Better keep your fingers double-crossed

My weekend started (on Friday evening) meeting Matthias at his workplace in Keir Starmer's constituency, moving on for dinner and a concert (on which more later) in Jeremy Corbyn's constituency, then sleeping overnight in a hotel in Diane Abbott's constituency: the peak north London experience.

Dinner was a bunch of Malaysian starters at the always excellent sambalshiok, but we weren't able to linger, because we had to head down the road to a tiny (but cavernously ceilinged) venue for the gig. Uncharacteristically, we were there for the support acts — nnhmn_ and minuitmachine — and hadn't even heard of the main event, rebekawarrior. The former are female-fronted dark electro acts, the later a dark electro dj (and by the time we got to her set, I was astonished that I'd never heard of her), we danced our delighted, exhausted hearts out, and a fabulous time was had by all. We made our way into the night, and back to our hotel via the overground, and collapsed into sleep.

Saturday dawned cold and cloudy, and I was able at last to try the pastries at pophamsbakery for breakfast — a patisserie I've long been following on social media — and was pleased to discover that they lived up to the hype. We finished our 36 hours in London up with a visit to the British Library, to see their exhibition on Black British music (from Tudor times to the present), which I highly recommend. It's always a bit tricky to do a physical exhibition on a topic that relies so heavily on aural experiences, but they did a good job of telling this complex story. It would have been great if there had been a way to accompany the exhibition with a multipart documentary, just so that the music could have told more of its own story in sound, but I enjoyed things all the same.

After the exhibition, and a quick lunch, we headed back to Ely on the train, and had a lazy Saturday afternoon and evening at home.

Today has also been fairly lazy (apart from both of us doing a bunch of household chores) — slow cooking, slow yoga, lying around reading (Elusive, the second book in Genevieve Cogman's published self-insert Scarlet Pimpernel vampire AU trilogy, which was as swashbuckling good fun as the previous book, with the same reluctance to examine the inherent flaws of the source material's premise while adopting a smugly self-congratulatory assumption of having done so), and restoring energy before the advent of the next working week. I'm severely behind on Dreamwidth, but I'm going to do my best to catch up on my reading page before I go to bed tonight.

I hope everyone's had lovely weekends.