I Heart the Big Smoke

Rob & I spent this past weekend in London. We got the train up on Friday afternoon, checked into our hotel and went straight out to meet Brent, Joe & Tara for a meal. It was amazing - it called itself 'Healthy Meal' but there was so much of it; I'm not sure it was all that healthy to eat such a large amount of food in one sitting :).

Saturday was our shopping day. I mentioned at work last week that I was looking to buy a ring in London and one of my colleagues told me to call her friend, who owns a jewellery wholesale business. I spoke to him on Friday, and he gave me the name and address of a jewellery shop in London that they supply. When we got there on Saturday, they had been told to expect us, and they gave me about 17% off the price of the ring I chose, plus a bottle of champagne to take away. Result! It's not what you know...

I also got a watch and a handbag, and two separate opportunities to speak some Italian. Rob got a key ring. But it's a nice key ring.

In the evening we met up with Joe and Tara again and went to see The Shawshank Redemption at the Wyndhams Theatre. I don't know how faithfully the West End production sticks to the original play, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (or even how the film fares against the original, for that matter), but as a stand-alone piece it was pretty good. By no means as good as the film, but there's only so much you can do with a play about a prison escape when you can't actually portray the guy crawling through miles of sewage pipe. There were some noticeable differences between the play and the film, but as I said, taken in isolation it was a great way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday night.

On Sunday we got up early and walked down to HTB for the 09:30 service, then afterwards we made our way back towards the hotel, walking past Harrods just as it was opening :). We had a quick browse around before going back to the hotel to check out and get the train home.

The more I go, the more I love London. I couldn't live there, but it's great for a few days.

So That's What That Thing Does...

Rob bought me an SLR camera over 2 years ago, just before we moved down here, and I have never used it out of Automatic mode. Until today...

We both went to a 'Getting to Know Your Digital SLR' course at Portsmouth Dockyard today, and learned the basics like setting aperture, checking shutter speed, adjusting white balance and ISO settings, the rule of thirds and hotspots. I learned about depth of field and had fun taking pictures around the dockyard, experimenting with my camera's settings, getting blurry backgrounds, moving the focal point from one side of the picture to the other, etc. Here are a few un-retouched first attempts.

Do You Hear the People Sing?

6 of us went to see Les Miserables on Saturday in the West End. I love living just over an hour from London! Only one of us had never seen it before, and by the time we came out of the theatre, between us we had seen it 24 times...

It's over 4 years since I last saw it, so it was about time I saw it again. It really was just as good the sixth time as it was the first! The guy playing Valjean was the understudy (we saw the matinee performance) but he was absolutely awesome - when he sang his diction was really clear so you didn't miss what he was singing, which as you may know is one of the things I look for. Javert, on the other hand, was less articulate, and I was worried that Cathy, who was the Les Mis rookie, would miss what he was singing about, but she said she followed everything OK.

Having listened to the music countless times over the past 20 years, I have to say I'm a bit fed up of most of the better known songs in this show. What I love, though, are the not-so-famous songs and interludes, in particular One Day More, the Act I Finale, and the Epilogue from Act II. [NB: Don't click these links if you don't want to know what happens! But if you haven't seen it, rectify that as soon as you can!] One Day More is possibly my favourite ever song: it combines the 'theme tunes' of all the main characters into one song and took months to write, but it was well worth the effort.

It turns out most of the people I work with haven't seen Les Mis either. I feel another trip to the Queens Theatre coming on...