Sista Blog

The Museum of Garden History is probably one of the most unique places I’ve been yet for a gig. Hosted in the church of St-Mary-at-Lambeth tonight’s performers could take full advantage of the amazing acoustics that such a venue could provide. (Despite this there was a lot of faffing about at the beginning of the evening as the acts did sound check after sound check.)

It seems that this is not the first time that the Museum has hosted such and even. In fact this is the fifth year of a series of jazz festivals that Museum has hosted. Tonight it was Cuban Night featuring first up Robert Mitchell & Omar Puente and then second up Cubana Bop.

The venue as a gig sight is fairly interesting. Hot food, which is generally reasonbly priced and not at all junkie, is on offer as well as a fairly well stocked bar – stocked with wine and beer that is! There are quite a few tables set up (which are of course higher priced tickets) with plenty of standing room for the rest of us though it was awkward to find the best position to stand. Nevertheless it was Cuban Jazz Night so we weren’t expecting to be sitting for most of the perfomances.

Unfortunately the music wasn’t all that for dancing. The first act of Robert Mitchell and Omar Puente were … not great. Not at all what I expected I felt that the performance was self-indulgent and sometimes I was wondering if they were performaning for themselves or the audience. Or perhaps my taste is music wasn’t sophisticated enough to recognise rhythm in what they were presenting. Often the two went off into some improvisation piece that was neither pleasant on the ear nor enough to capture my interest. The second act, Cubana Bop, was much better and delivered much better pieces and to my surprise towards the end even had the mostly English crowd up on their feet. It was very much towards the end however.

Craig promised to continue the good times at Bar Thompson. See how happy everyone seems?

As I mentioned in an earlier post I got up at stupid o’clock this morning to join hundreds of others at the Shaftesbury Walkabout to see the Geelong Cats battle the Port Adelaide Power in the 2007 grand final of the Australian Football League.

These two teams finished one and two in the premiership this year and therefore were fitting finalists. The Cats, however, clearly had the support of those in the Walkabout although the small pocket of Power supporters did their best to show their support.

This kind of event is so popular that all the Walkabouts required tickets to be pre-purchased – £15 bought you entry, two drinks and a breakfast bap/meat pie. At 5am in the morning the Walkabout crowd were suprisingly, and quite scarily, eager to get to their pints. Drinking beer to me at any time of day is disgusting but at 5 in the morning – truly gross! So, despite evidence to the contrary, as in the photo to the left, I just stuck to my OJ and lemonade (boring I know!) and my bacon bap which was tasty and very welcome though difficult to eat as were jostled about by the heaving crowd. At some point Pauline, James and I even got separated from Brendan and Cameron. It was pretty mad. Managed to get in some “in the crowd” photos though:

The game was fairly good though very one-sided to the pleasure of those in the Walkabout. The Cats absolutely killed the Power and the 163-44 scoreline in The Cats favour, which smashed the previous largest winning margin in a final by 23 points, was only a small reflection of just how much The Cats dominated.

In other, and maybe more slightly interesting news to the general public who have no clue what aussie rules is, but who may have more of a clue about Neighbours we were joined at Walkabout by none other than the current Vegemite Tales stars: Blair McDonough and Jonathon Dutton. The funniest thing was that it was Brendan and Cameron who first spotted the two “celebs”!

Here are some stalkarazzi shots (though note that some were purely coincidental like the one of Blair making out with his girl – it wasn’t my fault they were standing so close to us and they “happened’ to get into my shot – and its purely coincidental that all the photos focussed on the hunky Blair …)

Damn long! The last 24 hours have felt like the longest of my life. Well, okay technically 24 hours is 24 hours however it feels like I’ve lived at least three days in the last 24. Still I seem to have survived it for now, except for picking up a feeling that I’ll soon be coming down with a cold, so its all good.

So, where has the last 24 hours brought me?

It all started with waking up at 4am yesterday morning to get to Shaftesbury Ave for 5am for the broadcast of the AFL Grand Final. This idea, when suggested by Pauline, seemed all fine in theory leading up the day but I did find myself wondering why it was that I was getting up at stupid o’clock to go watch a final which didn’t even feature my team (the Brisbane Lions) in a venue (Walkabout) that I have sworn I would try my bestest never to step into! Still, at 5am Pauline, James (who had even less reason than me to turn up!), Brendan, and Cameron found ourselves in a line outside Walkabout. More on this here.

After watching the Grand Final, by which time it was about 8.30-9am, of course I was hungry so we ended up grabbing some breakfast at Giraffe over the river from Embankment. By the time we got across to Giraffe, as Grace, yes that’s me, thought it would be a good idea to walk, we had all been up for nearly six hours so it was basically lunch time. The breakfast was very welcome but boy was it a mistake to have something so heavy because it immediately sent me into a feeling of needing a nap immediately!

Thankfully the walk back to Leicester Square and then from there up to Oxford Street woke me up some as I had to meet Caro for another wedding dress fitting at Vera Wang, Selfridges. Unfortunately signals got a bit crossed and there was some confusion about her fitting time but I did see the dress she was planning on wearing (an interesting red number) and had the chance to catch up with her and Maud over my second lunch of the day! However, I was still stuffed from breakfast so limited myself to a butterscotch milkshake. Mmmmm ….

After all this it was mid-afternoon by the time I got back home and although I was hoping to grab a quick nap before heading out again in a couple of hours for Christy and Scott’s “Cuban Night” an engineer was coming to try and fix my internet and there was no guarantee when he would turn up. And as much as it was tempting to nap before he got there I thought it would have scared him off when sleep-rumpled-grace-who-just-woke-up-from-a-nap-and-is-therefore-still-in-her-pjs-with-shocking-hair-and-most-likely-crazy-eyes answered the door.

After the engineer came there was time for a quick shower before heading off to meet Scott and Christy, and their former housemate Jenny, for a quick drink before making our way to the Museum of Garden History for a night of Cuban Jazz, where we met up with Craig and Mark (or Bartie). Quite a strange venue and in fact I hadn’t even realised there was a museum dedicated to Garden History! More on this here.

After the jazz Craig wasn’t quite ready to finish off the night so we all headed over to Bar Thompson for a bit of Sing Star Superstar. It was very entertaining though has just further proved to me that I should never never never sing in public again – ha ha! Admittedly I was having quite a bit of fun, and perhaps the laughing didn’t help with the keeping in tune aspect of the game, but nevertheless I had to move on to the final engagement of the night – an appearance at Club 49 in Soho.

James’ friend, Tara, was having a birthday do at Club 49 and she’d arranged to have a VIP area in the club. It actually didn’t seem all that big a venue but the line to get in was definitely large. Just as well I was on the guest list though I still had to pay a cover charge to get in. In addition to the guest list the benefit of the VIP area is having your own bar! Definitely makes getting in your drinks a lot easier.

The dance floor on the bottom floor of the club was absolutely ram-packed and hot as anything but for the most part the music played was pretty awesome – though it did hit a few blank spots now and then. And towards the end of then night it got totally rubbish – maybe their way of getting people off the dance floor and out of the club! Some of the photos below:

And so, after making our way through the crowded streets and to the crowded bus stops, which at 3.30am in the morning were heaving, I finally got home at 4am Sunday morning. The End.

I’m still not sure how I feel about this movie because it was so … bleh. George Clooney plays a “fixer” at a large corporate law firm in New York. This means he is the go to man when something a little beyond legal advice and representation is required. The baddie in this movie is a big corporate giant U-North, whom the law firm is representing, who is involved in a class action suit for releasing cancer causing chemicals. When the lead counsel for defence goes just a little mental and awol Clooney is sent in to save the day.

This movie just didn’t do it for me. Yes it was superbly acted by Clooney and Tom Wilkinson who plays the lead counsel gone cuckoo, in contrast to Tilda Swinton as U-North’s in house big wig lawyer who was a wet fish and pathetic, but otherwise I felt that there was nothing surprising or dramatic in the story-line. All the cards seemed to be shown to the audience at once so I was constantly waiting for the shoe to drop and right to the end it never did. The movie showed you exactly where it was going at all times and that is exactly where you arrived.

As I said in the intro, bleh.

It is a strange coincidence that a month before we are going to Imperial China for a work do involving the odd combination of a club called the Curry Club, Chinese and Karaoke my brother and I decided to drop in to Imperial China for a bit of yum-cha.

The first thing that strikes you about Imperial China is its looks – its all very glammed up with its pretty entryway with fish pong and a classic chinese bridge, the giant glass windows on the ground floor, the intimate lighting, the dark colours and the waiters and waitresses dressed to the nines. We were hoping that the food would live up to first impressions.

Yum-cha at Imperial China is ordered as it is in many restaurants these days by marking your selection on a slip of paper. Interestingly, unlike other restaurants, there were a number of options which were “Not Recommended” …. interesting. I’m sure there is something lost in translation there and the fact that our choices just happened not to include any such dishes is mere happenstance!

The yum-cha offerings at Imperial China are fairly stock standard but did contain a few distinguishing dishes such as dumplings shaped like rabbits, goldfish or butterflies and fish belly rolls. From a taste perspective the dishes we had weren’t extraordinary so were not the best I’ve ever tasted nor were they the worst. Prices were fairly average for what you got.

Overall I think Imperial China was a pleasant, if ordinary, experience. It will be interesting to see how this experience will contrast with that of our work do in a month’s time.

Tonight was the second night of our “Movie Previews”. We were supposed to be seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof but for some reason it wasn’t being shown so we had our pick of movies. The best offering seemed to be Shoot Em Up – a crazy action movie featuring Clive Owen and Monica Bellucci and one of the silliest story-lines I’ve seen in a while. Strangely enough the movie has totally restored my faith in Clive Owen. He first came to my attention as King Arthur, a movie in which I totally loved him. But then I was totally turned off by him in Closer (though Jenny says that just shows how good an actor he was) and now I’m back to the loving him side.

Shoot Em Up is over the top, ludicrously violent, absurd, campy and just plain good fun. The movie opens with Clive Owen as a supposed bum minding his own business sitting at a bus stop drinking coffee and eating a carrot. A pregnant woman soon runs past him screaming and she is followed by a man threatening her menacingly with a gun. Damsel in distress? Clive Owen is soon on the job. The first sign of just how crazy this movie is, is the method of Clive Owen’s first kill – drilling the carrot through the back of the man’s head. Brutal and bloody much? During this opening action sequence the woman goes into labour and so with Clive Owen both coolly directing her to push and massacring the rest of the evil dudes, lead by villain Paul Giamatti, in interesting and imaginative ways a baby is born. The mother subsequently dies but Clive Owen’s conscience does not allow him to leave the baby behind. The rest of the movie tells of his baby-sitting experience, assisted along the way by a bunch of carrots and his, to be girlfriend, prostitute Monica Bellucci, and of his quest to find out exactly why the baby is being targeted for assassination.

The movie is almost cartoon like in both the number of deaths and in the way the lead characters, Clive Owen (good guy) and Giamatii (bad guy), never die despite all sorts of pain and kill shots being inflicted on them. The way Clive Owen somehow defies the laws of physics to escape Giamatii’s evil clutches time and time again add to this feeling.

There’s no true plot or logic to this movie but the story line serves its purpose of giving Clive Owen a vehicle to kick butt and that’s all I cared about. It is a surprisingly funny movie with witty one-liners from both Clive Owen and Giamatii though often you’ll find yourself laughing more at just how waaaay over the top the action scenes are. This is one of those movies that actually had the audience clapping at the end and for that I would definitely recommend it though you’ll have to put your brain in park first.

Lately Sandra has been able to get free tickets to screenings of yet to be released movies. This one is the first one I’ve gone to. I’m not sure how they select which movies come up on offer but I’m not gonna say no to a free movie despite how little I know about it! Tonight’s movie was A Mighty Heart.

Daniel Pearl was a Wall Street journalist who was kidnapped and brutally executed by Islamic fundamentalists in Karachi, Pakiston. A Mighty Heart is an adaptation of a memoir by his widow Mariane Pearl and takes us through her nightmare of the weeks leading up to his execution. Throughout the movie Mariane, who is nearly full term pregnant, stoically maintains her composure while assembling a group of friends and colleagues to find him. The only moment that she totally looses it is when she finally finds out her husband is dead. And not just dead but beheaded and chopped into ten pieces. This is not a happy story kids.

Angelina Jolie as Mariane is simply amazing as Mariane Pearl. Its easy to put aside all the recent press about Jolie’s personal life and remember that actually she is a decent actress. She totally embraces and becomes Mariane. Truly compelling.

Interestingly the film does not paint the evils of the terrorists themselves although clearly they are bad guys in the film. Instead the focus seems to be on the chaos and confusion of international communication lines from the respective government perspectives to the media reporting and also the importance of hope, however futile, in the face of such loss.

The movie’s only downfall I think is in living up to the title – A Mighty Heart. Sure Jolie’s character is generally a pillar of strength throughout the film but because the movie is for the most part emotion-less you don’t get the true sense of how much pain Mariane Pearl had to work through to overcome what would ordinarily be the automatic feeling of total hatred of her husband’s executioners.

As the placard reads Spamalot is “the new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I’ve never seen the movie so from that perspective I didn’t have too many expectations going in however I’m familiar with Monty Python humour so I was expecting some funny moments.

The translation of a movie into the musical can be fraught with dangers and I think for the most part Spamalot has managed to avoid most of them. It wasn’t outrageously funny in the way a comedy such as Avenue Q is but it definitely had its moments with the humour coming across that typically dry English way with the funniest moments involving the French taunting and abuse of King Arthur and his Knights as they attempt to storm the French castle, the killer bunny and as Silvie put it the overall musical p!sstaking.

From a musical perspective the songs were well written and the pieces very well choreographed. The sets were pretty good – above average in themselves but also smart in the number and method of scene changes they were able to incorporate into the show.

Where it did fail was in the male cast, in particular King Arthur, who were surprisingly not as impressive as singers or performers as I was expecting. On the other hand I was very impressed with The Lady of the Lake, played by Hannah Waddingham. Waddingham delivered an amazing vocal performance and was highly energetic and engaging as an actress.

If you are suffering from a lack of silliness in your life then Spamalot is definitely the cure for you.

We were supposed to go to The Church today but instead Pauline and I went to Brighton and our livers are probably very thankful! It wasn’t a particularly hot summery day but we did have moments of sun which we were grateful for. It was just nice to get out of London even though I’ve already been to Brighton a couple of times.

Mainly Pauline and I walked up and down the “beach” and I also introduced her to the 2p machines. I’m surprised she’s never seen them before – very addictive. It was all I could do to tear her away. Ha ha. We even had to fight off this man who was trying to take over our machine though I think he was trying to give us tips on where to put the coins at the same time. Strange!

On this trip I also finally managed to get to the Royal Pavilion. Its actually a funky palace though a little over-priced to get into. There is a fairly detailed audio-tour that you can take but it was very historically based rather than about the Palace itself. I was disappointed I couldn’t take photos of the inside – very amazing interiors especially the large opulent dining room which was “guarded” so to speak by these intricate and rather big dragons and had a most amazing chandelier.

J. Sheekey belongs to the same group of restaurants as The Ivy so Jenny and I were expecting big things from our meal tonight. Rehana has also raved about the restaurant so my expectations were very high.

J.Sheekey is located just near Leicester Square and, as with The Ivy, is “guarded” by the little man in the top hat. The windows are covered up so once you step into the restaurant the sense of privacy and intimacy is immediate. Something I’m sure the celebrities appreciate. The restaurant is much longer than it appears from the outside but is sectioned off into a number of areas with about 5-7 tables filling any one space. This definitely made it hard to star-gaze! Just last night Kylie and Mick Jagger had dined here apparently but sadly no luck for us tonight. Besides we were so busy gaping at what everyone else was eating to have time to search the restaurant for any celebrities.

If you don’t like your fish than you won’t have too many options to choose from on the J. Sheekey menu – this one is definitely all about the fish and seafood though they do have one or two other dishes for the non-seafood eaters. All around us it seemed the popular starter was the fruits of the sea platter which was filled with all types of cold seafood including oysters, pippies, prawns etc. The platter is maaassssssive! However, not being the biggest fan of cold seafood I went instead with the crab bisque as a starter. It was superbly delicious and creamy but very rich. For mains, at the recommendation of the waiter, Jenny and I shared a grilled fish platter. With it we got bream, salmon, tuna, john dory and cod. A very good selection. We didn’t think we could get full on just fish but surprisingly we did though to be fair there was a lot of it and it was very rich (read oily!) The fish was quite tasty, though I think in future I’d like my platter to have a mix of shellfish rather than all fish because after a while it almost felt too sameish.

We forced (ha ha) ourselves to have some dessert – I tried the raspberry crème brulee (as unfortunately spotted dick was not on the menu). It was nice enough but I must remember in future that tart fruit just does not go with crème brulee! Still finished it however .

To my surprise the service was a bit hit and miss tonight at a restaurant which supposedly values it quite highly. That’s not to say that it wasn’t unfriendly or unresponsive but I just felt it was … spotty. First of all before we even sat down we were asked if we wanted any drinks without being offered any sort of drinks or wine menu, then we sat for a while without any menus whatsoever and then our drinks that we did eventually end up ordering took very long to get to us. The waitress later apologised for the oversight but still. Finally, we were often left alone for long periods of time. Respect for the customer aside and all but I still expect a restaurant like this to check in with the diners now and again. However, it seems our experience is at odds with everyone else who has dined here in the past if the reviews I’ve read are anything to go by.

So, in the end were my expectations met? I think not to be honest. However that’s probably more from my having such high expectations in the first place. For three courses and a juice and service it was about £52 (which included an outrageous £2 per person cover charge) so for that price you would expect to be dazzled. I wasn’t. Merely satisfied with the experience. I must say however that despite the reputation and seeming poshness of the restaurant you never feel like a, pardon the pun, fish out of water so for that it has to get some marks.