dome

Some charity was at the door again, collecting for 'the disabled'. 'Do you know any disabled people?', asked the woman. I thoughtlessly said no, fervently wishing that Dave had stirred his crutches to answer the door instead of me. 'You're lucky!', she said - which was certainly subject to misinterpretation. What I should have said was: 'Actually, I've got one upstairs. Give us a tenner and I'll pass it on.' Instead I just stood there, waiting for it to be over.

I was similiarly paralysed by another situation. One of the people who interviewed me for that job I didn't get turned up in the shop, browsing. How should I deal with this? Do a Get Selling on him, but sell... myself? Or adopt a more Peggy Mitchell approach? ('Not good enough for yer, eh? Well two can play at that game. Yer barred!') Or perhaps something more Shakespearian? ('Thou didst reject me!')

He'd gone long before I'd made up my mind.

On Saturday we went to the Dome. (Yeah, I know it's the O2 Centre now, but it's still a fucking dome, innit?). It's a bit eerie, like something out of Quatermass: stuffed with bars and restaurants, it's like a glimpse of a future world in which leisure activities are all we have to do, and the air outside is too poisonous to breathe. We saw the new Indiana Jones and the Sex And The City movie. Neither of which would have been my choice, but both of which are good three-star movies (Out of what? Out of five, six or seven, it really doesn't matter.) In fact they were surprisingly similiar. In fact, they were exactly the same. Maybe it was the controlled atmosphere of the Dome, but they have more or less merged into one in my mind now:

Recuperating from a small thermonuclear explosion, Harrison Ford (who now looks exactly like Clive James) hires a black female PA (Shia LaBeouf, miscast) to help keep his treasure maps in order. Together they go off in search of the fabled crystal Louis Vuitton handbag. Louis Vuitton, like all fashion designers, is actually an alien deity who hangs out in a lost city in Mexico, where he forces the Indians from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto to sew sequins onto his bizarre creations. Unfortunately for our heroes, a group of shrieking villainesses known only as 'The Girls' are also on the trail of the iconic handbag with its amazing supernatural powers. The dark-haired one gets hold of it, but the pleasure overload is too much for her, and she shits her pants. The End.

Afterwards we went to an intimidatingly expensive restaurant. I had thought - unlike anyone else in the group - to wear a shirt, but this was counteracted slightly by the fact that my lips and tongue were blue from the 'slushie' I'd consumed in the cinema. Luckily it was pretty dark in there. In fact, as I recall, they turned the lights down a significant notch almost as soon as we sat down. We did not take this personally.

Then half of us saw Boyzone and the other half got the DLR back to Stratford, with the result that everyone was happy. Along the Docklands Light Railway, the stations are so close to each other that the effect is more of a novelty than a means of transportation: a ghost train in which the only frights come from your fellow passengers. Mat, Rhys and I whiled away the time by betting on how long it would take to reach the next station, usually about a minute. Once home they started playing Star Wars Risk, and I drifted off, in more senses than one.