Quick Round Up

Oh dear, I’ve been very slack in keeping on top of the blog lately.  If you’re a regular visitor here you’ll know this, I go through periods where I blog endlessly and then silence.  No news is goods news my old Gran used to say but the fact of the matter is there is lot’s to blog about but not so much time.  This is partly a problem of my own making as I always feel a blog should be more than a  few words, crudely thrown together to make a sentence with a couple of said sentences joined together higgledy-piggledy to make a paragraph and these aforementioned paragraphs….you get the idea?

So, I haven’t even blogged about the weekend in Paris, strangely I managed to upload the photos almost as soon as I returned but I kept putting off saying something because I wasn’t quite sure what to say and in my head I had the notion to construct something worthwhile, to do it justice.  I will do that but for the moment let me just say that I spent a very enjoyable weekend in the company a finer group of stranger you could care to meet.  The bloggers in question were Jenny, Claire and David and each brought a friend, or in David’s case his charming wife.  I invited Tanja, possibly the strangest 5th date but I think she enjoyed it.  In case you are new here the weekend was courtesy of the Comité Régional du Tourisme of Paris Ile-de-France as a result of a piece I blogged about back in December, the original trip was postponed due to the problems Eurostar had dealing with the wrong type of snow. Anyway, as I said, I’ll return to Paris at a later date…

Last week I attended the monthly London Bloggers Meet-up which was sponsored by Greene King IPA.  They’ve introduced a new fan-dangled pump dispenser that gives you either a Northern or a Southern style pint.  Now, I have to say, I’m not an ale drinker.  Until a few years ago I wasn’t even a lager drinker. Cider and Guinness were my pint sized tipples of choice.  So I felt a little strange appearing to be the only person drinking lager at the event but I finally relented and tried the IPA; obviously I had to have 2 pints, 1 Northern and 1 Southern just to compare.

As it happens the ale wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, I’d tried drinking it many years ago but just couldn’t get over the feeling that I was drinking flat beer.  As I write this out I’m actually enjoying a glass of Greene King’s Ruddles Ale which was included in a very generous goodie bag.  I discovered that the bottled ales are carbonated and this therefore reminded me of McEwans Export which I used to drink when I lived in Glasgow.  Maybe it’s the bubbles that make it more palatable to me?  Anyway, I’ll probably write separately about Greene King as I have a stack of info on the new dispenser and they’ve offered a tour of the brewery so I may take them up on that and blog about the whole thing as one.

Finally, tonight I was very fortunate enough to attend a preview screening of the new Spike Jonze short film I’m Here which was done in collaboration with ABSOLUT vodka.  You may recall I wrote about it earlier this month. All I can say is it was awesome!  It won’t be released on the website until 1 March so obviously I can’t tell you too much about the story other than you MUST watch it!

I enjoyed everything about it, from the music to the story to the conversation afterwards with Chrissie as we shared our thoughts and discussed the many layers Spike created in just 30 minutes.  The venue for our screening was the basement of a car park and it was terrific, from the bubble-wrap carpet to the cardboard boxes that revealed self inflating mattresses just prior to the screening, Chrissie and I were very rebellious and chose to sit on the cardboard boxes instead, took me back to the gruesome 2 weeks I spent sleeping in the one under the Royal Free Hospital, only this time ABSOLUT had provided some cocktails.

There were even the obligatory ad-men prats who sat on shooting sticks, probably so coked up they didn’t realise they were not being hip, cool and trendy and people weren’t looking at them enviously, only as a re-affirmation of how their lives weren’t as bad as they thought the were!

So, that’s me more or less caught up with things, I’m sure I’ve missed a thing or two but c’est la vie!