Ticket prices for Glastonbury keep going up. According to the official site, they are now going to be £105 plus booking fee. Funny, after the license was approved they said they’d be the same price as last year (£97). About a week later this went up to £100, and now it’s £105… Tickets don’t go on sale for another month, are they just going to keep going up at weekly intervals?
Maybe Thom Yorke asks for a massive rider…
I went to see “The Hours” this weekend. Cracking film, definitely recommended and worthy of its inevitable Oscar success. The acting, in particular, is superb. As a resident of South-West London, however, two things particularly amused me (unintentionally so). In the film, Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, living in Richmond in the early 20th Century, struggling with suicidal tendencies and writing “Mrs Dalloway”.
At one point she sends one of her servants off to London to buy ginger, telling her that if she catches the 12:30 train, she’ll be there around 1. Nice to see that, in 80 years, the trains haven’t got any quicker.
Later on, she argues with her husband about the fact that they are living in Richmond, where she feels trapped and suicidal, and not London. He counters that it was precisely to save her from herself (the voices, etc.) that they moved away from London to the relative peace of the suburbs. There was some laughter in the cinema when she gave her response to this (I was watching this in Clapham), and there’s surely a missed opportunity that this didn’t make it onto the posters around here: “Given a choice between Richmond and death”, she explains, “I choose death.”
I’ve been to “Edwards” in Richmond on a Saturday night before now. I think I know what she means.
So I watched the Brit awards last night. Funny, I thought 2002 was quite a good year for music, as there are so many decent bands around at the moment, but apparently I was mistaken. No, it appears that Will Young was the best new act to come out of this country last year (so to speak – sorry that is an appalling joke isn’t it?).
All in all, it was perhaps the dullest ceremony in recent memory. [I mean what, exactly, is the point of getting a celebrity – maybe even one you’ve flown half way around the world – to introduce the nominations if all they are going to do is wander up to the stage and literally say just the three words “The nominations are…”]
Apparently the major labels that run these things have no interest in promoting any of the genuinely exciting bands around at the moment; they’re only interested in trying to shift a few more copies of “A Rush Of Blood To The Head” and then trotting out a curiously goateed Tom Jones to try to flog a few copies of the recent album that absolutely no one has bought.
All that, and there wasn’t even a Jarvis Cocker-style incident to write about. Jees, even the Chumbawamba/John Prescott water-throwing non-incident would have done. Bring back Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood, all is forgiven…
I get a lot of spam email.
Yes, I know it’s a bit of a hackneyed contemporary cliche to get upset about this, but it still bothers me. And ok, so I have a fair idea why I would get a lot of spam, I mean there’s:
(1) the Hotmail address, from surely the most spammed email provider of all;
(2) the fact that I’m signed into MSN all day at work (hmm, there may be a pattern developing here);
(3) the fact that my email address is plastered all over this site;
(4) the fact that I have been merrily giving the address out to any old website that asked for it for the last 3 years (case in point: I have a yahoo address that I don’t really use much and certainly never give out that hasn’t had a single bit of spam since I got it).
Anyway, so I have, I suppose, been asking for it. But it’s not so much the volume of junk that really gets me, rather the (often contradictory) nature of the subject matter. I do have to wonder where some of these people got my address from.
Which web form, exactly, was it that I filled in where I mistakenly checked the boxes to indicate that I am an overweight, debt-ridden, balding gentleman who has issues with the size and performance of his, ahem, manhood? (Some kind of Philip Larkin figure, perhaps?) Furthermore, what kind of a depraved human being do they think I am that I would interested in an email such as the one that arrived in my inbox this morning with the subject heading “Sticky Horse Sex”? (Despite my curiosity I somehow managed to resist opening that one. I am at work you know).
I mean, really, who do these people think I am?
Oh, and if you’re interested, this is what started it all.
Drinking on a school night is never a good idea.
Glastonbury’s on then. Radiohead to headline the Friday night.
Fan-bloody-tastic.
The hearing for the Glastonbury festival license is tonight.
Let’s hope it goes well.
Hmm. I must have missed the increased security presence at Heathrow this weekend. I didn’t even see a tank.
Very disappointing.
Then again… I’m supposed to be flying out of Heathrow tomorrow so I’ll be able to report first hand on the new “security measures” (assuming I make it back in one piece that is).
That’s always assuming I actually get away in the first place after the saga that was getting my tickets from lastminute.com, whose customer “service” leaves rather a lot to be desired.
Are tanks exempt from the congestion charge?