Day: 7 April 2024

Weeknotes #63: A musical weekend

Airport time change, events, food quest, rail chaos, family celebration, musical, Bananarama.

Week commencing Monday, 1 April 2024

Bananarama on stage at The Palladium
Bananarama at The Palladium

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 3/7. (57%). Total steps: 64,405

Life

  • Last week’s notes were written in a departure lounge. This week’s in my lounge. Mine does not operate a one-out, one-in policy.
  • Never arrive at an airport at the precise moment the clocks go forward. The loss of an hour on the way home was unnerving.
  • I was a day out of sequence. Last Sunday was Esther’s birthday lunch and a Beatles night at The Crazy Coqs.
  • The quest for a ‘hot cross Bunettone’ (Panettone meets a hot cross bun in a spiced Italian cake) took us to Wimbledon. We are still looking for one.
  • There was nothing but rail chaos on Tuesday at Euston. We ended up taking the longer route from Marylebone, but it wasn’t much fun arriving over two hours late. The return train on Thursday was swift and efficient.
  • Mum and Dad’s Diamond Wedding lunch was great, and I made a short speech that got laughs in the right places. I’m glad I prepared something; nobody was expecting it. The card from the King and Queen had pride of place. I’m so happy that it worked out.
  • Related, I didn’t need the loaded fries in the bar in the evening. They were delicious.
  • Back at work on Friday. I don’t think people realised I’d be back before Monday. It gave me some time to go through everything that happened while we were away. The project I’m working on deployed our software, and everything ran smoothly.
  • Frank has a collection of dresses from divas across the years—think Judy, Dusty, Julie, and Agnetha (with a dash of Ethel Merman and Karen Carpenter thrown in)—which he is forced to give to a museum so that he can marry Alan. That’s the plot of Frank’s Closet, a musical we saw on Friday night. It was fun.
  • Saturday at The Palladium: Bananarama. The show ran continually for the allotted time, so Karen and Sarah did not chat. That’s sad, as they can be funny, and some stories from their 40 years in the business would have been interesting.
  • Related, there’s never enough time for all the hits, but the show was built around their greatest hits album, and I am not sure why they skipped some big numbers to play covers that are not part of their catalogue: Atomic, Lost in Music, and You Spin Me Round.
  • For the second week running, we went to The Crazy Coqs presents. Tonight, the songs of Disney and Pixar were performed. Eleanor Hudson also performed a medley of the big tunes from Frozen dressed as Elsa. I don’t think I have seen a costume at one of these nights previously.

Media

  • All of Us Strangers: It takes some time to work out the timeline of the characters and that they are being presented at different points along that line. And I am still trying to figure out what to make of the ending. I’ve been thinking about it since Thursday.
  • Radio Geek Out with three episodes of Crunch and roll: Dirk Anthony, Dave Kelly and Ben Jones. All wonderful but Ben’s story about leaving Absolute Radio and the subsequent dark times is really interesting to hear. People on the radio are not always upbeat.

Some People Are Helpful

The staff of the Orange shop in Wimbledon were very helpful. Thank you.

My mobile phone developed a fault. It started a few weeks ago, but has made the device unusable now. There’s an electrical noise that became so bad that other people couldn’t hear me. I could hear them, but they had no idea what I was saying. So, I went to talk to the people at Orange and discovered they don’t have the right phone on the insurance that I have been paying for. They said it’s my fault, I said it was their fault. Anyway, after much discussion, it appeared that I could upgrade for free anyway, so there’s really not that much difference.

I spent a day or two thinking about what to do. I have had a Palm Treo 600 for several years. I think I must have mentioned before that it is not a perfect telephone, but it does allow me to take a whole pile of numbers and information with me when I am on the road, and that is very useful indeed. So I decided to upgrade to the Treo 650. And that is where the problems started. The Orange shop I was in said that they have been unable to source a Treo for months, and the other central London outlets that I contacted said the same. Other networks now offer the Treo, so I contemplated switching, which is a big deal for me because I have an irrational loyalty to Orange despite recent poor service and packages I am not convinced are great value.

Fortunately, there were some very helpful people in the Orange store in Wimbledon. In fact, I can’t recommend that shop too highly, and that is the point of this post. While other shops were unhelpful, Wimbledon were fantastic. It might have helped that they actually had the phone I wanted in stock, but I think it deserves notice that they were more than helpful. So, on Wednesday, I walked out with a shiny new Treo 650. Let’s see what it’s like.