January 2014 Review

I came out of the two-week rest caused by gym closures and Christmas and said "Since when was a 20kg plate actually heavy?" I may have used stronger language. One week rests are okay - just. Two weeks causes serious strength loss.

I changed around my exercise plan: Clarissa's hour-long spinning class on Tuesday, Yoga on Thursday, weights on Friday and Sunday, and added some lifts before the Spin, just to keep it up. That plus a sudden drop in my carb intake meant what has happened before - constipation which I cured with some tea from a Chinese herbalist. More details would be serious over-sharing. Add in an hour of Thai Combination at Thai Charms in Teddington every other Sunday after the gym, something I'm continuing until the stiffness and tension in my legs goes.

I made a little promise to myself to clear all the unread books I've had on the Unread Book Shelf, and so got through Ian Bone's Bash The Rich, Stephen Turnbull's The Art of Renaissance Warfare, 730 pages of Francis Pryor's The Making of the English Landscape, volume ten of Transmetropolitan, and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. There's a few left, and I may never get round to Moll Flanders.

I saw Leviathan, Beyond Burlesque, All This Can Happen and Oh Boy at the ICA; American Hustle, The Railway Man, The Wolf of Wall Street, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Out of the Furnace at Cineworld; and This Must Be The Place, and The Great Beauty through Curzon Online. Plus a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory while ironing. Must-see? Oh Boy, without a doubt. And yes, the Cineworld Unlimited card definitely makes it easier to go see a movie: the marginal cost is just the ice-cream. (Ice cream is medicinal. Everyone knows that.)

Sis and I had supper at Karpo, and I got to see King's Cross at 18:00 hours - where the heck do all those people come from? A lot must come from Kings Place and Central St Martins. I ate at the bar at Duck Soup, 10 Greek Street and Jackson and Rye, and tried the burgers at Grillshack. Props to Laura Fitzgerald (aka Boo In London) for the reviews.

Bose QC20i's are amazing. Sure you hear yourself breathe in the quiet passages, and when I eat an apple I need to take the buds out, but otherwise, I put them in, turn on the noise cancelling, play some music and the outside world goes away. Except wind. Wind is noisier with the phones in than out. Also, they take up way less space in the messenger bag, and that means I can use the smaller messenger.

And then there was the bit when someone stole my license plates. Uh-huh. Stole. My. License. Plates. This never happens. You have experienced hundreds of thousands of car-view and none of them have been of cars with missing plates. Well, mine did one Friday evening. I will write about that on another occasion.