Early sunday morning, while I was asleep and failing to notice the beginning of daylight savings time, I dreamed that I went to a pub on Oxford street with some friends (I can't remember which friends), but my credit card behind the bar, grabbed a megaphone (one was conveniently placed nearby) and announced: "everyone: drinks are on me!" At first people rushed to the bar and ordered drinks as normal. Then the barman realised that if I was paying for everything for everybody, it'd be quicker and easier to let people just grab what they wanted, so he just started placing handfuls of bottles on the bar and let people help themselves. Then it got totally out of control as people poured into the bar, pushing en masse into the VIP section (which was roped off) and continuing the party. In the ensuing melee, I grabbed my card from behind the bar and my friends and I snuck out again.

Saturday was pretty much excellent. I met up with Mary and Kiara for coffee, then lunch, and then the Tate, punctuated by emotionally-charged calls to and from our parental units (for entirely unrelated reasons). The current exhibition in the main hall of the Tate is amazing: there's a huge "sun" light on one wall of the room, several metres across, spilling warm orange light across the room, which is filled (accidentally or intentionally) with a haze of water vapour. The sun is bisected by a giant panel of mirrors which cover the ceiling, turning the entire roof of the tate into a giant mirror. This in itself is not that exciting, but what is fascinating is the reaction this strange environment causes in people. The giant mirror on the ceiling is great fun: people instantly realise that they can see the entire room by looking up, so everyone lies down on the floor, waving and laughing at the people hanging from the ceiling hundreds of feet above them. People spontaneously line up to form geometric shapes, stars and letters, and the ceiling becomes a completely separate work of ever-changing, human art. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but it's beautiful. The side effect of this mirror-play is that, of course, when you first walk into the room, you see a giant sun -- and a room full of people who appear to be sunbathing. This is disconcerting and fascinating, as if we have some deep primitive instinct when faced with the sun to lie down and worship in front of it.

The tate trip was followed by a cinema trip to see Mystic River, which is full of Oscar-worthy, "powerful performances", five stars, blah blah blah. However, it wasn't an entertaining movie -- it was powerful, and well-acted, and had a good plot, but nothing really happened: no conclusions were reached, no point made. It was just sort of sad. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it's just not to my taste. I guess I'm just a philistine -- I don't mind movies having messages, but it's fine if they don't. What I really dislike is movies where you have to analyse the film to find out if there even is a message -- and Mystic River is that kind of movie.

After the movie Mary and I met up with Tim, Justin, Robbie and a swarm of drunken American thespian girls for a truly random evening -- starting in a bizarre goth bar with Addams-Family themed shots and toilets which played spooky sound effects, but which played Ash and Sean Paul in the main bar. Mary then took her leave and we embarked on an hour-long search of Soho for a club called Mezzo, which the girls had visited once but had no clear recollection of how to find. There was no cover charge to get in, but the main dance floor involved a cover charge, which we cunningly avoided by taking the elevator instead of the stairs. The music was reasonable though, and we left at one for an hours-long wait for buses at Oxford Circus. It would have been cold had there not been someone to snuggle; I was lucky.