Weeknotes #129: from the West End to Shropshire

Heat, theatre, travel, family, and music filled the week joyfully.

Week commencing Monday, 7 July 2025

Evening view of the London Palladium's exterior showing the illuminated Evita revival advertisement featuring Rachel Zegler, with the theatre's iconic signage and stage door visible in the atmospheric blue-tinted lighting.
Rachel Zegler Commands the West End

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 4/7; Exercise 2/7 and Move 2/7. (33%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 34,737

Life

  • Extreme heat this week. I’m getting used to 30º temperatures. At the end of the week, time in the garden was nice.
  • On Monday, we saw Jamie Lloyd’s Evita revival and, thus, the other side of the balcony scene we had seen last Saturday.
  • I thought it was a stunning performance, full of energy and excitement. Rachel Zegler and Diego Andrés Rodriguez were brilliant. It was different, without props or sets, and used very simple colours. I’ve never seen a standing ovation like this one.
  • Relatedly, on Tuesday I listened to a cast recording from an earlier revival. It lacked the energy of this latest version.
  • Trains: I received £2.54 in compensation for one of my delay repay claims, but the second came back with £18.36, so I think it was worth it.
  • More trains: I was delayed by over 90 minutes on a journey from Euston to Shropshire. Fortunately, my carriage had air-conditioning.
  • A weekend in Shrewsbury. Lovely tapas on Saturday night. Fixed Mum and Dad’s home phone after the EE engineer left them without a landline. Their garden is looking lovely, and it was good to be able to sit outside.
  • I don’t follow F1 as much as I used to, but this is a big story: Red Bull sack team principal Horner.
  • This week’s lesson from country music comes courtesy of Brandy Clark: “I hate stripes, and orange ain’t my colour, and if I squeeze that trigger tonight, I’ll be wearin’ one or the other, there’s no crime of passion worth a crime of fashion”.

Media

  • 7/7 Remembered: How London’s bus drivers got the city home on 7/7: “despite the fear and the images of one of their own vehicles ripped painfully apart, their city needed them, and they came”.
  • Game Changers Radio: Aircheck trauma. It’s real and it’s everywhere. As part of the conversation, the point that the creative process is subjective and provides the opportunity to learn was important.
  • The guest on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast Dinner’s on Me was Russell Tovey. A lovely conversation. The discussion about the shame of growing up gay in the 80s made me quite emotional.