Day: 4 December 2022

Weeknotes #20

Week commencing Monday, 28 November 2022

Peter Pan’s Labyrinth

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 6/7 and Move 6/7. (90%, a good week). Morning walks: 4/5. Total steps: 74,257

Life

  • So pleased that I managed to get out for my morning walk a couple of days this week. Another thing I am staring to track in these notes.
  • Friday night drinks at Smiths of Smithfield was a lot of fun even if the bar was a little loud with a couple of Christmas Party groups. The truffle burger is 100% recommended.
  • Sign of our times: Merriam-Webster has chosen ‘gaslighting’ as its word of the year for 2022 and in another sign of our working times, The Guardian is reporting that a hundred UK companies sign up for four-day week with no loss of pay which is quite an interesting trend given the state of the economy.
  • If you’re looking for some festive entertainment, the production of Peter Pan’s Labyrinth, a kind of panto or Christmas fairytale mashups, at The Vaults theatre near Waterloo is a joy. The Guardian sums it up as what happens “when JM Barrie meets the David Bowie fantasy movie, with a dash of Guillermo del Toro thrown in”.
  • Sunday was a frustrating rail-replacement bus service to Hampton Court Palace for the Festive Fayre. It was a bit smaller than the summer’s food festival but very enjoyable and I managed to get a couple of presents. We walked back to Kingston to catch the regular bus home which was much more pleasant.
  • And the Christmas tree went up this weekend.

Media

  • We started to watch Spirited with Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell. We got about half way through before calling it a night. It was entertaining, although not all the musical numbers grabbed me, and I am sure we will complete it in a couple of days.

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the original source above no longer works, these should.

the Da Vinci Code

It’s very easy to get sucked into the world Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code.

You may recall that I love my pulp fiction and, on the train, I finished the latest and greatest thriller, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. I picked it up in a sale in a bookstore in one of those three-for-two offers. Amazingly, I had missed all the buzz about it and it was only after I had started to read it that I looked around to see half of the people on the train reading the same book. It’s certainly grabbed the attention of London commuters. Anyway, time to review it for Amazon as I haven’t been keeping those up and my ranking has started to slip!

It’s very easy to get sucked into the world of Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. It’s a thriller from start to finish and one of those books that can have you hooked in just a few pages – you will be stealing yourself away to read the next chapter before you know it. Maybe you can see the blockbuster film or see the Ludlum or Grisham parallels but what makes this novel stand out from others is enormous amount of plot detail. Regardless of your opinion of Les Dossiers Secrets (or any of the premise behind the tale) the description of the artworks, relics and rituals in the novel is fascinating. Most importantly, however, the detail enhances the story rather than detracting from it. You may imagine that such vivid descriptions of paintings, churches or cryptology would slow the story-telling but the opposite is true: the finer points of this work add to the pace. It’s probably a novel you should re-read to see if you can decipher the codes when you know the answers and it’s certainly a novel that makes you want to delve into the history behind it. All in all, it’s a great suspense story that makes religious symbology entertaining.