Paul in London

I have started to pay a little more interest in Celebrity Big Brother as tonight I caught some highlights showing transsexual Pete – famous in the eighties for that song "You Spin Me Round (Like a record)" doing a repeat performance of his one hit wonder. It was an amazing act of desperation. Pity he has so much plastic surgery his face looks like a mask. The rest of the "celebrities" includes ex-basketball player Dennis Rodman and Michael Barrymore. Barrymore lives in New Zealand after some guy turned up dead in his swimming pool in the UK but he is fondly enough remembered in the UK for most of the papers to warn the other contestants to skip the swimming lessons with him…

Today was one of those cold windy and wet days so it was a perfect opportunity to go to the movies. Match Point had just opened and being a new Woody Allen flick (and his first to be shot in London) it was well worth going to… Or so it seemed. It turned out that the story was a series of clichés held together by some pretty bad acting / pouting on the part of lead actor Jonathan Rhys-Myers. There was also a rather absurd plot development of two murders committed by a shotgun that took place in a central London apartment block with not a CCTV camera in sight. In real London six cameras would have caught the murderer's every move (unless the cameras had burnt out or malfunctioned)… Part way through the film A asked me if I was seeing a lesson in the film for me and I whispered back to him that the lesson from this film is to not screw around with your tennis coach as they can be such nasty bitches... The locations were bog-standard spots and included St Mary Axe ("the gherkin...

Man #1 : You’re looking great… You’ve got a great colour! Man #2 : Oh I’ve just been to the Canaries for a week… (I was in Australia for eight and all I got to show for it was a slight farmer’s tan…)

Scenes from Waterloo Tube Saturday 00:16 - Heading towards the Northern Line branch 

Scenes from Tate Britain Friday 18:54 - There was a long queue just to leave (or pick up as I was doing) your things at the cloakroom. The Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition is closing soon and so Friday night at the Tate was popular (it was also half price). It is a smart idea going to the late night showings, just get there at 17:30 as by 7pm you could barely move. It's a great exhibition, but not when you need lubricant to get through the crowds...

I spent the week catching up on a few things about to finish. One of these being Epitaph for George Dillon , which is a revival of a John Osborne / Anthony Creighton play starring Joseph Feinnes. It was a fascinating play that has held up well since the 1950s when it was written. When Feinnes walked in you could hear a collective swoon from the female members of the audience. I wasn't quite sure why as sitting in second row I could see he doesn't have any lips. Of course the makeup he had on accentuated this feature, he walked with a hunch, and the character he played wasn't such a nice chap, but obviously none of that mattered to the rest of the audience. The central message of the play seemed to be that it is fine to be a bohemian in suburbia as at least it pays the bills. Oh and marry somebody you don't really like as well. It is not surprising the play was written by two closeted bitchy queens who certainly knew how to write great one-liners, but they also created...

No photos today. The high street retailer that sold me my phone (oh which has a camera) on Saturday took it back today. It is all a rather long and involved story involving me, a sales assistant who didn't know what he was doing, and my strange desire to keep my old number. Keeping your number if you change mobile providers apparently isn't a popular thing to do in London (or at least you are given this impression by the store I went to), and it probably makes sense as if you have given out your number to so many loonies, every now and then it is probably smart to just disappear. Of course there are only one or two loonies who have my number and I have set them up in my contacts as "DO NOT ANSWER - Mormon" in my phonebook. To keep my number, I needed to set up a new contract and return the old phone… So some rather smashing photos of London were lost. Actually they probably weren't that great, but I was perplexed by returning a phone and then getting another bran...

Scenes from a Bloomsbury Art Gallery Wednesday 17:05 - Paper mach� animals anyone? 

Scenes from the bowels of the Barbican Tuesday 17:38 

Scenes from Tooting Common Tuesday 15:52 - A bit damp today...