Stompy funtimes

On Friday I watched Saint Etienne's Finisterre film. Which was quite reminiscent of the Robinson film about London I watched a while back, except that being St Etienne's, it was still in love with the city. Not blindly, never that - it reminded me of GK Chesterton's (biased, but not wholly untrue) observation that believers are allowed moments of doubt, whereas sceptics don't allow themselves moments of belief. I'd just read a link alasdair had posted to Iain Sinclair on the Boris bikes, reading which I'd wondered - does Sinclair never have a day in London - the city that's made his name - where everything goes right, the birds are singing and people are smiling? I do. I had one when I went to the library and Tesco and the park after watching the film which acts as a sort of primer for days like that, in its meandering way. You don't have to be a St Etienne fan to enjoy it, so long as you're a London fan; there are occasional appearances from the band, but just as people in cafes or the like, because the film is no more or less their story than anyone else's. It's the story - or rather, a story - of the greatest city on Earth.
(Something else it had in common with the Robinson film - it wouldn't play properly. One scene in the middle stuck, and once I was past that, it ground to a halt before the end. When I get institutional loan DVDs of feature films, they always play fine. But once it's a meandering art film, glitcharama. Why is this? Are the discs weedier and less resilient, or are the fans more careless?)

Then on to the first tolerably large weekend of the new year: a wonderfully messy Nuisance on Friday and a West Country-style cider party on Saturday (complete with far too much Wurzels on Spotify), then a Sunday of culture/weird sh1t. The Museum of Everything is Peter Blake's collection of oddities, a sort of 20th Century Sir John Soane's where stuffed rats play cards while the rat police sneak up to raid them, miniature circus rides spin far too fast, old dolls and clowns are as creepy as ever, and a three-legged duck gets to look as stupid in death as he did in life. Even the gift shop (£25 for a candle?) and the loo (a door at either end? That would unnerve me even if I hadn't seen Zombieland the day before) are rum and uncanny. I don't think it's around for much longer but it's definitely worth a visit while it lasts. The evening was a Jackson's Way talkshopinar. Achieved! Nor has the week got off to a bad start; last night's bout of Monsterpocalypse was the first game I've beaten johnny_vertigen at in months. And quite the victory, too: any game where your giant robot can twat the other fellow's Godzilla-type with his sword, and then impale him on a big spiky alien building before a barrage of tank fire finishes the job, is a game of which I would approve even had I not been victorious.