chicken karaage loaded waffle fries. They are fine! The chicken is mouth-roof-cuttingly hot, and the waffle fries then collapse a little under the weight of it all, but it does the job well enough.
So preoccupied with how to stop Donald Trump and the far right from stealing an election, they forgot to consider that people might just vote them in anyway.
Still playing
Recommended to me by Ruth, it’s been a lot of fun reading through this for inspiration. Dinhut writes passionately about the importance and versatility of condiments, which I grant you is not the least niche of subjects but a crucial one regardless. I can’t help but feel I’m going to end up making a tonne of jam at this point, so that’s great news for all involved except my dentist. A lot of intriguing ideas for pairings in multiple forms, from how to match base ingredients and herbs/spices at the condiment creation stage, to how to match the condeiments themselves to the right meals. The illustrations by Evi.O are absolutely gorgeous too.
Still watching
On the whole enjoyable, leaning more into the drama than the previous series, but with some wonderfully comic moments throughout. It’s not that I dislike Lenny Rush elsewhere, but yeah, you really remember why he’s hitting it big when you watch him in this. I think I still don’t fully buy some of the character motives, which is difficult when, as mentioned, it starts to care more about plot than comedy, but it just about holds up that end.
Rewatched as a light thing to have on in the evening with a bad cold, and this was just the thing. It’s adorable, and it’s such a shame that Pixar’s three-film late resurgent period coincided with a global pandemic and thus shunted straight to streaming. This, Soul, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Turning Red deserve more credit.
I greatly enjoyed Tucci’s first book about food, finding his to be a compelling voice in his passion, frankness, and humour. So why not more? What I Ate In One Year lives up to the title, acting as something of a diary, covering his time filming Conclave in Italy, various promotional duties, birhdays, family holidays, and medical issues. He speaks to how food and family intertwine - it’s a lot of fun to see how proud to see he is of his childrens’ developing tastes over the 12 months. When he’s acerbic, he’s acerbic, notably in recounting some terrible service at the airport. The writing is self-effacing, never tipping into grandiosity or self-importance. He appreciates the privilege of the life he leads and is careful to make sure he is sharing it rather than gloating in it. I’d read a volume every year.
The first First Friday Social at work for the year. A smallish turnout, but a perfectly sized one. We play some pool, I have a couple of pints (but not my usual Lilley’s mango cider, because for some reason I think it’s just going to be too sweet for me tonight), and make my way home at a reasonable hour (if later than originally planned).
Had my doubts before it started - Amanda not being my favourite character in Motherland - but this so quickly falls into the strengths of the original that you could easily have kept the title. Siobhan McSweeney is so very good as a stand-out in an excellent ensemble, and Peter Serafinowicz throws the whole thing into a new loop. I would watch this for years.
A warm refuge from the cold after wandering around the Bristol Light Festival. Some old favourites (fried chicken with a beautiful soy and honey glaze, katsu sauce-d fried which looked initially stingy on the sauce but soon revealed a deep well underneath the surface), and this time trying the Korean corn dogs, doused in chipotle mayo and a sweet ketchup. The doriyaki, with a green tea filling and cherry couli, hit the spot for dessert nicely.
We managed to get through most of the Bristol Light Festival installations this year, and we managed to do so together, which is a change on last year. I’ve broken out my Sprocket Rocket camera for the first time (and have yet to get them developed, so we await with baited breath) but do also take some photos on my phone. There are a lot more music-based ones this year, which is fun, but are also more enclosed, which means I am forced to reckon with the general public’s unerring sense of selfish lack of self-awareness. Alas. The creatures outside St Mary Redcliffe are fun, as is the squidgy black hole creator in Broadmead. It’s all good fun, and you get some photos out of it. I don’t think it’s ever really much more than that, though.
I wouldn’t change it, lord no, but my god the score is so hilariously 90s.
More two-episode miniseries, please. Or, I mean, just make it a film? I dunno. The kind of show that is absolutely reliant on the performance of its leads, and luckily both Coogan and Walter show up. Walter especially, given the long list of previous Thatchers. I don’t know if it really says much about the rise and fall of long-form political interviews on television, but it’s entertaining to watch another Thatcher downfall.
Incredibly horny, to the extent that I don’t think it really does what it wants to do.
Our friends Charlie and Milly are doing the sadly inevitable Bristol comedian thing of becoming just too good and in demand for Bristol and upping sticks to London. They’re having leaving drinks, and we get to do so in the games room at the Volley, including getting to watch Emma Hughes’ unhinged attempts at playing shuffleboard.
Still watching
Grabbing a quick bite after walking Alasdair over to a gig on Wapping Wharf, I have to pick and instinct takes me to Pigsty for the first time in just over five years. I figure I can get in and out in 20 minutes, a theory which is confirmed when I enter to find I am literally the only customer at 7.30 on a Thursday night. Oh boy. The Proper Cow burger lives up to its name - the bacon is a tad much and too crispy (from someone who really does prefer it crispy), but the duelling chimi mayo and chipotle honey ketchup call it a hard-fought draw, the patty itself is rich and deep, and the fries are nicely seasoned.
Surprisingly charming, given how much the trailer for Memoir Of A Snail has rankled me.
I know they’re obviously distinct things, affecting different people, but oddly I think Nickel Boys did this more effectively.
Oh man. This had been on my list for a while, but moved considerably up in response to starting Neverland by Vanessa Kisuule which was not quite the book I was expecting - whilst that more used the idea of discussing the art vs. the artist as a launch pad for talking about how hero worship takes on a life outside of the art, I wanted to read something more specifically delving into art vs. artist and what is to be done about, as Monsters’ subtitle asks, great art by “bad” people. My investment in this: I have eschewed art I loved by people who turned out to be bad. I am also a big fan of someone whose name gets thrown around a lot in this arena and whose guilt I, to be honest, think is questionable but nonetheless feel a certain discomfort around enjoying as a result. Dederer is a fascinating, thoughtful writer who takes neither prisoner nor easy answer. Monsters is a book of much nuance, so to distill it would do it a disservice, but I think it’s fair to say that it tips its hand towards the side of the art still being worth enjoying, though not without caveat. There’s a really interesting conclusion to be drawn around how this fits with our inescapable model of capitalism and consumerism, which has left me with a lot to think about. The whole thing delves into a rich tapestry of different approaches, different types of “bad” people, and the idea of the stain that spreads out wider and backwards, re-colouring the art in unimaginable ways. It is hard to watch Manhattan in the same way as it is Annie Hall. It is difficult to listen to The Suburbs in the same way as you did before. That doesn’t, I think, necessarily make it wrong. So why do I still cut out some art but not others? Why does it feel more right to want to not consume JK Rowling or Louis C.K., compared to others? I have spent so many years thinking about this, and whilst it doesn’t necessarily crystalise every thought I had, (and while it does crystalise a whole bunch of other thoughts I hadn’t begun to consider) Monsters is as comprehensive a text as you could hope for, written with grace and humour. A high recommendation.
A brief little book that presents less of a cohesive thesis and more of a series of jumping off points for ideas to make you think about how one might create and consume works of art, or even what we consider to be or to not be art. Food for thought, with some delightful illustrations from Adriaanse, but I would have liked something a bit more fleshed out or detailed from someone like Eno, who surely has more to offer than these generalities.
Just as bad as 7 years ago! Baffling at every single possible opportunity. Alasdair asked me to pause it at 30 minutes in because he was convinced it must somehow nearly be over. But no.
Fair enough, I was tearing up at the doorman phonecall. It is not, in the scheme of things, much consolation, but it is still nonetheless a relief that through him and the unseen veteran reporter, there are men here who, y’know, care. Shouldn’t have to be noteworthy in 2025, but here we are.
Raph and I go for a quick drink after coffee at the Bristol Loaf, because for some reason he wants to come here. I have never felt less welcome in a pub! It’s incredibly intimidating being two outsiders in a pub blaring Marilyn Manson at four in the afternoon on a Sunday, one of which (yours truly) ordering an orange juice. I shan’t recount Alasdair’s anecdote about it - that’s his to tell.
Time to catch up with Raph for the first time since Christmas, swapping the traditionally belated presents. I have a perfectly ok hot chocolate and a quite nice croissant, and that’ll do fine. I’m normally a bit more adventurous with the Loaf (their crumpets are excellent), but we got there just as the kitchen was closing, so alas no. Another time.
We braved Cribbs on a Saturday in January and true to that experience, we had a Burger King in the food court. Where 20 years ago I might have told you that Burger King was superior to McDonald’s, that has long since passed - the burgers are practically atomic, the chips few and far between, and this time when I chose to splurge beyond a basic combo meal, they couldn’t even correctly give me onion rings. Ah well.
A quick bite to eat before Alasdair’s preview as part of the (don’t rant, Sam, don’t rant) Bristol Comedy Festival. I do like a banh mi; I’m not an expert, but I don’t think fried chicken is necessarily the most traditional filling - but still. It’s good stuff. It’s well-adorned with veg and chilis, but it’s over-stuffed and the bread is a little too tough, or at least insufficiently brittle, to avoid the filling going everywhere upon bite. The fries a good, if a little overly paprika’d.
If this had been made 10 years ago, everyone would be describing it as Allenesque and I do find that funny. A really lovely set of performances, in various levels of subtlety and broadness, bringing the most out of a strong script and inspired direction. That last shot!
It’s fun and not without its charms, but it never quite clicks in.
As the rest of it does, admittedly, get stale, Dictionary Corner remains arguably one of the best showcases of comedians who don’t quite make sense in the panel show format. Take, for example, Ewins - he needs the tech, that’s his USP, and that would never fly on Mock The Week or WILTY or anything. But a space of just “you get three minutes with no constraints within the format”? Perfect. Him, Campbell, The Delightful Sausage, ABK. And, of course, the show’s poet in residence, Dr. John Cooper Clarke.
For some reason, someone in Oslo has booked Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborn to perform The Ballad Of Roger And Grace, a show they did 20 years ago. Understandably, they want a bit of practice, so obviously the answer to that is to do it in Bristol at the Wardrobe. Well, I’m not complaining. The first thing I ever saw of Daniel Kitson’s was another of his and Osborn’s story/song shows, Stories For The Starlit Sky, and that remains one of my favourite things I’ve seen live, so, y’know, more of that? Yes please. Roger And Grace doesn’t quite hit that same high for me, but it’s an awful lot of fun, and (at least against my fuzzy recollection from 2015) the songs are more integrated into the narrative than Starlit Sky. As ever, Kitson is just enchanting to watch on stage, the natural ease of it all and the clear consideration for the immaculately written bits somehow balance each other out, and he and Osborn have a wonderfully worn-in rapport. I hope the Norwegians love it as much as I do.
Big bold dancey stuff, I can see why she’s supporting Caribou, and that alone has tempted me towards getting a last minute ticket. Initial standouts: Broken, Onwards, Combat
It’s fun and not without its charms, but it never quite clicks in.
I was doing so well, but I was so hungry as I returned from the Watershed that temptation overtook me. The Mucker remains one of the best burgers in Bristol (and, believe me, I’ve checked). It’s the bacon and caper aioli that does it, so much so that I get extra on the side for the ancho fries. The lemonade always hits the spot - the classic for me, although it was a treat to overhear multiple people question what echinacea lemonade is. I remember when these burgers were impossibly wet to eat; how they managed to reduce that whilst keeping it as delicious is a scientific feat of our age.
Take the post-rock backing of something like Godspeed or Explosions In The Sky, chuck some Grimes vocals on top, and you’ve got what feels like a very deep pool to dive into and bathe in. Initial standout: Sungazer, Milk, Kenopsia
Still watching
We pop in for a quick drink as part of Maddie’s goodbye celebrations. I get as far as ordering a Jubel Peach before Alasdair reminds me that it’s still Dry January, so a ginger beer it is. I know I am normally the first person to argue that actually gentrification isn’t all bad, but this is one of the few examples where I do think we need pubs like the old Colosseum. Now it’s just any other pub. Bring back the Queen fruit machine.
Need to listen to this again to get a better impression. Initial standout: Irreversible Damage
The perfect film to watch on a TV with motion smoothing turned on and your boyfriend’s mum talking over.
Very much my jam. In another world, Traffic is the source material for some prestige TV series of film, as The Accidental Millionaires was for The Social Network. An excellent account of the burgeoning industry of blogging, its growth from bedroom hobbyists to influence at the highest levels of media and politics, through the lens of the warring Gawker Media and Buzzfeed. I used to be, in 2007 or so, obsesses with Gawker Media as a media company, seeming to have this very astute identity and voice online, the range of blogs staffed by people who cared alternately about the quality of the site or the metrics on any given day. In an ideal world, there’d be a book that was just that, but the HuffPo/Buzzfeed side of things offers important contrast. Smith has a knack for narrative and inside information, being at the heart of it (a fact, admittedly, only noted about half-way through the book when he becomes a character). It’s a well-structured book as well, with chapters being dedicated to outside interests; an especially interesting one steps back from Gawker vs. Buzzfeed to zoom in on how the New York Times approached the shifting landscape, or the one on The Dress acting in shorthand as an allegory for the whole thing. Immensely readable, highly recommended to understand how we got to where we are today. It’s sad to see Gawker’s fate, but equally I don’t know, from reading this, how it could ever have been any other way.
Big fan of having them see The Importance Of Being Earnest at the theatre. Otherwise, wonderfully Wilde.
An odd set of spoken word dotted around this, and tonally different to what I (very vaguely) remember of them in the Louisiana like 6-7 years ago now. Good for them! Initial standout: Night Of The Skinwalker
Feel like I got scammed when I realised Them There were completely uninvolved in this. Some good gags dotted throughout.
Grabbing a quick bite to eat after the train up to Birmingham. I note they’re now selling the MOTH cocktails, but alas, Dry January. I have my normal order - the Shackmeister, a perfectly unhealthy cheeseburger with a very nice, creamy, tangy sauce and crispy shallots; the crinkle-cut fries; and a lemonade, a little less nice than usual. Equally, the burger a little overdone on the edges. But, did the job and hit the spot and I’d prefer it to a McDonald’s any day.
Always nice to have new EITS, even just a soundtrack. An interestingly wider palette compared to their album work. Initial standout: Memories
The usual haunt for the OPPO new year’s drinks, so I pretty much uniformally am on the mocktails. Definitely feels over-priced for what it is, and the ambience is, eh. But it’s tradition, now.
A suitably cheap set menu for a section lunch at work. I play it safe with what I assume Bella Italia can not go too wrong doing - garlic doughballs to start, a chicken milanese for the main, a brownie for dessert. They are all the Fisher Price versions of those things - recognisable enough for a child to point to, but uninspiring.
Milquetoast landfill indie that is mostly about their mates. Initial standout: Perfect Me
Complicated feelings about this one! About pretty much everything other than the cancer. Does at times feel like the trailer existed first and someone thought “that looks great, flesh that out another 1h45 and we could have a film on our hands”.
Not the platonic ideal of my standard order of a house burger (today, a slightly over-toasted bun and under-chees-ed patty), but it’s always something of a treat to kick back on the sofa with this before a film. The chips are surprisingly good, or at least hit some specific spot. The construction of the burger appears to be different every time, so it’s nice to add a frisson of chance into the mix.
It does feel somewhat tossed off, and yet he does seem to care more about this than The Strokes. Still, a couple good songs. Initial standouts: 7 Horses, Spectral Analysis
Not the book I was intially expecting from the brief description I had seen of it, but that’s to Kisuule’s credit. It would be - I’m not going to say easy, but more straightforward - to write the “what do we do with good art by bad people?” book about Michael Jackson, and that was to be fair the kind of thing I was looking for when I picked up Neverland. That’s not quite what this is (although there is certainly some of that in here), but I was equally happy with what I found. Instead, Kisuule uses Jackson as a jumping off point to examine how we see this in ourselves and in those around us - why do we hero worship, such that this is then an issue? How do we do we deal with loved ones who are not perfect, and how do we deal with ourselves? It doesn’t absolve Jackson - doesn’t even attempt to - but paints him as a cautionary tale of generational trauma but why that’s not an excuse to carry it on. A lot to like here; I would still, though, like the “good art/bad people” book.
Nasty, brutish, and oddly compelling. Initial standout: OILED ANIMALS
Complicated feelings about this one! About pretty much everything other than the cancer. Does at times feel like the trailer existed first and someone thought “that looks great, flesh that out another 1h45 and we could have a film on our hands”.
Still watching
Begrudgingly, I quite enjoyed this. Amiable Sunday afternoon fare, and honestly amazed it wasn’t longer, which is a higher compliment than it might seem.
Took about an episode to ramp up, but it grows from a lot of deliciously written lines, to wonderful scenes, to tightly drawn and lived-in characters. A charmingly bleak little thing.
Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age (31) but while the writing is still absolute dross, I didn’t mind it so much? I mean, still terrible.
Vapid, faux profundity with an affected voice. It’ll keep the Idles crowd happy. Initial standout: Love
Soothing little puzzle game, wonder if it’ll be any more than that by the end
Solid if occasionally stolid album 20 years in. Initial standout: Build It Up
Really liked this. The use of first person POV is handled incredibly deftly, with the right level of subtle and unsubtle cues to indicate transition in viewpoint. Some really fascinating choices in service of deeper story telling (older Elwood’s “perspective” being more removed and how that came to be, the use of doubling up moments without cutting but with different outcomes) that I’ll be thinking about for a while.
A voice where I can’t tell if I like it or not and won’t be able to for some time. Initial standout: No One Else
Oh this is horrifically addictive and I am going to have to be very careful about how much or little I play this.
Initial standout: Alone
I mean, sure. It’s All Born Screaming but she’s singing in Spanish. Initial standout: Tiempos Violentos
I remember vaguely being aware of WHY? from an Acaster pre-show mix. I have now actually listened. Initial standout: Later at the Loon
An idea from a pub conversation that has got massively out of fan. Stupidly fun. I forgot how intense Adam Riches’ eye contact is. Enjoyed how much John Kearns enjoyed Alasdair enjoying a line about the agricultural revolution. Spent the whole show very conscious that Ed Gamble and Rosie Jones were in my eye line on the other side of the stage.
Early (comparatively, to what I listen to), Steve Albini-produced post-rock, lovely for reading to on a train. Initial standout: Sea Above, Sky Below
There’s a moment in Hollywoodgate where the Taliban laments that if they had had all these resources that the Americans had had, they would be ruling the world right now. The remaining 90 minutes somewhat casts that into doubt.
Replaying this for the first time in years, this time on the Switch. I forgot how quickly the death count racks up, but amazed at how much muscle memory I’ve retained. Wonder if that’s true for Super Hexagon.
Swedish power pop in the vein of The Beths (no bad thing). Initial standouts: Headache, I’m So Sorry
I think it must be about 7 years since I last watched this, and I love how happy I am every time I remember a character. Much soapier than I remember, and I don’t mind it! The music is gorgeous. David Lynch passed away between us starting to (re)watch this and finishing this season, so that’s added a whole new weight to it.
Watched in 35mm at the Watershed. Gorgeously shot, fascinatingly monochrome throughout in different ways.
Surprisingly vital for this stage of Jack White’s career, I can see why the buzz about the cramped gigs last year was what it was. Initial standouts: Bless Yourself, What’s The Rumpus?
Gone are the heady early days of the long queues to get in here - it’s not too late in the day and it’s comparatively quiet. Killing time between being in town and Nosferatu at the Watershed, we figure that Tonkotsu’s boast of the importance of the 42 second ramen means we should be in and out quickly. Less so than you’d hope, but here we are. It’s still up there for me (although not the best in Bristol), with a delightfully creamy base, and an extra egg for ol’ me. Chicken karaage on the side is beautifully done likewise. We don’t have time for an ice cream sando, but next time, next time.
Maddie is trying to fit in as many social engagements as possible before leaving for Seattle, and I am delighted to abet. We go for lunch with Alasdair at Oowee, all of two minutes down the road, which is dangerous when there’s an £8.95 lunch deal and the frequency with which I work from home these days. I try not to make it a Friday regular. Today, though, I eschew the lunch deal and splash out on a Big Cheese - a patty and baconaisse-spread bun practically glued together by a mix of American and Swiss cheese (forever chasing that high of the original Moor Burger, Please from Burger Theory), with some Marmite waffle fries on the side. It is all too much, and absolutely cannot become habit.
Initial standout: Black Ribbon
I miss when Letterboxd wasn’t overrun by gen z
Probably Ayoade’s most accomplished book in his bibliography of doing “books like this”. It feels more lived in, more detailed. There are some bitingly funny lines, some well-drawn characters, but the highlights for me remain the “excerpts” of Hughes’ screenplays and scripts, all excellently observed parodies of a certain type of British film or play. It gets a little muddled in the final stretch, but on the whole a satisfying read.
Initial standout: The Birds in Birmingham Park
The annual tradition continues, thank you Mum. The platonic ideal was still the one like 4 years ago with a good short story, and I refuse to believe it’s just because I’m 31 now.
A cracking edition of this, to be fair. A good cast who enjoy the studio and can relax into themselves. Would I want a full series with them? Maybe not, but that’s what this is for.
Oh god, it’s still one of the best things on TV. Claudia Winkleman is perfect for it and I cannot believe the formula keeps working. The producers are definitely playing with the contestants’ expectations more, which is a lot of fun.
Happy new year indeed. Tell me more of the man who just had half a phone handed to him. 6 years ago I apparently wrote that this might be PTA’s most ambiguous film, and I think I stand by that.
Odd, almost Bon Iver-ian folky/autotune from Menorca. Initial standouts: Heu and M’agrada s’espigolar
I enjoy a café trip on New Year’s Day to walk off the hangover. This used to be Flour House as a staple, but now I live quite far from there, it doesn’t quite seem worth it. We strolled down North Street to take in the options and settled on Tin Can. And so 2025 begins with their house baked beans on toast, with added hash browns and sausage. I object - genuinely - to paying £3.50 extra for a single, solitary sausage, and it genuinely is not worth it. The sourdough toast retains just about enough bite post-bean-slathering, and it’s nicely topped off by the herb oil. This won’t - I hope - be the best thing I eat in 2025, but it’s a suitable start before an abandoned walk round the park.