All my Other Men(tm)

Considering that it was only three days long, and I've been dealing with continuing IT faff, I've had quite a productive week at work, including getting a rather large invoice signed off, which is quite comforting since I'm shortly going to be out of action for a few weeks. Not unrelatedly, I've been doing quite a lot of running this week. This might be overly optimistic, but knowing that I'm going to have to take quite a long break soon, and that depending on timings I might not be able to get back to my current levels of fitness in between this operation and the next two, I'm trying quite hard to push for a sub-20m Parkrun next week. I'm going to run it at Dulwich, which is considerably flatter and faster than Finsbury Park, but I don't think that's going to be enough to take a full minute off by itself, so have been doing some fairly hard interval sessions. They went pretty well, and I'll do a couple more next week, and then we shall see.

On Tuesday evening I popped over to Manchester to meet up with Nathan. We had dinner at Bundobust, which hjdoom had introduced me to in Leeds a few months ago. They do vegetarian Indian street food, and it's very tasty and ridiculously good value - their platter for two was almost more than we could eat, and set us back the princely sum of twenty-five quid. They also have an extensive range of interesting beers, including a choice of three good non-alcoholic ones. After dinner we headed to the Village but after trying a couple of bars and finding all the comfy seats taken decided to just go back to his place and hang out there. This was an excellent decision apart from the bit where we totally lost track of time and I nearly missed my last train home. Have I mentioned how distractingly gorgeous he is?

Yesterday I went to York to see leonato sing as the villainous Dr Bartalo in The Marriage of Figaro, which I really enjoyed. I always love seeing him perform, and he is very good, but it can be a bit hard to tease out what is objective appreciation of his considerable talent from the knowledge that I could happily spend hours watching him doing nothing, or listening to him read a shopping list. But last night he was absolutely at the top of his game - both vocally, and capturing the character so well that I almost forgot who the actor was. In fact, the whole show was splendid, with all four principals extremely strong, as indeed were all but one of the supporting cast (Cherubino, whose acting I enjoyed, but didn't seem to have the right vocal style for the part). I've struggled to acquire the taste for opera in the past, perhaps partly by starting with too much difficult modern stuff, rather than classics with lots of hummable tunes, but this definitely felt like something of a turning point, and I'm now excitedly anticipating seeing more.

Mark had taken today off work because performing is exhausting so we spent a quiet morning together, and then went for a bite to eat at Betty's, which was delicious. One thinks of Betty's as primarily a place for afternoon tea, but as it was a little early for that, we went for the lunch menu, and both plumped for the rarebit with bacon, which was excellent, and served with a caramelized onion chutney that was nearly as good as emperor's. My arteries may still be screaming, but my belly is exceedingly happy. After lunch we said our farewells, and I set out towards Stansted, whence I shall be heading to Berlin, for a weekend with the lovely oedipamaas84, completing the hat trick of my Other Men(tm).