I’m the guest DJ at the indiepop & vintage soul club How Does It Feel To Be Loved this weekend.<\/p>\n
Date:\u00c2\u00a0Saturday Jan 21st
\nVenue:\u00c2\u00a0Downstairs at The Phoenix
\n37 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0PP.
\nTime: 9pm-3am. I’m ‘on’ from about 10.30 to midnight.<\/p>\n
Further info here<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0I also highly recommend the club’s podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n Always a pleasure to be asked. Thinking of playing McCarthy’s ‘Red Sleeping Beauty’, what with all the talk about Mrs Thatcher that The\u00c2\u00a0Iron Lady<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0has inspired lately.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Catching up… Last week has mainly been about college: Woolf’s Room Of One’s Own,\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>Chaucer’s House Of Fame<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0(with talking eagle) and\u00c2\u00a0Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1. <\/em>Just been reading how it was unusual for Shakespeare to not<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0write a comedy set in the London of his day – from 1599 virtually all his fellow playwrights were doing it. Instead he chose to smuggle the city into his histories, particularly\u00c2\u00a0Henry IV, <\/em>to give it a\u00c2\u00a0genre-bending mix of power-plots and battles alongside comic London pub scenes.<\/p>\n Learned today: Dickens was such an admirer of Falstaff that he not only bought the Gadshill house in Kent because of its association with Falstaff’s robbery scene in Henry IV, <\/em>but put up a plaque in honour of the play as soon as he moved in. The more one realises the influence of Falstaff on Dickens, the more it makes perfect sense; the colourful name, the larger-than-life-ness, the mix of humour with pathos, the instant mass appeal.<\/p>\n **<\/p>\n Last Saturday was a day out to Suffolk to see my parents; \u00c2\u00a0first trip to the house I grew up in since I turned 40. I took the little rural branch line from Marks Tey to Sudbury; a single carriage train that runs on diesel rather than overhead electric lines. Think the first time I used it was in the late 80s, when I went straight from school near Sudbury up to London, in order to see REM and Throwing Muses at Wembley Arena. I’m now rather less of a concert-goer and rather more interested in picturesque train journeys for their own sake.<\/p>\n Stumbled upon the new Adnams shop in Store St, Bloomsbury this week. An unexpected little piece of Suffolk tourism in London – specifically Southwold. With added free gin tasting, as the brewery now does spirits. They also sell mugs depicting the now famous Southwold beach huts.\u00c2\u00a0Turns out there’s a branch of Adnams in Spitalfields too.<\/p>\n **<\/p>\n Discovered that I’ve been the subject of someone’s 100 picture icons (or avatars), those little square images that people use to identify themselves online. Often the image isn’t of the person themselves, but a favourite picture of a cat or Doctor Who or Sherlock Holmes or the like. So it’s very flattering indeed. They have me filed under ‘other’.<\/p>\n