well, that was odd…
Or alternatively, it seems that both I and the folks at the London Film Festival decided to be properly prepared after the catastrophic ticketing failure last year – yay!
Last Wednesday morning at roughly 08.30hrs I decided to assemble food and drink for the next hour or two, make myself comfortable on the sofa and log into my BFI account in preparation for the waiting room I’d read would be taking over the site from 9am, and on my phone – waiting room screen as expected. On the laptop, however; still browsing films at 09.58, and after pressing Refresh – with not a little apprehension – a second after 10am I was in immediately, and after a brief timelapse because of the disbelief, tickets and seats were chosen and everything booked and paid for by 10.06.- result! The LFF runs from the fourth to the fifteenth of October and tickets for non members went on sale yesterday, I think.
Having had enough of sitting around being eaten by mosquitoes in a flat hotter than the sun (only visitors get the benefit of the aircon as a general rule, such is the electricity cost, although I will admit to having cracked on Friday evening just to get some sleep without feeling as if I’d been locked in the sauna), I decided some affirmative action was required and took myself off to the O2 on Saturday afternoon, where Cineworld is huge, food choices are plentiful and the aircon is nothing short of brutal. The pints of iced water were a helpful addition too after the Cornetto I got from the corner Tesco Express – sadly the Calippos were long gone.
Past Lives is my hands down recommendation for this week unless the heat has meant difficulty sleeping for a few nights; in this situation I would point you to The Nun 2, a box-ticking franchise addition so woefully dull and pedestrian I nodded off for a good fifteen minutes and didn’t miss a thing. In Nun 2’s defence, I only picked it because I haven’t been in the X Screen (a wraparound affair where the picture is on the left and right hand walls as well as the front; Jaws would be fabulous) before, and it finished at a convenient time for me to head over to Wagamama for some ramen, green juice and lollipop prawns before the much better Past Lives started at eight o’clock.
For those unfamiliar with the dystopian wonderland that is Canary Wharf, that’s a bit of it on the bottom left photo at the top. The pointy-topped building slightly to the right of the middle is One Canada Square, and I will be getting a much closer look at it in roughly nine weeks time when I will be heading up forty eight floors of stairs for the the Felix Project, a London charity which collects and redistributes surplus food around the city, reducing food waste (and as somebody who used to work for our favourite high street store with it’s popular food hall, trust me that there is a lot of it) and alleviating hunger. The reason I don’t work Monday daytimes is because I’m one of the people volunteering there to help them do it.
The Santa Stair Climb is a way to help a bit more; vans cost money, kitchens cost money, even fundraising costs money! So without preaching or banging on about it any more, anybody who would like to sponsor me (consider forty eight floors, over a thousand stairs, having to go to Canary Wharf) and help some people have some dinner before they go to bed while truckloads of good food is saved from landfill, let me know. You don’t have to book to do this.
Training so far has involved incline sprints, lots of weighted lunges, squats and donkey kicks, barre and spin classes and (predictably) just the one attempt at running up the ten flights of stairs in my building in thirty degree heat before giving that one up as a bad job. More vigilant readers will have spotted that my pre-event warm up will in fact be an all dayer at Fabric on the which starts just shy of twenty four hours prior, and should give my legs a proper stretch. It’s a good job I’m a trooper.
Song of the Week is likely to be the last of the summer, so I’m just going to get on with it. It’ll soon be Christmas.
More soon! The stairmaster at the gym beckons…
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