Last weekend, I got the equivalent of one of those experiences where people who baffle me go into a sauna (bad enough in itself), then run out into the snow. Saturday night: the first big gig I've been too in a year or more, Crystal Castles. Who at least have an audience smaller than those at the last big gig I went to, Magazine - they mostly appeared to be tiny children with brightly-coloured hair or Siouxsie Sioux eye make-up, which makes for an adorable agglomerate. Brixton Academy remains a great venue, despite the management's best efforts, and Crystal Castles continue to be one of the few modern electronic bands who really impress me, on account of having a bit of Digital Hardcore somewhere in their make-up - that old idea of a song at once physically painful and catchy. Plus, all the lightshow one generally only sees at gigs which are supposed to be A Bit Much in films. In short: delicious overstimulation. And then, on Sunday, Boring, a day of talks devoted to the mundane. Obviously the idea is that considered in enough detail, the most superficially tedious things can reveal fascination - or terror, in the case of ASMR, a subculture of which I was happily unaware before rhodri's talk.
Conclusion: they were both lots of fun. But I still have no intention of rushing out of a sauna into the snow, thanks all the same.

Otherwise: went for a wander with Paynter and found various odd little London delights along our way, all of which were supposed to be closed but, because it was one of those evenings, weren't. Such as a Soho gallery full of clocks become castles, and mutant taxidermy. Or an enormous free tire slide plonked in Leicester Square as promotion for a film where Wolverine plays the Easter Bunny. Finally managed to beat Charlie Higson and David Arnold at the pub quiz - but on a week where they weren't on form, so as to still only make third. Perhaps we shouldn't have named ourselves after a supervillain team, given their success rate? Saw the Pre-Raphaelite and Turner Prize exhibitions, each containing some good stuff alongside a great deal of embarrassing filler, though obviously the dead guys' ratio was a bit better. Went to another gig, at more my usual level, where Joanne Joanne were again delightful (they've started to incorporate songs from the cocaine soul years now), and Shrag played their song very well. Went on a Tubewalk, and discovered that in Lambeth it's easier to find leopard pigs than a bearable pub; the first was playing the sort of jazz that gives jazz a bad name, the second too full and too gastro for words (and had signs urging us to 'follow our banter online'), and the third was set on closing half of its floorspace for no apparent reason. And they wonder why people prefer to drink at home now.

The Guard is a black comedy starring Brendan Gleeson, a man whose face is so expressive that I could happily watch a film of him doing his weekly shop. It somehow comes across as low key in spite of all the swearing and violence - much like In Bruges, which also stars him and whose director is The Guard's director's brother. Also like In Bruges, the rest of the cast is packed with great actors - Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong as a particularly philosophical drug dealer, Don Cheadle as the FBI agent out of water in rural Ireland. Strangely moving, unlike How to Steal a Million, which I'd seen years ago and which is still as gorgeously empty as prime Wodehouse, a beautiful insubstantial rainbow which would evaporate without Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn anchoring it by sheer charm. Both are of course vastly better than Prometheus, two hours of sound and fury signifying nothing but the bleeding obvious. But then, I've already discussed that on Facebook, haven't I? The same place we all now tend to put anything pithy, anything intended to get a mass response. The latest wave of spambots has taken me back to a few old entries on here, just to delete their spoor, and I'm amazed each time by what a busy poster I was. So young, too - there's a spot of anti-RTD hysteria in one of the entries I saw which makes me sound about 12. Even some of the longer, more considered content isn't here anymore - my book reviews are on Goodreads now. And yet, this is kept going, in part simply because it has been kept going, and so it would seem crazy to abandon it now - a very London attitude, beyond which, I never did like lines drawn under the past. And I suppose now, unlike February, June, July and October 2012, I've made it at least one more month with more than a single post. Livejournal Abides.

Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies is not only a very funny film; it has more to say about race in America than all that Oscar-winning dreck like Monster's Ball and Crash could even dream of.

Went to see the Cuming Museum's exhibition of painter-magician Austin Osman Spare's work last week, and very good it was too; it's finished now, but here's Alan Moore with his thoughts and a brief tour. A slight trek, but aside from finally getting an excuse to use the Waterloo & City line on my return, it was more powerful seeing Spare's work on his old turf than it would have been in the centre, more in keeping with how he exhibited during his life (in local pubs, for the most part). It makes sense that I heard about him mainly through comics - Moore and rival writer-magus Grant Morrison are both enthusiasts - because most of the things his art reminded me of were comics art. The self-portraits reminded me of Glenn Fabry, the pencils of Dave McKean as much as Aubrey Beardsley, the most deeply spiralling magical pieces of Billy the Sink if he had more respect for anatomy. And Spare's vision of the collective unconscious as landscapes made of faces...it was a little bit Source Wall, and even more the garden of the shamans from The Authority. Two pieces particularly wowed me - L'Apres Midi d'un Faune, which I think was done without taking the pencil of the page, and looked to me less like a faun than a satyr or maybe Machen's terrifying Pan, and The Evolution of the Human Race*, a still image which somehow evokes the vertiginous quality of deep time.

Other than that, a quiet weekend; it's hardly been the weather to encourage much in the way of Outside. But of course I made it along to angelv's apparently, regrettably final Don't Stop Moving for pop galore. If this really is the end, it will be missed.

*Speaking of evolution, I loved the way David Attenborough's First Life packed the whole story of vertebrates into its last five minutes. And pointed out that the way insects come together into colonies, or superorganisms, is basically the same process which first saw cells aggregating into multicellular life. But in particular, the section on eyes - ranging from the adorable Cambrian sea creature which had five, to trilobites with crystal lenses - should be injected directly into the brain of every creationist moron who says "What about the eye, eh?" and then thinks they've won.

But I was away, in a strange land where wild cursors make posting anything longer than a Facebook status a bit of a trial. The train to the West spends much of its route running alongside streams, and uneven, overgrown waste ground, and hills, and woods, and all the best sorts of terrain for dens and playing soldiers and general mucking about. And alongside that route during August - admittedly not a summery August yet, but not a foul one either - I didn't see a single gagle of kids taking advantage of that. Terribly sad. Though I did see a steam train on an adjacent track, and while I was in the West I saw a badger (as I may have mentioned elsewhere), and an awful lot of butterflies (some of whose names I can even remember), and a properly old-school fete, and oneofthose, and the Dark Morris, and a country band playing gloriously inappropriate songs about incest to an afternoon family audience.

In my bag for the trip: two books, which I knew wouldn't be enough but there was stuff to be borrowed at the other end. Finished the first, Arthur C Clarke's Imperial Earth, and found the afterword defending the plot's use of coincidence (which I hadn't even registered as a major factor) with reference to The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler. The other book I'd taken was, inevitably, by Koestler, whom I had never previously read.

Anyway! There are various other odds and sods about which I shall likely post tomorrow, but meanwhile, how good was the concluding Sherlock? The second episode, aside from its opening fight, I found so dull that I ended up fast-forwarding some of it, which I almost never do (even during the longeurs of, say, Notorious* yesterday, I only skimmed the paper. But then, that was also showing live). Last night, though, I was rushing home from the pub because I knew I wanted to see this one as soon as possible. And oh, Gatiss did not disappoint. Maybe he just needs to concentrate on writing more Holmes, because I certainly don't see any case for letting him loose on Who again, and we do need more Holmes. All the lovely little nods both to what Doyle did (Bruce-Partington) and what he didn't (I'm unaware of a story which addresses the implicit existence of 221A Baker Street). The modernisation worked so well, bringing home the unpalatability of Holmes by showing such modern manifestations of his monstrous solipsism, and if I thought the emphasis on boredom as a shared motive for the two consultants was a little 'Killing Joke', well, I couldn't call it implausible. My only quibble was with two of the 'facts'; varicose veins are genetic, and Titan is not the largest of moons.
Also, where he tells the imprisoned man that of course he won't be hung? I have always lamented missing my chance to do that.

*North by North West excepted, I don't think Hitchcock brings out the best in Cary Grant; I didn't get on with Suspicion either. Hitchcock often seems to need a cruelty in his male leads, and as much as I love him, Grant just can't project that. Claude Rains was excellent, though.

More than the usual weekend dose of Doctor Who; on Friday, after catching my first seven elephants (including James Bond elephant!) and a brief stop at Poptimism, I was one of the five Doctors at Are Friends Eclectic?. The eighth, obviously, because his TV career may not have been great but his outfit was the best. There may have been certain breaches of the First Law of Time and the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. AFE is great.
And then on Saturday, 'Vampires of Venice'. For some reason I hadn't got that excited in advance of this episode, in spite of having already seen the library card business. And there was plenty more to love, mainly in the interplay between the Doctor, Amy and Rory - the bouncing up and down with excitement, "let's not go there", hushing, combat deployment of Your Mum gags. But ultimately, it dragged a bit, resolution by Adam West-style climbing was anticlimactic, and how did it make any sense at all that a species change should be easier than a sex change? Not a disaster by any means, but a flawed mid-season entertainment. It's weird how even with Moffat in charge, Who is never consistently perfect. Perversely, I think it's somehow right that way.

Saturday: another Keith TOTP/Indelicates show. I've run out of things to say about these except that I swear 'I Hate Your Band' and 'Savages' get even better every time. Some Thee Faction-style intra-band ideological controversy when Simon said "our drummer's had to go to emergency homosexual rehabilitation camp"; this surprised me if only because Julia let him get away with "she said 'snatch'!" again. There was another band in between whose set seemed to last about 26 years, of which the first song was OK. They tried to flog us vinyl afterwards and I could quite legitimately reply "I don't buy records from people who diss Tesla". This on a night when I'd already discussed unicycles with the Vessel. I love my life. Would have hung around to give Black Daniel another chance, but my presence was required for dancing to pop at Don't Stop Moving. Mmmm, pop.

Strolled over to Hampstead yesterday for a combined birthday/engagement/welcome back to Britain drinks. Saw two puzzling things en route. One was a life-sized model camel which I somehow missed last time I went to ALE MEAT CIDER, even though it's just down the road. The other was a street sign where the legitimate N7 had been crossed out and graffiti added: 'N19! w@nkers'. I've heard about these youth gangs going by postcode affiliation, but they seem not really to have grasped how the system works. Terribly sad. Though as a Shield/Sons of Anarchy fan, I have to wonder whether these N19 loyalists call themselves One-Niners.

No, not the Ian Curtis flick, which I've still yet to catch and increasingly suspect I'm not that bothered about seeing. Just the theme of several recent bits and pieces:

- Aside from the Alice-themed Are Friends Eclectic? and a little light Saturday pubbing, most of my recent outings have seen me tramping around Islington via its libraries in search of some items they definitely owned at one point but now seen unable to locate. I've found various other stuff instead, of course, of which more in a moment, and I've also found things in between - a section of Regent's Canal I'd always missed before, for one, which feels like our own Little Venice. But also the city farm in Paradise Park (which, disappointingly for Divine Comedy fans, is not called Paradise Farm). A rather feeble effort compared to Mudchute's, it is nonetheless decked around with dozens of signs warning you to disinfect your hands the second you've stopped touching the animals AND wash your hands before you leave AND don't even think about eating in the area (except for the cafe, obviously, that has special magic anti-germ force fields). Yet I remember plenty of farm trips when I was young, or just wanders down to the end of the road to feed the cows, and while if they licked your hand it smelled rather pungently of baked beans such that you probably would wash your hand before eating anything anyway, I don't recall any of us ever being struck down by whatever terrible blight these signs imply we should fear.

- Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner - one of the other things I found in that library tour, and a book I borrowed without even reading the blurb, just for that name. While the story of gin's origins would be interesting in itself (its inventor was one Franciscus de la Boe of the University of Leyden - is gin the true Face of Boe?), Warner is more intrigued by the moral panic which ensued as a prototype of modern drug scares. And this is very much The Wire in periwigs, with the counterproductive legislation, the product getting stepped-on, the snitches and the underclass. The main difference being that the paternalism back then was more blatant:
"skirmishes over drugs are necessarily skirmishes over how people live - and sometimes seem to waste - their lives. When we react against a new drug and the effect it might have on other people's behaviour, we are also reacting against the culture in which the drug has taken root. This is what makes the rhetoric of 18th century reformers so refreshing: unlike modern reformers, they were unabashedly elitist. What they had to say may not have been attractive, but at least it was honest."
The lawmaking classes back in the gin age wanted the proletariat healthy and fertile, so the population would keep growing, so that there were plenty of soldiers and sailors to be expended, and plenty of labourers to keep wages low. Those priorities may have changed slightly as mercantilism has given way to consumerism, but not that much - just witness the horror with which the CBI greets any increase in the minimum wage, let alone the slim chance of that legislation actually being enforced. Warner is fully aware of how much continuity exists and, after a survey of the nineties War on Drugs, finishes with predictions about what might be the next drug scares now crack had been defanged, assuming they would either involve new drugs or new settings for drugs, not seeing implicit in her own account that you can manufacture a panic out of nowhere if you need one. Hence the absurd and mendacious 'super-skunk' fear being put about these days - because when you have a generation of parents and legislators who mostly tried dope themselves back in the day, you can't expect them to fall for the same 'reefer madness' lines unless you claim those reefers are a new and deadly upgrade. Hence 'binge drink Britain', essentially the gin panic with a miniskirt and a fake tan.

- As regards consumerism taking over from mercantilism, I finally saw John Carpenter's They Live. In 1988 this may have seemed like SF/horror, or black comedy, or satire - now, except for one interesting hypothesis about why governments and businesses aren't doing more about climate change, it's mainly stating the obvious. Carpenter proposes special sunglasses which enable you to see the coded messages in advertisements - messages like OBEY and STAY ASLEEP. In a world where Carling, a supposedly 'fun' beverage, plugs itself with a simple BELONG, who needs the shades? The CCTV cameras are obvious now too, we just ignore them anyway. And as for the big speech by the member of the elites who've sold humanity out to to Them: "I thought you understood. It's business, that's all it is. You still don't get it. There ain't no countries anymore. They're running the whole show. They own the whole planet. They can do whatever they want." Tell me something I don't know.

Up to Kilburn for the first Vichy Government show since the US election. New songs abound, a particular highlight being the typically cheerful 'Siberia' - it may be their take on politics and society which first slaps you in the face with Vichy, but sometimes I think it's the ones which apply the same despair in the personal sphere which I love most. Andrew, ever encouraging, identifies it as 'Winter Forever Part 2'. This isn't entirely unfair, but nor is it any bad thing.
Beforehand, having spent a while reading in Kilburn's oddly congenial little park, I meet the troops at the Black Lion, which soon gets bonus points for giving us free samples of a new Smirnoff vodka - also what I initially take for shots in tubes, a bit like those Eerie Pub cocktails. Fortunately, before I can drink any I am informed that they are actually glowsticks. Everyone else has already gone the bracelet route, so I make mine into a glowing collar like I've been enlisted in the Nu-Rave Penal Battalion. I am already wearing my MAGNETO WAS RIGHT t-shirt* and red Converse; Johnny helpfully informs me that I "look like even more of a dick than usual".
On Saturday, the meet-up is held at the Highbury Corner Wetherspoon's, who have introduced something new and strange: alcoholic ginger beer. It is yummy and, if not quite Ginger And Free as would be appropriate pre-David Devant, it is at a promotional price. I approve. Wetherspoon's may have its flaws, but compared to meeting at the dismal Famous Cock it's the bloody Ritz. I do briefly set foot in the Cock later, to tell Aug not to have a swift pint because Devant are on in five. He suggests halves instead, I acquiesce. Except they don't have any Strongbow. For once, because I have no reason to remain in this shambles any longer, I am in a perfect position to do as I always wish in this circumstance - shout "Well why isn't there an upturned glass on the pump, then? Fvck's sake, it's not exactly complicated!", and exit.
Keith TOTP is on first, and as ever his UK Minor Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band has something new to offer. A sober member! A bassoon (an instrument I have always loved on account of its looking like a rocket launcher)! And a version of Devant's 'One Thing After Another' which really shouldn't have worked but was in fact astonishing.
Then Dream Themes, who cover TV themes, rather well. Although hearing a version of The A-Team theme in a club does give me major Spaced flashbacks.
Finally, David Devant, who I think I've seen live more than any other band, but who even when they're just playing the classics, thrill me every time. Lovely.

Yesterday I saw a butterfly die. It fluttered down on to a leaf, and as I moved over to take a closer look (I'd not seen one sat still in a while), it folded both wings over to one side. I blew, to wake it up, and instead it just fell off the leaf and lay still. I felt guilty about disturbing its final rest, so I feel the least I can do in recompense is memorialise it here.

Any song called 'Tesla's Future War' needs to be a great deal better than the extant example of the form.

*Selected for the Vichy show because it's probably the most confrontational garmen I own, though I always tend to forget that on this parallel it's not really all that controversial, because here Magneto is a fictional character. As I am walking to the station, musing on this, a guy comes the other way with the exact same problem: he's wearing the logo of the Sinestro Corps. We do our best not to acknowledge each other.

So it's precisely 105 years since the day on which it's set, and I've just finished Ulysses. Which in places is precisely as obscene and as incomprehensible and as up its own (and other) arses as the haters ever claimed - a particularly trying section for me being 'Sirens', which felt like trying to read a ringtone. But which is also so rich and so full and so alive. Whenever people bug me to write a novel, I tell them that I've only ever had two ideas for one, and I got beaten to them both. One was about a city in a state of existential collapse, citizens caught in the fall-out from a war they couldn't even comprehend - and just as I was starting to work out how that might play, three other people produced it (two of them called Jeff, which left me suspicious of Jeffs for a while). All very good, though, so if anything it just saved me some trouble. The other didn't even have a plot, so much as a style - the idea of a story which was perfectly in every moment, protean, shifting its form to follow the defining mood of each incident. Well, it turns out James Joyce beat me to it 55 years before I was even born, even if he left out the full-on action adventure chapter I think might have made it even more complete. I suppose in expressing the infinite richness of a single day, Ulysses might have inspired my favourite album ever, The Divine Comedy's Promenade, and that was always going to incline me in its favour. But still I thank heavens that I read it for pleasure rather than studying it. With something like this, or Gravity's Rainbow, I have to get into the flow of the prose, let it wash over me, appreciate it like music rather than trying to make sure I have the full measure of each individual word. If I'd run into it during my degree, I'd have managed maybe two chapters of notes, quit and bluffed, like I did with Henry James (to whom I've never returned). And I was going to say now that this was the last book I felt any obligation to read, that now I'm truly free...except I just caught sight of that copy of Don Quixote on the shelf. Not just yet, though, eh?
(I forget - has League of Extraordinary Gentlemen referenced Ulysses yet? If not, the obvious point of contact would be M'Intosh. We never do find out who he is, so I think maybe Quartermain)

Of course, because I had to finish this on Bloomsday, and didn't really want to get underway on any other big reads in the meantime, I was rather kicking around for shorter stuff to read these last few days, having got to the end of the penultimate chapter on Friday. So I very nearly finished Saturday's paper on Saturday, and have been getting through a lot of short stories, and yesterday I went to the park to read about two outsiders who rose to lead great empires - Benjamin Disraeli and Conan. Somehow I don't think those points in common would have seen them become great friends, though. Anyway, there was some canine event in the park, but I didn't notice any more dogs than usual - just bigger dogs. At least three which were bigger than most people I know, each of a different breed and each with a different owner. Also, I noticed grave goods. I'm used to floral tributes and pictures when someone has died young, but on a tree in the park it was instead a birthday of the deceased being marked, and as well as photos, notes and flowers, the friends had left vodka and Red Bull.

Primeval cancelled; should have known ITV wouldn't want to spoil their record by continuing to produce a decent show. You can't leave Danny Quinn stuck at the dawn of man, you sods!

Finally saw cult 1979 New York gang classic The Warriors last night and dear heavens, was ever a film this side of 300 so stunningly homoerotic? All the gangs in their little uniforms - and the baseballers in Boosh make-up look positively hetero next to the Warriors themselves in their lovely little leather waistcoats. Any attempt to dally with girls instead leads to danger - and any resistance to the idea of eg pulling a train on a lone girl is taken to mean one is "turning faggot". Because we all know how straight it is for lots of men to share one girl, right? See also: footballists.
Then made the mistake of trying to watch My Monkey Baby, about Americans who treat monkeys as their children. Sounded cute, if fairly TV Go Home; was in fact deeply distressing. One woman who looked like every enveloping mother an insecure male author ever created to be feared talked about how, if she could, she'd have given her real children a pill to keep them babies forever - and now she had a monkey to dress up and make up, and that was the next best thing! A couple newer to the practice went to pick up their 'daughter' - and took her out through the breeding cages, where her real mother flipped out and ate the poffle from the microphone. And they were surprised. They were surprised that she didn't want her baby stolen by lunatics.

Still not quite sure what to make of the new Patrick Wolf album. Each of the others was a thing unto itself, a world entire - and I could see how people might like one album by him but not him as an act, which interested me. But the new one, for all the talk of how he had more creative freedom now and could do exactly what he wanted...well, it's mainly just a harder-edged Magic Position interspersed with Wind in the Wires ballads. Which doesn't make it bad by any means, because those are great templates of which I'm certainly not bored yet, but does make it less of a revelation than any of its predecessors. I've still yet to have an album really knock me over this year.

Black Plastic on Saturday was a classic example of how London's greedy venues threaten to cripple their own trade with the short-termist desire for a buck; the Star had also booked in two or three birthday parties, taking up lots of space (including, for the first few hours, what should have been the dancefloor) with people who had no particular interest in the music or the night. Or indeed, much interest in music in general; they were in a trendy East London venue, so whatever they were hearing, must be cool. Not cool enough to make them dance or anything, but cool enough that whatever had been played, wouldn't have been able to scare them off. Even once the tables finally moved, there were too many of them standing around talking, making the place feel like a bar, and have I ever mentioned how much I hate bars? I salute the courage and indefatigibility of the DJs for making sure that there were still classic moments in amongst all this, but why does doing a night in this city have to be such an uphill struggle?

The temperature seemed to be trying to cycle through three seasons in a day, but I finally made it down to Shooter's* Hill on Friday. I'm not sure quite why this had become such a goal of mine, even with the Luxembourg lyric bolstering the Alan Moore story about local boy Steve 'No Relation' Moore. Perhaps it's just like when you're looking for a particular pen absent-mindedly, and it imperceptibly mounts to become an obsessive hunt, because I can't claim any particular epiphany as the lodestone which was drawing me there. Although it is lovely...well, not so much the main road which takes you there, but you can start from Greenwich and wander through the bit of the park which always seems to get neglected in picnic season, with the flowers and the woodpeckers and deer. And then out across Blackheath, which is so open and happy in the sun, when the werewolves aren't out. And then the rather dusty, concrete, Ballardian stretch - but then you're between commons and woods and the sudden apparition of a tower which claims the awesome name of Severndroog Castle, and these are proper broad-leafed, light, English woods, where bluetits titter and kids are still making rope swings rather than doing anything edgy or urban or Mail-baiting. And if you carry on over the hill, and come out of the wood, you'll realise there's no postcode on the street sign, and you've accidentally walked out of London, and you need a drink and a sit down.

When Grant Morrison released Seaguy back in 2004, it wasn't very well received. The story of a superhero born too late, living in a world where everything is perfect (isn't it?) and there's no evil left to fight (is there?) just didn't seem to strike a chord in the boom years. Now we've realised that the whole age of ever-rising prosperity and ever-bigger plasma screens was a mirage, it looks so astonishingly prescient that one wonders at people ever missing the point. Perfect timing, then, for the sequel over which Morrison essentially held DC to ransom for his big event work, Slaves of Mickey Eye. Except now his point (those cuddly institutions who told you everything was OK? Do you really trust them?) seems almost too obvious. Prophecy's a tough game. Fortunately, there's quite enough Mad Brilliant Ideas TM, moments of genuine pathos and mysteries as yet unsolved to keep one interested beyond the obvious message. If you prefer the Invisibles and Filth Morrison to the superheroics (not that I've ever felt the distinction was particularly noticeable), then this one is for you.

*The apostrophe seems to come and go, but I prefer it with one.

I suppose with Google Streetview available my urban explorations have become even more inexplicable and archaic - but since when was that a bad thing? On Tuesday I took the W3 to the end of the line - the end I don't live at, clearly. All these years of seeing them headed to Northumberland Park, and now I've seen it. There isn't much to see; once you get past Wood Green and into darkest Haringey, through White Hart Lane and Tottenham High Road, it's only the odd name which gives you any clue you're in London - normally you can at least tell that you're in a crappy bit of London, but here you could be on the more depressing fringes of Derby, or even (gods help us) Leicester. I did manage to thread my way through an industrial estate to Tottenham Marshes, but even that...it has herons to disturb, and a canal boat population which seems to be halfway to becoming a pirate kingdom, but I have encountered no London open space so thoroughly littered. And once you start heading up towards Walthamstow (its border with Tottenham coming across as though it could easily be sealed in time of war), there's a uniquely disturbing nature reserve where it's difficult to tell how whoever's set up a makeshift shack in the middle of the thicket establishes boundaries with the cottagers of whom the ground provides copious evidence. I suppose wildlife often does best in environments least welcoming to humans, and this is hardly Chernobyl.

I'm sufficiently behind with Battlestar Galactica that, in the week where most people are still OMG-ing over the finale, I've just watched Razor. Which doesn't suck like some of the one-off episodes do, but has the common problem of retcons - why was this never mentioned before? Partly dodged by the focus on a new character, but again - why should I invest in this character when the mere fact of us being in a flashback is a pretty good clue that she's not going to make it? Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere, that is not a razor, you twits.
I really should get Season 4 pretty pronto.

Today: the zoo, and 18 Carat Love Affair at 93 Feet East (which works quite well, doesn't it, both starting with numbers like that).