Dancing Through Life

Friday was a long day, a bit of internal politics erupted and resulted in me spending most the day researching legislation relating to email privacy alongside all the usual items on my to-do list.

Today I had arranged with Rosie to help her bring some of the stuff back from her office (she is beginning the clear-out in advance of taking up her new job) so I took the opportunity of taking another suit, some fresh toiletries and a few more shirts into the office. Once that was complete we met up with Brett, who’d spent the morning in the gym, and had lunch at Studio 6; a reasonably hearty meal, but in their conservatory-style addition which is never quite warm enough. As today was bitterly cold, with temperatures of several degrees below zero, this was an issue!

It was an even greater issue when we left the restaurant to head to the cinema (I’d wanted to go to the Byzantium Exhibition at the Royal Academy, but got out-voted by Brett & Rosie.) We staged the trip to involve a couple of stops for coffee to warm us up along the way; firstly at the National Theatre and then at the Waterstones on Trafalgar Square.

This latter stop was asking for trouble I suppose. I went in for a coffee and came out with three books; A book of Banksy’s art, which I like, a book on the American Presidency and Albert Camus’ The Fall. The books all came from the store’s ‘Recommended’ section, where the members of staff write their personal recommendations of particular works on little cards. One of them was rather bizarre though; Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor had a recommendation card which concluded thus, “Put simply: an amazing tale brilliantly told and the best novel on inadvertent incest you’re likely to read this year.” Which made me wonder how many novels on inadvertent incest the employee thinks most people read in a year… Maybe I’m just out of touch with the genre du jour!

The movie we were going to see was The Duchess at the Odeon Mezzanine, which was a film we’d all wanted to see but never got around to. It turned out to be worth the effort as it’s a sumptuous piece which seemed quite attentive to historical detail and had a realistic ending instead of Hollywood saccharin (much to Brett’s disappointment!)

Afterwards we gave Rosie a lift home and spent the remainder of the evening watching most of a mini-series dramatisation of the life of John Adams, which was also rather good.