Comic genius

Yes, of course it's Bill Bailey. And yes, now that you sk, he did go to the same school as me. Lucky him, eh?

We celebrated PG's birthday in raucous, absurdist style at the Gielgud Theatre. Tinselworm is not quite as fresh as Part Troll, or quite at 'new' as Cosmic Jam (a very old one) and this Times Review is fair, if a little muted. However, there's nothing like good comedy in the flesh, and I've not seen any since the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000, so I was very happy to catch the old Bill.

'Have you ever stuffed so many chocolate Brazils into your mouth at once that you blacked out?' I thought, "Chocolate Brazils? What are they?" And last night I discovered (in large quantities) as Mrs L's students came round for a social evening, bringing sweet white wine (something else to disgust the purists but delight my insensitive tastes) and the aforementioned nut and cacao-based treats. Well done to them.

a day in London

Started with an early morning prayer meeting with people from Cherry Hinton Baptist church who are down the road from our new church plant - praying for the area, for our outreach and for unity among us. Cold, but inspiring!

Then two piano lessons postponed from yesterday (when I was in Sheffield for the second seminar day with Northern Training Institute), followed by a dash to the station in time to stand in a queue and miss the train we'd wanted to catch.

Got a faster train and then some underground shenanigans to Highgate to meet Nick (best man best friend at Cambridge) and Kate (recently married). We stepped off the Northern Line train to find Nick and Kate stepping off the same train a few carriages down!

After a walk up a hill (something of a novelty for us) alongside the barbed wire security fence protecting Highgate Station and an intriguing adjacent cottage hunger overtook us and we stumbled into an odd pub, with remarkable speed for a party of 4 boasting three indecisive people (and me!)

Long pub lunch (The Woodman) - entertained by the chef, Xavier ("I try to cook a different menu every day... You must finish everything... I don't wan to see any food on the floor...") and sated with his excellent food. More meat in a meal than in a normal fortnight (wanted to alliterate with 'month' but it would have been something of an exaggeration)! Cambridge pub prices in London, and incredible quality - a rare treat. Pint of IPA and then farewell to Kate who was off to China for a 2-week holiday to see her Mum and some friends.

Then a wander round Highgate cemetery with Nick, stumbling across Shura Churassky, Douglas Adams and a cosmopolitan cram of corpses from across the world. Notable numbers of Chinese and Poles, but more other countries than I can remember. We missed Karl Marx, but then had a guided tour of the restricted side of the cemetery with another colourful character (a volunteer with the Friends of Highgate Cemetery) who spun a lot of good stories and gave us some intriguing Victorian social history and an explanation of the art of grave sculpture.

Always rewarding to walk round graveyards, this one no exception. Huge variety of sculptures, lots of plants interwoven, bits of biographies... But I am always astounded by the amount of money spent on these monuments. (The many immigrant families represented here were not the poor ones, let me tell you!) And the pathetic - in every sense of the word - sentiments on some of the tombs and headstones set the mind a-spinning.

"Boris Johnson would destroy London's unity"

said somebody with an OBE who is black and who has suffered as a result of racist violence. Yet that hardly justifies the comment being the front page "news" article of Saturday's Guardian! How is that news!? If someone wrote this in the Kiddiminster Weeky Advertiser would you be impressed... 'A hostile opinion to the mayoral candidacy of Mr B Johnson, Con., was expressed yesterday... blah, blah...' Come on Guardian, you can do better than front-page ad hominem. It's not as if the article actually said very much beyond that except to quote bits of Johnson's journalism out of context. If we were looking for a balanced look at the candidates we might have expected some comments on Livingstone's bloopers, but in any case we weren't - we were looking for NEWS on the front page of a respectable NEWSpaper!