Mighty

In spite of my morning walk, which I am loving keeping up, I failed to get all my stand goals done today. This is a bit disappointing as I have been trying to do all the exercise rings each day. Can’t quite believe that I didn’t notice until it was too late in the day. 

I started my new audiobook on the walk this morning. The Secret Barrister’s Nothing But The Truth. It’s started telling the story of how he got into law. It’s amusingly self-deprecating and well written. I was enjoying it so much that I put it on while I was eating breakfast and for the first half hour at my desk while I trawled through a distinct lack of emails and messages. I think my boss is back from seeing our customer, Astro, at some point today but he cancelled the one-on-one in the afternoon. 

PY had an 8:30am with his future boss. I think he’s keen to both have some more materials to enable him to be better prepared on day one but also to get his start date confirmed. 

Later, there was a Product Marketing session focussing on the story for content providers. Much of the positioning was similar to the work we did last week for the Pay TV segment. I hope the subtle differences that we landed upon are helpful framing discussions. 

Cornelia messaged about the train strikes and any impact on Saturday’s Eurovision party plans. I reassured her that there are plenty of alternatives. It’s one of the advantages of living in this part of south London: we’re not too far from the District Line at Wimbledon, the Northern Line’s South Wimbledon station and, if they were not also on strike, Thameslink’s Wimbledon Chase. I repeated the offer of a bed which we can make-up in the office room,

I ended my day trying to work out a thorny logic issue in one of the bits of code I’ve written in Apple Shortcuts: so absolutely nothing to do with work. But I’d just worked out how to fix it when the clock hit to 6pm and I’d promised PY I’d be ready to head out by then. It was, therefore, a bit of a rush to make the train to Clapham where we we’re changing for one to get us to Queenstown Road Battersea.  While South Western Railway is running trains there don’t appear to be any (many?) on Southern’s network so we couldn’t get to Battersea Park. 

We were heading to the Turbine Theatre to see Eugenius. We’d seen the version that was performed at The Other Palace in  October 2018 but this was a slightly reworked version.  We arrived early, and were disappointed to find the little upstairs seating area closed, so we had to stand around a corner with some wine while we waited for the house to open. It was encouraging to see all the tables occupied because it suggested a very full house. The foyer had been dressed for Eugenius which was another interesting sign.  Although we have been to this theatre many times, this was the first time we’d noticed so much theming. 

The Turbine theatre is not massive but the staging was very effective and it felt much bigger than the space actually allowed. I think in part that’s because of the way the music filled the room and felt like a large production. Elliott Evans was great as Eugene and Jaina Brock-Patel and James Hameed also great as friends Janey and Feris. I think the Feris role in particular must be hard as it’s essentially to be the amusing sidekick. 

It’s an 80s-themed musical based around characters created by Eugene in the comic books he created. The 80s references are really well done. As with the first time I saw it, I wonder why there are not more people my age in the audience as the whole growing up in the 80s vibe brings back memories. Maybe it’s the comic book concept that ‘s off putting. Fortunately, it’s incredibly popular with a younger crowd who all seemed to know the “Go Eugenius” actions. 

It was a fun evening and I am tempted to go and see it again. We were humming the music all the way home. I put the soundtrack on whole PY went to buy us a kebab and we sat eating overly-spicy chicken and chips to the album of ten original cast recording. It was co-written by Ben Adam from the boyband A1. I can’t imagine that he’s old enough to remember the 80s in the way the musical depicts it. I checked Wikipedia and see he was only born in 1981 so the understanding of 80s culture must have been learned. He’s not old enough to remember!