By The Water, For The Heat

Yes, Summer in the City has arived. And, so, it's time to cool off elsewhere. To seek refuge. By the lake...



boat, non obligé



..in the mountains, of course...



A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there

Joggers on Embankment

Summer in the city, at last!



Some joggers enjoying the lunchtime sun.

Sombrero

Last night we went to Sadler's Wells to see Phillipe Decouflé’s latest work Sombrero.

...Sombrero - in which the choreographer himself dances - sees him playing with images of light and shadow, with the intense heat of the sun employed as a central theme. Decouflé creates captivating and magical images using a blend of both old-fashioned theatricality and high-tech video trickery.

Sombrero is a funny, entertaining, moving and magical experience that looks set to be a real treat for Decouflé fans and newcomers alike...

from sadlerswells.com

Technically, the dancing was competent to good, though the idea and execution was the real gem. Dancers, dancing with their shadow-sometimes other dancers, digital or video projection. So very well done that, on occasion, the viewer wasn't really sure if the shadow was genuine or false-be it dancer or digital.

There was clever use of shadow trickery. On the whole the production was fairly satisfying.

However the French actress and actor (who was the worse of the two) pigeon English, heavily accented (so that it was incomprehensible most of the time) who delivered the prologue, and some commentary throughout should have done so in French. Xfe couldn't understand their English because of the accent. That probably went for the rest of the French people in the audience.

Dinner@The Fish Shop

After the show (which finished at 9pm) we went for dinner at The Fish Shop on St John St.

That was rather disappointing. We had a lovely table in a fine loking restaurant. We were served pretty quickly. We had pre-starter platters of whelks and of marinated mussels. The whelks had been cooked some time before and left in a warm over, or under a heat lamp. Those parts exposed from the shell were dry and rubber, with the eye baked on to the end. The mussels weren't much better.

For starter we each had soup. I had the fish chowder, which I thought was going to be smoked haddock and salmon-though I might have imagined that. When it came it was more disintegrated parts of salmon than haddock, and certainly there was no smokiness about it. No corn certainly, and a watery consistency, certainly not creamy. Bland and disappointing.

My main was the monkfish in bacon. Once again, it was tough and rubbery. Overcooked, left under a heat lamp. And we had to wait about 45 minutes for our main!

The cost was £88 for the two of us which included a bottle of rose (well, it is summer, and service-12.5% optional.