Weeknotes #118: Culture, musicals and cheese

Culture, musicals, cheese and travel made for a joyful week.

Week commencing Monday, 21 April 2025

Several Italian cheeses were displayed at what appeared to be a delicatessen counter with handwritten price labels on small chalkboards. Artisanal Italian cheese display at Lina Stores delicatessen, featuring traditional varieties like Ubriaco, Fontina D.O.P., and Prosecco-aged cheeses with handwritten chalkboard price tags. Located at 18 Brewer Street in the heart of Soho, London, this beloved Italian delicatessen has been trading for 80 years since 1944.
Artisanal Italian cheese display at Lina Stores delicatessen

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 5/7. (71%). Office days 1/4. Total steps: 56,504

Life

  • Lovely Monday morning in Shrewsbury, and a train home the long way around because of engineering works. The train from Moor Street was busy, but we secured a seat, and that’s all that is really needed.
  • A not-so-secret leaving drinks happened on Friday night. A colleague is going for the second time, so I didn’t want a big event—delightful time with nice people.
  • Friday, to a small theatre in Lower Marsh to see The Rise and Fall of Vinnie and Paul, a musical based on Paul Gauguin’s turbulent cohabitation with Vincent van Gogh in 1888. Van Gogh’s infamous breakdown and the severing of his ear ended the piece. A truly intimate, small show—really well done.
  • Our Saturday cheese adventure started at Fortnum and Mason and ended in Neal’s Yard. There was much delicious cheese and some fizz.
  • Another new musical on Saturday, Stiletto: set in 18th-century Italy, follows Marco, a castrato singer, and Gioia, a talented black woman, whose love story is challenged by a murder. I learned the non-show meaning of Stiletto as part of this experience. Also, brilliant and deserves wider recognition.
  • To the Actors Church in Covent Garden for Songs I’ll Never Sing, a charity concert featuring West End performers singing songs outside their typical range, in aid of Chicken Shed and The Brain Tumour Charity. Always great singers, but it does feel quite wrong drinking alcohol in a church pew.

Media

  • I started it at the weekend, and by Tuesday I’d finished Careless People, a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat who joined Facebook and was there while I was. The book reveals a very different view of the company’s culture than I experienced, but the more I hear about things that happened around that time, I am beginning to think I was very sheltered.