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This is another “watching, not doing” blog entry. Can’t see myself doing this anytime soon:

I took this at the Thames Festival last week. It shows a member of the Free Running (aka Parkour) demonstration team performing a hand stand on the specially built stage. We were also treated to running, jumping and somersaulting from the rest of the team, all neatly dressed in their corporate sponsor’s logo. (Barclaycard - Who, incidentally, caused me a great deal of inconvenience this week, so I’m not feeling charitable enough to give them a free picture advert on my blog.)

Other highlights this week …

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This is Albert.

Yes, that Albert. Prince Albert of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria fame, now more famous for their museum than anything else.

OK, I admit they may be quite important but I had a useless history teacher at school and the museum’s what comes up top of the list if you type “Victoria and Albert” into Google. If you really want to see how times change, try typing “Prince Albert” into google and see what comes up first.

So, what’s Prince Albert doing on my blog?

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I’ve always wanted to play the drums but never really gave the idea any serious thought as they’re one of the least practical musical instruments ever. Large, noisy and require the use of all four limbs to play, so couldn’t possibly be easy to play, could they?

Not that I’d let the third fact put me off, but living in a flat in London, the first two factors are pretty significant.

The solution?

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I recently bought myself a drawing board so that I could do some pencil drawings from the comfort of my sofa. Here is how the most recent one came out:

I’ve altered the colours slightly so that the picture shows up better on the web. The original is in light pencil. The picture is sketched from the left shoe of my pair of Patrick Cox snake skin shoes.

Turns out I’ve owned them for quite a long time, although they’re still looking reasonably decent as I keep them for special occasions.

So, why shoes?

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I spent yesterday evening with James Randi & Friends - about 500 of them.

The event was this one, which promised “A rare opportunity to share an evening with James Randi and his associates in an evening of discussion about science, pseudoscience, scepticism and the paranormal.”

James Randi, in case you didn’t know is famous for being a skeptic and used to appear on TV shows debunking people like Uri Geller the spoon bender. James’ website his here and you can read more about him on wikipedia here.

So, am I now a fully converted Skeptic?

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I decided that since 35 is a kind of “special” birthday - well, it marks the traditional half-way point in one’s life - that I ought to do something to mark the occasion. Since Clare’s excellent Christmas Karaoke/Dinner party, I’ve been wanting to do karaoke again, so that’s what I decided to do for my birthday.

I realise that the picture just shows me, but that’s because I don’t like to post other people’s pictures on the internet without asking. I could happily do karaoke all on my own, but it is much more fun with other people. And, of course, I’d like to thank those delightful people for coming along to help me celebrate!

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Skate and Date is one of my friend Clare’s bright ideas for getting single people to meet up with each other. Predictably enough, it involves Skating (on ice) and Dating. It’s been a while since I last ice skated, so I thought I’d give it a go.

And after the break, there’s an “action shot” just to prove that I did actually take part in the Skating part of Skate and Date.

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In case you’d been wondering why I’ve been so quiet lately, this month, my work took me to Dublin, where I’ve just spent three weeks working on a project for Bank of Ireland.

Of course it wasn’t all work, work, work …

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Last night I went to see this - Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds, based on the book by H.G.Wells.

You can read all about the original 1978 concept album here.

The show was a faithful rendition of the album with all live performers, many of them from the original album, band and full string orchestra. Even Richard Burton made an appearance as a computer generated animation lip-synched to his original recording.

So, how was my second trip to The O2 (to see Madness last week - fun, but they’re clearly getting a bit old) in just over a week?

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I’ve just got back from a week’s holiday in Mexico with my good friend Tom. We stayed at the Gran Bahia Principe resort near Akumal, on the Yucatan Peninsula, about 60 miles south of Cancun. The weather was fantastic all week, hot and sunny and only once started to rain as we were sitting in the aeroplane waiting to head back home.

We ended up having quite an eventful trip …

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