Week commencing Monday, 24 November 2025
Quantified Self
- This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 6/7. (%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 60,736
Life
- Monday, Murder She Didn’t Write (Duchess Theatre) was a one-night-only, improvised comedy murder mystery, structured like an Agatha Christie whodunnit, where almost every element of the plot is created live in the moment. A Whose Line Is It Anyway? for cosy-murder fanatics: genuinely hilarious.
- Disconnected ideas: my bank is so concerned about fraud that it flagged a payment from my account to another of my accounts as fraudulent. It then answered with the name of a bank I don’t technically bank with when I tried to call. But at least the team knew I was on hold for 25 minutes.
- Related: everybody tells me the last person who tried to ‘fix’ my guttering was a cowboy. They then turn out to exhibit similar behaviours. Ah.
- Wednesday, to see Starlight Express in its new Wembley home (again). What I said last time stands. The cast still makes a concerted effort to get the audience to cheer for the trains and clap along, and tonight, just as on the last visit, they succeeded only with a minuscule portion of the crowd. Why they cannot induce more vocal support for the engines is beyond me. But I still loved it.
- I avoided a work social because, by the end of the day, I was exhausted.
- Forty minutes on hold with HMRC, and I didn’t get the answers I was looking for. At least they’re going to send me a letter.
- Saturday, to Manchester mainly to see the Piccadilly Radio exhibition at Central Library. It’s only a small display set across three listening posts in the library’s main entrance. Fascinating to hear and see all about Piccadilly from an audio collection now curated by the library. It took me back to my childhood.
- Afterwards, we walked to another library, the John Rylands Library. It’s a beautiful building, one of the finest neo-Gothic examples in Europe, and inside it felt closer to Dracula’s castle than a building of learning.
- Lunch in Manchester was at Sexy Fish. It had a great vibe and fantastically friendly service.
- Sunday, to the Ideal Home Christmas Show. We ended up with an LED Christmas tree light, and there were plenty of present options: perfume, solar panels, hot tubs, toys, cake mixes, and electronic chopping devices. These shows are always fun, and we did come away with a few bits, but they’re also full of things we would never want.
Media
- I continue to enjoy Celebrity Race Across the World.
- More episodes of Down Cemetery Road. I’m finding it intriguing and tightly put together. I can see the quirky echoes of Slow Horses, although it’s very much its own thing. Emma Thompson is excellent.