"No, seriously, you have to see the ladies' loos..."
A memorable quote from a fairly excellent weekend.
Friday: Will turned up (eventually) from Warwick and we toddled off to Popstarz as per usual. I danced, I met a cute boi (who I am going to call after I've done typing this...) and I generally had a good time. On the way home, Will learned a valuable lesson about kebab-buying: even if you don't want one, you will want one as soon as you smell somebody else's. So buy one then, because other people are not always willing to share their kebabs. I am pleased to have been a part of the instructional process.
Saturday: Will and I dragged ourselves out of bed and set off (late) to Central, mainly because Wabson.org is broken at the moment so Will needed to spend some time screaming at it. At Central (aka Leicester Square) we met Michael and Mary, and went for the World's Fastest Brunch™ record at a nearby O'Neill's, so that we could be in time for the movie. Milly joined us a mere 10 minutes after it started.
The movie was CAMP in every possible sense of the word. Unbearably cute people, oodles of gay people, and more Sondheim than you can shake a stick at, all set to music! GENIUS! There's nothing there not to like, and there was nothing in the movie either. It was low budget, but only a few times was that really obvious, and it was sweet and happy and funny without being clichéd, which as Milly remarked is actually really difficult to do, so kudos to them. I recommend everybody go and see it right away; it's playing for a bargainous £4 a ticket at the Prince Charles Cinema, which is astoundingly priced for a cinema only 50m away from Central.
Post-movie on Saturday evolved into coffee at Costa (ka-ching! and they fucked up our orders) shopping (10 minutes for us, an hour for Will), then more Coffee (we were tired!) at Starbucks (double ka-ching! I'm so broke after this weekend). Milly and Mary then toddled home, and Will and I hopped back for a quick turnaround to be a mere two hours late for Danny's 21st at The Knights Templar, on 95 Chancery Lane, where the above quote originated.
The reason I give the address is because the ladies' toilets there are soon to become a major tourist attraction. Discovered by accident by a wandering drunken queer, they are more than 50m long, with fitted sofas, optical sensors on the taps, and mosaiced counters set into hardwoods. Each toilet cubicle is about six foot a side, with enormous, semi-cylindrical (real) hardwood doors that swing like fucking Cry-Stasis doors on a central pivot to reveal the plush interiors. There's also brass lamps and -- duh! -- a fountain. You know that episode of the Simpsons where homer gets the key to the executive toilets? Well, it's surprisingly close to that. There was sadly no string quartet playing Mozart, but I get the impression it was merely their night off.
The party itself was great fun. It's one thing to fill a pub with gay people -- that happens all the time -- but quite another to fill a quite large pub with a single group of gay people who all know each other; there were easily a hundred of us; it was quite excellent. Post-pub we moved on to Heaven, which was better than I've enjoyed in a while, and in what's turning out to be a regular feature of my visits to heaven, I discovered yet another room, bringing the total to five, this one playing what sounded suspiciously like dub. I shall bring trinis there in future.
Today Will has headed Camden-wards and I am recovering, and doing some work, but currently watching Them!, a ground breaking black and white sci-fi film from 1954, when horror movies were slow moving and suspenseful and the idea of a giant mutated insect had never been done before (it was the first!). It's excellent so far, and I have yet to see a single gigantic ant.
Update! My excellent weekend improved further when I emerged in typically anti-social fashion from my room around 5.30 to discover that my super housemates (whom I thought had been watching rugby in the living room with friends all day) had also produced an absolutely fantastic dinner and transformed our living room into a candle-lit dining room for 12, a feat that was still more miraculous for being unexpected. Dinner was superb and conversation was enlivened by much talk of pole-dancing lesbians. I enjoyed myself :-)