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Well, it’s just as well that’s Sal’s having her Camden-based birthday drinks next weekend, otherwise we’d probably have been prevented from getting to dance like fools to indie tunes in the Barfly at the end of the evening due to half of Camden being on fire on Saturday night.

We were actually having a quiet night in on Saturday entirely unaware of anything going on when Sal’s phone got a text: “Are you ok with the fire? Is that near you?” asked her cousin Sarah from Melbourne.

“Fire?” we asked ourselves. “What fire?” (and how does someone on the other side of the world know about it before we do?)

We couldn’t see anything out of the window, so I stuck the telly on, and after skipping through the first three of our rolling news options (News 24, CNN and CNBC), who had all unbelievably found better ways to fill their airtime, we found Sky News, who clearly had nothing better to do with their channel than show grainy viewer footage of the Great Fire of Camden Town and let a man in the studio ramble incoherently over the top of it.

And there was plenty of hyperbole from the man in the studio. Apparently the Hawley Arms was just about the most famous pub in London, and at one point he just started reading out the names of indie musicians and their hangers-on (“Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Kate Moss, Razorlight, Liam Gallagher…”) not because any of them were actually in the pub on Saturday evening, but because they may all have been there at some point in the past. Perhaps all future news events should be covered by a man reading out a full list of all the famous people who’ve ever been in the area before.

Of course, by this point it was about 10:30, and the fire had been going on for a couple of hours. I can only assume that he’d been talking over the top of whatever footage they had for some time and was running out of things to say (when he wasn’t listing the names of indie stars, he was mostly just saying “look! flames!”)

Occasionaly Sky would give their studio guy a rest and cut to their reporter on the ground, who would then speak to an inebriated man on the street who could provide some assorted hearsay and speculation (one chap told us that he’d “just heard that the whole of the Stables market [was] on fire”, which was entirely untrue). The reporter also spoke to an “eyewitness” whose first words to camera were “well, I didn’t actually see anything…” and at another point a chap speaking to them over the phone explained that at the time the fire broke out, Camden would have been pretty busy as lots of people arrived to start their nights out. Unfortunately he chose, without a trace of irony, to tell Sky News that things “would have just been warming up…”

PS. Memo to London buses: if you’re going to redirect the No. 24 bus route while Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road are closed, then you might want to make sure your double deckers can fit under all the bridges (via Londonist).

So I think the idea with the free film screening tickets that Sal and I use from time to time is that everyone who sees the film goes off and spreads the word. Sadly, that only works if the film is any good.

Last week we went over to the Dome or whatever it’s called these days and fought our way through the crowds of Spice Girls’ fans to get to the cinema to see Juno, which proved to be very good indeed. But given that it has already picked up a bunch of nominations for awards ceremonies that probably won’t happen, I don’t think that anything Sal or I can do for the film is going to make much difference to its overall takings.

On the other hand, if the film isn’t so hot, then surely the advance screenings can do more harm than good…

Tonight we headed over to Bayswater to see Definitely, Maybe, a new romantic comedy from Working Title, the people who brought you such “gems” as Love, Actually and Four Weddings…

Let’s just say that I won’t be recommending this one to any of my friends, or indeed anyone on the internet either. If any of my enemies are reading, though, then I can recommend a great way to spend 90 minutes of your life that you will never get back…

Before the film, we were accosted by some PR people who gave us some wristbands (which might just be the world’s worst promotional items, given that they don’t actually feature the name of the film on them), and told us that they’d be recording people’s reactions afterwards (presumably these are the ones featuring gushing morons that get shown on the TV ads). I therefore spent most of the film composing the review that I might have given them, if I’d had a chance, but sadly Sal quickly dragged me past the camera as we left, and I was unable to tell them just what I thought. So here goes:

Perhaps the best thing that I can say about Definitely, Maybe is that it’s not the worst film I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly well placed in my personal top 10 worst films ever (alongside classics like the aforementioned Love, Actually, and the utter stinker that was Love, Honour and Obey). I knew it was going to be terrible about 10 minutes in, when the main character picks up his precocious stage school brat of a daughter from school, and starts recounting the story of his love life to her…

It’s a derivative, sloppy, shabby, rom-com by numbers that fails to be either particularly romantic or much of a comedy (to be fair, I almost laughed twice) and thinks it’s a lot cleverer than it really is. The characters aren’t really characters, more thinly drawn stereotypes, and the plot is generic rom-com fare. (There’s also a whole bit about one of the characters obsessively looking in New York’s second hand bookshops for a particular copy of a particular book that has an inscription written in it. Um, haven’t I seen that film before, and wasn’t it called Serendipity last time?)

Oh, and did I mention that the film is really sloppily edited? In one scene, Isla Fisher is making cups of tea for her and Ryan Reynolds. She gets the teabags out and puts them in the mugs, then the shot cuts over to him for a second and when it cuts back to Isla she goes over to the cupboard and gets out two mugs and then puts the teabags into them… In a later scene, in what is supposed to be 1997, Ryan and Isla sit in a cafe where the radio is playing Belle and Sebastian’s The Boy With The Arab Strap (a song that wasn’t released until 2000…) [I take this back–as pointed out below it was released in 1998…]

I also found it surprising that, considering that for the majority of the film we are watching the story that Ryan Reynolds is telling to his obnoxious daughter, he still manages to include in this story a scene he isn’t in, which is rather impressive (perhaps the other characters had filled him in on it afterwards?)

All of which made it rather fitting that, as the film ends, it plays what purports to be a relatively new Badly Drawn Boy song (The Time of Times) that sounds almost exactly like an old Badly Drawn Boy song (The Shining).

So, um, yeah. Two thumbs up from me. A must see…

In another bit of excitement, as we left the cinema we popped into the Whiteley’s branch of Marks and Spencer, where we spotted a small black mouse running around underneath the shelves in the bakery section. (“This is not just a rodent infestation, this is an M&S rodent infestation…”?)

Let’s just say that we only bought stuff from off of the top shelves, and we checked the packaging very carefully for bite marks…

(I’m sure they’ll have fixed it by the time you read this, but still…)

I wouldn’t normally be taking photographs in the gents toilets in a pub, but when I saw this on Saturday afternoon, well, I couldn’t resist.

I don’t know about you, but if there had been a point during the afternoon when I’d “required a no 2”, then there is no way in the world that I would have asked behind the bar so that they could escort me to the ladies…

On Monday I walked home past one of those Evening Standard headline boards that was yelling at me about “Black Monday”, and telling me that fifty odd billion had been wiped off global share prices. This was on a day when the FTSE had closed down about 300 points for the day. Yesterday the FTSE closed up about 200 points, and so far today it has continued to rise, and might even close marginally up on the week.

No doubt the Evening Standard’s crack team of headline writers are already stencilling in “Red Thursday/Friday” on tonight’s board. No?

I can also tell that the markets are having a bad day when I pop over to the BBC News website: if bad stuff is happening, then they move their MarketWatch tickers to the front page. When the markets recover, they quietly shift them back to the business pages…

I’m not for a minute suggesting that the global stock markets aren’t in a bad way (and who knows, maybe when the Americans wake up things will start heading in the other direction again and I’ll look like the fool for writing this) but I do wonder how much effect the relentless barrage of negative media coverage and prophecies of doom have. The fate of the markets being so much about sentiment after all, I do wonder how long it will be before those prophecies start to fulfil themselves…

There’s this pervasive and unpleasant sense of glee at the prospect that a recession might be on the way, which seems odd to me. Sure, all those people losing their jobs and houses certainly makes for a good way of filling your newspaper with juicy stories, but it’s not much good if no one has any money left to buy it, is it?

Much to Sal’s chagrin (she calls me “clicky” if I spend more than 20 minutes hunched over the laptop of an evening), I’ve been doing a bit of work on the site recently.

I’m really doing it for Sal’s benefit, as I’m anticipating a hypothetical period later this year when I might need to update the blog from internet cafes a bit so that people know what I’m up to, and so I’ve been adding some features in anticipation of that (mainly the ability to save half written drafts when I run out of time and/or money), but somehow Sal doesn’t quite see it that way…

Mostly, I’ve been taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together again, a bit like you might with a knackered washing machine. I have almost certainly broken something, or left a vital part on the kitchen floor somewhere, so if you work out what that broken or missing thing is, do let me know…

Much of the underlying code had hardly been touched for the 5 odd years that I’ve been blogging here, so this exercise has generally involved me roundly mocking the me of five years ago for being such an idiot, as I remove 20 odd lines of hack-y code and replace it with the one php function that already existed to accomplish the same thing. I’m sure the same thing will happen again when I look at the code again in a few years time and realise that the me of now was an idiot as well.

Anyway, while I’ve been doing this I’ve been mugging up on security issues like SQL injection and cross site scripting, and I found this cartoon, which made me laugh a bit more than it should have done.

Yeah, I know, I need to get out more…

As usual, I half-heartedly resolved that this year I might do a bit more writing than last, but somehow life sort of got in the way and it hasn’t really worked out so far. To be fair, I did spend the first two weeks of the year suffering with the same cold that everybody else has (although thankfully not the norovirus, yet) but it was still enough to have me confined to bed on my first sick day in four years.

It is going to be a big year, though, with no shortage of stuff to write about, but that probably means that I’ll spend most of it actually doing exciting things and not so much of it writing about them. Ah well, hopefully at the very least I won’t stop taking pointless photographs…

Last night we made a last minute decision to go out and do something, so eschewing the chance to queue up all day to see some band play, Sal and I instead picked up some extremely cheap tickets to see the West End revival of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice.

I’d thoroughly recommend it, even if you don’t know anything about poker (and we certainly don’t). Great performances all round, although thanks to the wonders of typecasting I’m not sure quite how credible Roger Lloyd Pack can ever be in a serious role. Our cheap tickets also ended up being so close to the front that we were almost on the stage–close enough to smell the coffee and close enough to see that the cards being turned over in the poker games in the second half of the play all matched the ones in the script, which must take some planning (they subtly switch packs for each hand, but still…)

So there I am sorting out my surprisingly successful fantasy football team for the weekend’s fixtures when I spotted that I’d ended up with this:

I think it’s only right to keep this formation for the next couple of weeks (but I’ll be sure to take it down before 6th January, of course…)

In other news, thank you very much Network Rail, for deciding at the last minute that you’ll be doing engineering work on New Year’s Eve. I am so looking forward to squeezing onto a replacement bus with all the other Christmas-present-laden travellers returning to London. Merry Christmas to you too.

Ok, so picking up on typos and grammatical errors in shabby freesheet thelondonpaper is a bit like shooting free fish in a very large barrel, but I thought this one was just a bit too amusing not to pass on:

Prince William and younger brother Prince Harry lapped up a night of racy sextease last night after dropping into a little-known venue in Shepherd’s Bush for a two hour session of risqué burlesque dancing.

They watched scantily-clad acts from Smirnoff’s Medium Rare show, including The Wau Wau Sisters. They swung from trapezes with the words “F***” and “Yeah” written across their knickers and sensually rubbed each other.

Well, that’s certainly a different side to William and Harry. But what colour knickers were the Princes wearing? I think we should be told…

And this lunchtime I went out to Borough Market to see a celebrity buy some fish. It was art, apparently.

The celebrity in question was Jude Law, and he was there to re-enact this as part of an art piece called The World As A Stage.

I have to say that the re-enactment didn’t look quite like the video (I’m not sure that Borough Market ever looks quite as peaceful as that, and definitely not on a Friday…), but it was interesting to watch nevertheless. When I got there it was just loads of people standing around in one spot by the fishmongers and the fruit and veg place where I do my shopping. Every now and again a car or a van would try to get down the road, and the crowd would reluctantly part to let it through, before scurrying back to absorb the space.

As an examination of our obsession with celebrity, it was quite interesting to watch (although I don’t believe that that was the intended point of the art). I took up a spot at the back by the fish shop, where I overheard a TV cameraman discussing with his reporter where to go to get the best shot “We know he’s going to go in the shop and buy some fish, so why don’t we stay here?” they said to each other.

You could tell that Jude Law had eventually turned up not because you could see him, but because you could see the crowd swarm around him and follow him towards the shop, camera phones, digital cameras and SLRs held aloft to capture blurry photos of a bloke off-of some films.

As I was standing quite close to the fish shop, and as I happen to be continuing my pointless internet-based photo a day project, I took some of my own blurry photos of a bloke off-of some films in the process of buying some fish from a fish shop.

And then I heard someone behind me say something like “where did all these tall blokes come from?” so I stepped out of the way to let them through, showing them what a blurry photo of a man buying some fish looks like as I did so, and headed back to the office.

Jude Law. Buys some fish.
Surrounded by cameras.
Yeah. So is this art?