ART SQUAT!

What's the opposite of a lost weekend? Whatever it is, that's what I'm recovering from.

The Finnfans came to stay, arriving late on Thursday night bearing a bottle of Welsh gin. I can report that Welsh gin is good, but perhaps not the best thing to drink on a schoolnight. Our friends C & A came for dinner on Friday, and we had a huge curry and real ale extravaganza, inspired by Madhur Jaffrey, Vicky Bhogal (whose writing style, at times, annoys the hell out of me but whose recipes are fantastic) and the Punjabi cookery classes that M took in the 1980s. We are still eating the leftovers, which is as it should be. There were no leftover poppadoms, which is also as it should be. We finished the Welsh gin at the end of the night, which is possibly not as it should be.

All this was organised *after* I'd made my 9am leg wax appointment for Saturday. I won't go into how much fun that wasn't, but the upside was a late breakfast and a lazy afternoon reading the papers and preparing for the ART SQUAT!

I had already been invited to the HA! Art Jam, an "environmentally conscious interactive mash-up of art, film, music and performance in a derelict Mercedes showroom", as several of M's band were providing the soundtrack (and a bit more) to a performance by Cafe Reason. I had decided it was beyond the call of girlfriendly duty to hang around in NW London all night with nobody to talk to. And I'd already seen it once.

But the Finnfans thought it was a great idea, which made it into an entirely different proposition, and off we went. It was a disappointingly homogenous crowd (we represented pretty much the only under 18s and over 25s in the place, and most everyone else was an art student or looked like they should be) but there was plenty of weirdness to look at. It was a struggle to find the promised political agenda but I guess it was in there somewhere, in an easy-on-the-eye sort of way. If the world was cooling down rather than heating up, would art students put on more clothes?

Anyway, an educational experience with perhaps more nudity than the younger members of the party would have opted for, but that's what educational experiences are about. It was benign while being very strange. And that's as far as I'm going with a review, K was much more articulate about it all.

And then... the snow! The SNOW! Not a flake in sight at 3am, and a good three inches five hours later. It was wonderful, fluffy, crunchy stuff which we all ate a bit of via snowballs on our way to the Excelsior for breakfast. I haven't been in there for years. I sort of know why, the Welsh Rarebit is still sitting in my stomach, fattening me up for ritual slaughter at the Festival of Grease.

Later, we all squidged into M's room to watch downloaded Doctor Who on the iMac. And I've done almost nothing but sleep ever since. Well, that's a lie, but I'm off to see Elbow at the Cardiac and I hate it when posts lie around unfinished...

joella