Expensive weekend

After wasting everyone's time waxing lyrical about Nathan Barley in two posts, I went out on Friday night and forgot to tape the first episode. Pah. When's it coming out on DVD?
The Londonist reviews it.

On the bright side, I ended up on a minor pub crawl around Kentish Town with some pals (including Inane) who are looking to buy a pub lease in the area. We were scoping out the competition, so it was market research, really...
Covered the Assembly House, The Bull & Gate and the Abbey. First two were good; the third (where we ate) was a bit godawful - cramped seating, bench-table height ratio made for tricky eating and it's generally pricey. And my burger and chips came on a block of wood as opposed to a plate. It's enough to make you vote UKIP.
Shame, though. When I was nine years old, if someone had brought me burger and chips on a bit of wood, I would have hooted and hollered with delight and promptly demanded all my meals (including soup) on slabs of tree-trunk. If it had happened when I was nineteen, I would have immediately identified it as a restricted hardwood, organised a sit-in to protest rainforest destruction and had the place shut down. And now aged twenty-nine, it just annoys me. Hope it doesn't happen when I'm thirty-nine. I'll probably smash myself over the head with it. I digress...

More drink when I got back home (stupid Scattergun), crashed out at about 3.30am. Got rudely awoken at 7.00am by the local accredited representative of Her Majesty's Royal Mail brandishing a parcel from Foyles. No Christmas box for him. Turned out to be Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, so it wasn't all bad. It's shaping up to be a good read.
Pottered about in the usual dazed and confused fashion but managed to catch some of Midsomer Murders, so the day wasn't wasted.
Scooted off to meet Nomen Luni at 43 South Molton Street nr Bond Street- one of the more achingly trendy joints I've been to of late. We lowered the tone quite badly.
The upstairs bar was hired out, the very nice looking downstairs bar was simply not open and the ground floor where we ate and drank was festooned with boxes of Weetabix, children's drawings and Whizzer & Chips and Dandy annuals. Hmm. The food was wonderful, overpriced and came with an automatic 12.5% service charge. Ouch.
Then to Buttoned Down Disco to shake my booty like a mad thing to lovely tunes. Great fun. Left at three. Took a while to get home. Not so much fun.

Awakened fashionably late on Sunday, to find that Cursor had returned to the flat after his gigging tour of St Petersburg and environs. He brought me a couple of Russian Sherlock Holmes DVDs - details here. He knows me too well...
They're a series produced by Lenfilm for Soviet State telly from the late seventies to the mid eighties and still extremely popular in the CIS. It is assumed that all English people eat porridge for breakfast, simply because Holmes (Vasily Livanov) and Watson (Vitaly Solomin) do in these adaptations. They are extremely good programmes - well worth picking up if you like your Sherlock - and Solomin's Watson is terrific.

Popped out to Marks & Spencer for a bit of shopping, to find that they have brought out a range of meals called Gastropub.
Right, that's it I'm definitely voting UKIP...