Weekend - London, London, London...

[mrph]

Another very pleasant (and fairly busy!) weekend in London, visiting souldier_blue and wandering about not-entirely aimlessly... :-)

Friday
Friday night saw us wandering down to Wimbledon (no tennis, no wombles) for Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands. I'd heard some mixed reviews from people who saw the initial run, but I gather that they've changed a few things since then...? In any case, I think it's definitely worth watching. Dancing topiary, invisible cars, a very grumpy 'goth' in a rather nice tail coat. We were in the second row, so got snowed on at the very end. :)

I'd like to see it again, partly because there was so much going on in some of the suburban crowd scenes - every character had their own little drama/comedy, hidden away in the background. A lovely touch on the first curtain call, too - everyone stayed in character. So you had a bewildered and nervous Edward, tentatively stepping forward to meet the audience...

Saturday
I'm still not entirely sure what happened to Saturday. We wandered out into the cold for a cafe breakfast, then wandered through Borough Market, fuelled by coffee and mulled wine...

...now, odd as this may sound, I'd never actually been to Borough Market before. I've wanted to, for quite some time, but consistently failed to do much about this. Oh my. It really is that good, isn't it? We got there quite late, but even so - the selection's excellent, as is the quality. We ended up buying a few interesting bottled beers from Utobeer, somelots of absolutely amazing Turkish Delight (*ahem* at some point, I may previously have stated that I don't really like Turkish Delight - if so, I was wrong. I just hadn't found the good stuff...) and some lovely fresh ham tortellini.

[souldier_blue 's cat, Doughnut, certainly appreciated the tortellini. He's being very nice to me now. Possibly this is because he's a little concerned that stealing our dinner before I could cook it didn't endear him to me... :)]

We may actually have spent more money on Turkish Delight than on beer. A quiet pint in The Rake seemed the obvious way to respond to this.

Made it to Vagabonds for the evening - a chance to catch up with lots of familiar faces (if only briefly, in some cases) - including sarcaustick , chimera_s , ninshubur , wildeabandon , nils , fuzzygoth  and giggly_teapot . Nice night - lovely venue, good music. I wasn't actually expecting to dance, and certainly wasn't dressed for it, but somehow ended up on the dancefloor anyway...

Sunday mostly failed to happen.

Well, ok, not entirely true. There was a little bit of shopping and a very late breakfast at an American-style diner near Carnaby Street, complete with an alcoholic milkshake. Finding somewhere that serves alcoholic milkshakes and isn't in Germany has to count as a step in the right direction, I think... :)

Oh, and while I remember - one of the more intriguing purchases at Utobeer was the Paradox Smokehead beer. I'm something of a fan of Smokehead - and I really like the previous Paradox whisky-aged beer - so this one sounds like a winning combination. Haven't tried the bottles we bought yet, though...