Drinking and thinking

Last night I went round Vicki's house, and she cooked tea for me and Ed - a pumpkin risotto. A brave choice I thought, though it was delicious: sweet, sticky, moreish winter stodge (though of course March seems to have got bored of Winter and advanced straight to Spring).

Her housemate Claire was seeking some help touching up a headshot of her in Photoshop, but as her iBook only had a trackpad and no mouse, it was something of a challenge to finesse anything... I touched out some blemishes and showed her how curves and levels could achieve a more dramatic contrast in tone - I wasn't sure what else I could demonstrate in a five minute crash course.

After that we trundled down to The Hermits Cave (there's no apostrophe in the sign, by the way) where we had one of those rambling, slightly drunken debates about life in general I sometimes find myself locked into on a week night.

I don't think we really set the world to rights, though as a result, something did occur to me during one exchange about cohabiting with other people. As I've said before, living with others can be hard work and I've always considered myself a fairly easy going person, but henceforth I think when deciding whether to live with someone, I'm going to make damn sure I really want to live with them.

If you actually enjoy someone's company, flatsharing is a relative breeze, and you don't really sweat the small stuff so much. I moan about cleanliness and noise, but really, I'll forgive a multitude of sins if I have affection for someone..

Wheras if you don't.. if there's even the slightest hint of doubt about sharing your personal space, you tend to chalk up even the most minor transgressions ("You didn't do the recycling!") on a mental score card, which will, if you're uncareful, ultimately feed resentment. Which is sort of unfair, I suppose (In any event, all my housemates are great, by and large – end caveat).

Anyway.. not exactly a moment of blinding insight, but an interesting reflection I thought. I'm like a modern day Plato or something, and he liked his caves too.

We were a bit drunk though.. the barometer of my inebriation being when I wobbled the table mid gesture and an empty Leffe glass danced off the edge and smashed to bits on the ground. All eyes on us. Oh dear.

I woke up today feeling tired and fuzzy. It took ages to get to where I was working on Hanway Street, possibly because I caught a 42 (which never seems that fleet of foot at rush hour). It was a quietish day and the work was straitforward enough, though my keyboard seemed to lack half the keystrokes necessary to create things like brackets, dashes and question marks, and had a button which said 'help' in Italian. This was in itself a replacement for a previous device which had a non-functioning hyphen/underscore key, letter 'P', and space bar. All fairly essential when working with type I'd say, though I got around it by copying and pasting those elements.

As I guessed it might do, this week's booking wound up early. I left early at around half four, which I didn't mind really as it was such an unseasonably lovely day. Walked up past Spitalfields and cut across the road near Liverpool Street Station, then up through Shoreditch to the roundabout at Old Street, where I caught the 55 up through Clerkenwell to Oxford Street.

Went for a nose round the Cosh gallery on Wardour Street looking in vain for a print I saw there a month or two ago by Fred Deakin, which now adorns his new mix cd. Gone gone gone, alas. After that I headed north of Oxford Street to meet Ade outside his work, before adjourning for a pint at some generic Noho rentapub. I had left my Golden Virginia at home, so underwent the slightly humbling ritual of offering to 'buy' a rollup off someone, whereupon I was surrounded by a host of eager hands proffering tobacco products, for no fee.

I headed back home after that, stopping for some food at the consistently excellent Silver Lake, which I sat and ate in front of the telly. Hotel Babylon was on, which is one of those ultra Beeb-by-numbers programmes which is presumably by now generated by a proprietory algorythm somewhere in the heart of Television Centre. Fairly uninteresting, in spite of its arsenal of sub-Lock-Stock editing.

Anyway I'm sleepy now. Some work of my own to get on with tomorrow, then in the evening, to the Ritzy in Brixton to see the new David Lynch film. Might eat in the cafe there beforehand, though hopefully it won't take as long as last time when I waited an hour for a pizza. Cheerio.