Tired of Sal Tlay Ka Siti? Tired of Life...

Just had the sort of weekend (well 27 hour window) that you can only have in London - absolutely jam packed.  Let's do this chronologically:

Peter and Alice: Dame Judy Dench and Pingu from nathanbarley in a play about the real Peter Pan meeting the real Alice in Wonderland. Sounds bloomin' ace.  Hadn't really looked into it (much like when I went to see Bingo last year and was expecting a comedy about a clown); let's just say it was gloomier than I expected and move on.

Kangaroo burgers at Borough Market.

Old Operating Theatre: I'd never been before - I'd seen it in lists of quirky things you should do, but never bothered to find out where it was.  Happened across it and there was little chance I was walking past.  Just bobbed in for a cheeky amputation, as one does on a Saturday afternoon.

Rose theatre: Now the ignorance is pouring out.  I didn't realise that the Rose Theatre was an actual thing.  I knew it used to be a thing, but was blissfully unaware of its continued (sort of) thingness.

Maslenitsa. Nothing like celebrating the Russian Sun Festival on a grey and drizzly day.

Book of Mormon: I don't really need to say much about this as it's been hyped right up already.  The hype is entirely justified.  It is a lot of fun.

The Curious Incident of the Trains in the Night Time

I went to see that show about the dead dog.  Dead good it was.  The show, not the dog.  The dog was dead, so was a little bit past ethics.

What was less good, and therefore far more fun to talk about was the journey home.  The trains were an absolute joke.  An hour standing on the concourse at Liv St, followed by a scramble for the train on Platform 12, a half hour wait then a dash to platform ten.  It was two hours before we'd left the station - well pumpkin.

Something else that was rubbish was the Essex Book Festival event that I went to.  All publicity is good publicity (I say that as someone who's pretty stoked about the prospect of ballooning over Valley of the Kings - didn't even know that was a thing until 2 weeks ago...), so I'm not naming names, suffice to say your man wasn't a raconteur.  Or someone who knew about the book that he had allegedly written. So, Essex Book Festival, you had a chance.  You blew it.

Game over.

Confetti.

If the band are divided

Support your local live music venue.

I heartily applaud Evoke's attempts to become a credible venue for live music. Since the demise of the Army and Navy, and Club Y, and The Cave, and the Basement, and Barhouse, and hooga we could do with an actual venue in Chelmsford City and so far they've managed some pretty good names.

Now Sham69, they're a name.  Don't know a great deal about them - the words to If The Kids..., the chorus to Hurry Up Harry, and that's about it - now I know a tiny bit more.  It seems that there are two different Sham69s touring.  One which has most of the members of the 77-79 version and one which has none.  It turned out that the one that played in Chelmsford was basically a Sham69 tribute band. Feeling a little bit cheated...

City of Sausage

"Excuse me do you serve food?"

"I'm sorry, we only have sausages."

It's exchanges like this that means Frankfurt should be a dream destination, somewhere that only serves beer and sausages? It's even named after a type of sausage.  By anyone's reckoning that's a porky paradise. But, they didn't sell sausages, they sold wurst; I'm not 100% sure what the difference is but it's definitely there.  I think it's something to do with needing a run up with your fork to get through the skin.  But it could be to do with the day-glo colour. Either way it means that you can only eat a finite amount. Boo. By second dinner we'd had to leave the world of sausage and head for something with a more defined pork content, I feel like I'd let myself down.

And that's before we get on to currywurst. Adding bbq sauce and curry powder to a chopped-up, pre-cooked sausage isn't a 'thing', it's a way to use up leftovers before your student loan comes in.

As for the less-sausaged elements of the city, it was nice enough but a little bit soulless.  Sort of like if you go to the Square Mile  at the weekend.  Only with rubbish sausages.

An Honourable Man

Things that Chelmsford has now:
A pretty good museum.  There's always been a museum up in Oaklands Park (I say "always" I don't mean always "always" obviously), it never used to be all that - I remember the last time I went giggling at the coin exhibits as some were just rubbings.  Now it's been redone and it's proper good - I realise that I'm about a year out of time to write about that.

An African restaurant. It's called Lekki's and it's a pretty good alternative to going for a curry. Now I'm not averse to eating weird food, but word of caution, I'd advise against the cow tendons, just a little bit too knuckle-y for my delicate palate.

In the wider world (what, there are things beyond Chelmsford City limits?), I went to the Donmar to see the all-female Julius Caesar.  All the adverts had made it look Pussy Riot-inspired.  It wasn't.  Boo. Still it was pretty good, for the most part, if not quite the dizzy heights of last year's RSC version.

Last Ditch Culture

I've been spending my last weekend of the year squeezing in some more culture, trying to make sure I've not missed anything that I should have a 2012 opinion on.

First off: music and an album with a very orange cover, probably the most excited I've been about listening to an album this year; not Frank Ocean's Channel Orange (which seems to have swept the year end polls but which I don't get, which is probably a function of me getting old as much as anything else) but the new Beans on Toast album (which for some reason has been omitted not only from the year-end charts but also from any review section of any non-niche music publication).  Turns out it's about as good as an album has got this year, but this again may just be a function of me getting old and this not sounding like David Guetta / everything else.

This year's seen me going to the theatre a lot.  I've seen some really fun stuff (Three Sisters - who'd've thought?), some really boring stuff (Bingo) and loads of Shakespeare.  To maximise my Shakespeare exposure I saved the biggest 'til last (I'm taking the histrionic Americanised version of Mayan astronomy in my definition of "last" - tomorrow night my calendar runs out so it's the end of the world, right?). Mark Rylance! Stephen Fry! Trigger from Only Fools and Horses! All on stage together! Exclamation mark explosion of excitement!! I've not seen Twelfth Night before and it was well acted and funny and that but crikey the first half is boring. I appreciate that that Bard fella is handy with words but he can drag out the set-up of a comedy.

So Shakespearian highlight of the year (the Pete of ten years ago has just been sick in his mouth at how bourgeois the concept of "Shakespearian highlight of the year" sounds)?  Was it Mark Rylance in Richard III? Simon Russell Beale in Timon of Athens? No and no. Both were good but both get soundly beaten by the Globe to Globe, all-African Julius Caesar. Which in any other year yada yada... How good was Macbeth at the Clerkenwell House of Detention? It makes a pretty good case for the dropping of "Shakespearian" from that first sentence...

Last Tango in Guatemala

We were going to miss out Guatemala City, what with its reputation for being a bit shooty, but we figured that it needed seeing so see it we did. And you know what, I'm pretty glad.  It had good levels of random which I'm a big fan of - we got a mussel soup with a beer in one bar; there was a line of sheep and goats outside a milk store - and we never felt particularly unsafe, although the high levels of guards-with-shot-guns on the street meant that you never forgot that there may be a bit of a risk somewhere.

So that's it then.  Guatemala whizzed around.  Jungle trekked.  Didn't get shot. Didn't get erupted. Don't think I've got Dengue fever.

A couple of weeks ago I thought this was going to be about the most ridiculous trip I'd ever taken.  Turns out that it didn't ever really feel that crazy and, like most other travels, it's just left me envious of everyone else whose trips sounded more hardcore.  Hmmm, itch still not scratched...