A much bela­ted part 2 of time spent in the West End and other fun pla­ces, I think I was meant to post this around Decem­ber 20th, looks like that didn’t hap­pen. I roun­ded off the last post with a trip to see Zorro.

Next stop Alan Ayckbourn’s trio of plays “Living Together”, “Table Man­ners” and “Round and Round the Gar­den” (seen in that order) as part of “The Nor­man Con­quests” in the round at the Old Vic — a thea­tre trans­for­med for a 360 degree vie­wing expe­rience. Being under 25 offers us the nice little perk of much dis­coun­ted tic­kets, £20 for each play ins­tead of £40–60, or the­rea­bouts, a bar­gain. The six strong cast con­sis­ted of Ame­lia Bull­more, Jes­sica Hynes, Stephen Man­gan, Ben Miles, Paul Rit­ter and Amanda Root.

Going into “Living Together”, Sam, Jo and I weren’t sure what to expect, our seats were at the rear of the audi­to­rium, where the stage would nor­mally sit, but ins­tead a cir­cu­lar tier of seats stood, car­ved into the back. We were inc­re­dibly close to the cir­cu­lar stage with its ‘model village come woo­den cur­tain’ and light fur­ni­ture set. The three plays inter­min­gle in time, each can stan­da­lone but together they form a big­ger pic­ture, por­tra­ying dif­fe­rent nuan­ces and natu­res of the cha­rac­ters whilst each inc­re­dibly reveals a sig­ni­fi­cant plot point subtly but rea­lis­ti­cally refe­ren­ced in the other two. (Reg wan­de­ring into the front room, “Ah there it is”, picks up the bin and walks out again).

The sto­ries are deeply tra­gic; three siblings, two unhap­pily married and the other sin­gle yet equally unhappy. The other three cast mem­bers make up their spouses/possible future part­ners whilst a sick and elderly mother and her pro­mis­cuous past resi­des out of sight, ups­tairs and bedrid­den. Nor­man is all set to run away for a roman­tic wee­kend with his wife’s sis­ter Annie, Annie’s poten­tial love inte­rest — Tom, the dim wit­ted Vet, belie­ves she is going on holi­day alone and that this is partly his fault; Annie’s brother Reg and inter­fe­ring wife Sarah arrive to look after mother for the wee­kend, in Annie’s absence. Norman’s wife Ruth remains una­wa­res, but isn’t without sus­pi­cion. Cue the start of all three plays and without wishing to reveal too much; the home made pars­nip wine, Reg’s cle­verly devi­sed board game he wants ever­yone to play, Norman’s desire to make ever­yone happy, Tom’s com­plete befudd­le­ment, the rug, the silence at Break­fast, soup and salad, sea­ting arran­ge­ments, Ruth’s misin­ter­pre­ted advice in the gar­den, the cat stuck in the tree, the tom­foo­lery and East Grins­ted — and as the family tears itself apart you’ll laugh with every turn, every reve­la­tion, every remark and your jaw will ache from the smile plas­te­red across your face.

For Table Man­ners and Round and Round the Gar­den we were sea­ted at the top in the middle, a little further from the action but still a great view. Ori­gi­nally we’d deci­ded to only go to one of the three, but on the strength of Living Together — which we now believe was the best star­ting place — we boo­ked the next two. If I had to put them in order of favou­ri­tes I’d put the Gar­den epi­sode first, clo­sely follo­wed by Living Together and then Table Manners.

Our taste for plays, come­dies, Ayck­bourn and the Old Vic have been sti­mu­la­ted and we’re ready for more.

Here’s the best shot I could get of the cir­cu­lar stage from where we were:

Before the shows we ate at the Ban­ga­lore Express (with its dou­ble dec­ker sea­ting arran­ge­ment) and Yo Sushi (where we used our buy 5 pla­tes get 5 free vouchers), both of which are in wal­king dis­tance from the Old Vic.

Follo­wing the Gar­den, which we saw on a Satur­day after­noon in Decem­ber, we grab­bed the tube to Hyde Park to visit the Win­ter Won­der­land with all of its Christ­mas­time goo­dies and German-like mar­kets. War­ming up with a tasty steak bur­ger we aim­lessly peru­sed the stalls, trying out the mulled wine, the can­died nuts, mini dutch pan­ca­kes in cho­co­late, fun hats and Ger­man sau­sa­ges. Without rea­li­sing it had reached 9pm we mean­de­red towards Covent Gar­den before res­ting at “Fire and Stone”, a fan­tas­tic stone-oven piz­ze­ria where every pizza is based on a world city, I had a:

Marra­kech // £8.95
Cumin spi­ced ground lamb, moz­za­re­lla, mint yoghurt sauce, green oli­ves, rai­sins & sli­ced red onion drizz­led with chi­lli oil.

Worth every penny.

The Ballet

The next big ven­ture into Lon­don for Sam and I was to the Coli­seum to see the English Natio­nal Ballet per­for­ming Slee­ping Beauty; my first foray into the world of ballet and dance. Approaching the night slee­pi­fied and docile, I wasn’t loo­king for­ward to the three hour per­for­mance des­pite pep­ping up with a home-made bur­ger from a nearby Moroc­can place off Lei­ces­ter Square.

Howe­ver, when the cur­tain lif­ted, the surrea­lism of a 3 hour show without a sin­gle spo­ken word, not even for the inter­val, slowly daw­ned on me, and with it I became quietly engros­sed in the beau­ti­ful dance and skill before me, the miming tech­ni­ques used for the plot mostly going over my head but for a few obvious exam­ples. My slum­ber had me all but­te­red up and I left amongst the extraor­di­na­rily posh and the dis­pro­por­tio­nate num­ber of rich attrac­tive girls into the cold win­ter air, with scarf and glo­ves, ready for Christmas.

Now that I have made my mam­moth 5000 word Greece holi­day post, which has been wai­ting around for a month or so to type up, I can move onward to new blog posts in this new and impro­ved MrFofR​.com blog, hap­pily within WordPress.

Impor­ting 5 years worth of posts from Blog­ger and then cate­go­ri­zing them was not a pretty task. Though I did notice a gra­dual des­cent into imma­tu­rity as I wor­ked back­wards. In cele­bra­tion of this achie­ve­ment, and brin­ging this blog inline with my other pro­jects, the site has chan­ged hosts and lives on its own domain as a sepa­rate out­let for unpro­fes­sio­nal blurbs, rants and what­not; www​.mrfofr​.com. The Mr. bit is new, I’d be pretty lucky to bag a four let­ter domain name.

After 5 years, my AMD Ath­lon 2700 XP with 1.5gb of RAM and LG 17″ screen was gro­wing weary. Time for an upgrade, and the new 24″ iMac model took my fancy — I grab­bed one from John Lewis in July and its now sit­ting pretty as the focus of my front room, coin­ci­ding with a big rea­rran­ge­ment of furniture.

Good timing really, con­si­de­ring that I had mul­ti­ple and simul­ta­neous hard drive fai­lu­res on my PC shortly the­reaf­ter as I tried to trans­fer 40gb or so to the mac.

Having been through the old posts, I noted that, in hind­sight, screenshots of my pro­jects are very help­ful for when the ori­gi­nal source mate­rial has since vapo­ri­zed into the mists of some inter­net pur­ga­tory. And on that note:

It’s been a short while since my last blog entry; I have been hurriedly coding my mons­trous hunk of a new web­site, Auc­tion Ear­ners. In bet­ween fran­tic key bashing I have also par­ta­ken in Christ­mas fes­ti­vi­ties, sett­led in at work (care­fully omit­ting key­words to pre­vent this being flag­ged in a Goo­gle Alert), tur­ned 23 and grown a little over­weight. Who’d have thought that typing was not suf­fi­cient daily exer­cise to keep one healthy? When it gets a little war­mer those calo­ries will be burnt off as I take to a regime of sun tan­ning and cycling.

Now, in taking a break from my still unready ad ser­vice, I feel that I need to rant about a cou­ple of things. Come New Year and my splen­did get-together come shin­dig in my flat – (with Tex-Mexican nice­ties (tacos, enchi­la­das, dips, chi­lli con carne) spread among 8), whilst purcha­sing the tasty treats I deci­ded to embark on a Free­view adven­ture. Back in Novem­ber I bought myself a Phi­lips Free­view box (a DTR220, digi­tal terres­trial recei­ver) for £35. Plug­ging it into the aerial atop of my flat lead to the dis­co­very of 40 chan­nels, with an almighty 3 of these being vie­wa­ble (bid up TV, sky three and a radio sta­tion), the rest degra­ding into some sort of glitch-ridden mad­ness. This didn’t bother me too much; I took the box back and grab­bed my refund from Curry’s, one hour after purchase. In late Decem­ber I pic­ked up my sig­nal boos­ter from Bris­tol, bought the same box again and hey presto – 40 vie­wa­ble channels.

It’s been a month or so since I got the box, and a num­ber of things have star­ted to annoy me. The main nig­gle is the cons­tant crashing of the firm­ware – I’ll be merrily flic­king through chan­nels and all of a sud­den it will turn itself off and on again, expe­rience a con­trol freeze up (the TV sig­nal shall con­ti­nue but all con­trol is remo­ved – for­cing me to switch the unit off and on at the switch) or sud­denly cease ren­de­ring the back­ground image ele­ments for the EPG and info bar – which again do not return until a reset. Tem­po­rary in-viewing pro­blems also inc­lude a perio­di­cal five to ten seconds of black and white, cross chan­nel inter­fe­rence (par­ti­cu­larly anno­ying if the inva­ding chan­nel has scro­lling text) and all on top of the ugly low sig­nal digi­tal pau­sing and image dis­tor­tion that occurs during bad weather. The remote con­trol inter­face is also enti­rely unin­tui­tive, although it is slick – if I had to give a posi­tive point to this pseudo review.

In conc­lu­sion, do not buy the Phi­lips DTR220, it is a hunk of junk with a brand name.

To con­ti­nue in the same vein, my tele­vi­sion comes equip­ped with a soli­tary SCART con­nec­tor. I regu­larly switch bet­ween my Xbox 360, Wii, PC out­put and Free­view box. This wouldn’t be a pro­blem if an affor­da­ble yet decent switch-able multi SCART adap­ter exis­ted. Fin­ding a manual switching device that doesn’t use auto­ma­tic sig­nals to change the dis­play is dif­fi­cult enough – given that my PC is on all the time this isn’t an option. Robert and Dyas do stock one, a 4 con­nec­tor with push but­ton switch – fan­tas­tic. Up until the point you plug it in and get hideous inter­fe­rence bet­ween all the SCART chan­nels and inces­sant screen flic­ke­ring. Pro­duct retur­ned and I’m still looking.

Ideally I would upgrade my 20 inch CRT to a flat screen LCD, but the TV isn’t that old and it does its job well enough – except when it comes to Xbox 360 gaming, but that isn’t its fault. Of the 4 games I have, only one has legi­ble on-screen text – the others all result in tiny blu­rred text that is impos­si­ble to read – ren­de­ring it use­less. This is enti­rely a design flaw – expec­ting all users to own an LCD is an outra­geous assump­tion that con­ti­nues to thwart me. Gah!

Ok, elec­tro­nics rant over, time to get back to fixing some ses­sion stuff.

Since I have been wor­king at Ocado, deve­lo­ping my own sites and from time to time pla­ying Halo 3 on Xbox live, I haven’t had time to finish off watching Twin Peaks sea­son 2 or the last two and a half sea­sons of The X-files. It doesn’t help the­re­fore that I have been subsc­ri­bing myself to even more tele­vi­sion that I simply don’t have the time for anymore.

Bos­ton Legal:

Cali­for­ni­ca­tion:

Batt­les­tar Galac­tica Razor

Then there were the films…

Super­bad (awesome)

Shoo­ter (meh)

The Bourne Ulti­ma­tum (awesome)

1408 (good)

Dis­tur­bia (much bet­ter than expec­ted) — Shia is someone to watch.

Shoot Em Up (a good laugh but nothing fabulous)

Last wee­kend we were reve­lling in it. England had knoc­ked out France in the Rugby World Cup final and they were on their way to a Satur­day show down in Paris with South Africa. Lewis Hamil­ton was top of the F1 Cham­pionship lea­der board with one race to go and the Scot­land and England foot­ball teams were minu­tes away from Euro 2008 qualification.

Come Sun­day eve­ning and we’ve got nothing.

England dra­ma­ti­cally lost 2–1 to Rus­sia away from home due to a poor penalty call and some shoddy goal-keeping and defen­ding. Put­ting qua­li­fi­ca­tion out of England’s con­trol, and rel­ying on a Rus­sian fal­ter against Israel. Scot­land meanwhile left them­sel­ves the task of nee­ding to beat Italy at home to qua­lify, after their torrid dis­play in Geor­gia, losing 2–0. This all hap­pe­ned on Wed­nes­day. Next up is Satur­day, and with thou­sands of English fans, the rugby team are in Paris for the World Cup Final. Whilst a gallant and brave per­for­mance, a demo­ra­li­sing disa­llo­wed try and some lack of dis­ci­pline and BAM, the final is lost. Now our nation’s hopes of a great vic­tory fall to the young roo­kie Lewis Hamil­ton, with a second place posi­tion on the star­ting grid in Bra­zil for the last race of the sea­son. Things quickly go wrong as Hamil­ton falls to the back of the pack with car pro­blems, finishing the race in 7th, resul­ting in a Raik­ko­nen race and cham­pionship win.

It seems I was lucky enough to have the plea­sant dis­trac­tion of going to Lei­ces­ter for the wee­kend for Samantha’s birth­day, dra­wing me away from such shat­te­ring rea­li­sa­tions. So whilst England lost — left, right and cen­tre, I merrily drank wine, ate Risotto and sam­pled fine Hotel Cho­co­lat delights. It seems I was lovingly spa­red this time around, gif­ted with a won­der­fully rela­xing long wee­kend. On this occa­sion I am thank­ful to have mis­sed out on all the spor­ting commotion.