I've had a pretty quiet time this week, saw a few movies, hung out a bit and so forth. It's been a week for navel gazing really. I was at the funeral of my old English teacher and mother of one of my friends last Thursday. Pippa Donald was, by all accounts, one of the finest teachers you could ever hope to meet and it's just coming to me now how much that woman taught me, and not just about Shakespeare. She loved a laugh, had a wicked sense of humour and brooked no nonsense from anybody. She scared the bejesus out of me quite a lot, even after we'd left school, but she's one of the women I most admire. She was claimed prematurely by cancer but didn't let it get her down and didn't ask "Why me?" She just got on with it and was teaching right up until the October break. What an inspiration! Oh, and she introduced me to one of my favourite Shakespeare quotes, from As You Like It:

Audrey: I am not a slut, though thank the gods I am foul.
Touchstone: Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness! Sluttishness may come hereafter.

All in all it's been a bit of a strange time recently, there seems to have been all sorts going on with everybody. There's been a higher than usual instance of couples breaking up, couples getting engaged, pregnancies being announced, things breaking down and so forth. Bruce keeps muttering about sychronicity from some hippy dippy book he's reading so I'm starting to wonder if the universe is messing with us. I'm not sure what the creative forces could be trying to tell me because one of my coincidences was telling Zoe and Byron about Shark Attack 3: Megaladon (an extremely shite film that's so bad it's funny. Huge prehistoric sharks man!!) and the star of that film being on Jonathon Ross the next evening. Erk? What? Are the creative forces telling me to watch more pish movies??

Talking of pish movies I went to see The Prestige yesterday. On the face of it you can't really go wrong: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, David Bowie. Magicians. Rivalry. Glamorous assistants.... For the most part the film was quite watchable, despite Christian Bale's character being thoroughly unlikeable, but it just got really stupid at the end. I won't say anything more than that but the phrase "Oh come on! You're kidding! What??" just about sums my reaction to the end of the movie. It may be controvertial and people won't believe me but I'd say spend your money on Borat instead. I don't know about the ethics of making fun of Khazakstan (if you believe that portrayal is real then you are a fuckwit though and deserve to have the widdle taken out of you) but I laughed mightily throughout that film. Plus, how often do you get to see a naked fat man being chased through a convention of mortgage brokers? (I must track down a mortgage broker and ask them...)