Who in God's name would bring a half-eaten eight pound jar of Hellman's mayonnaise to a public meeting?

Or in other words, I'm reading Bonfire of the Vanities. It's pretty good so far.

The weekend was a thing of beauty -- and, as such, a joy forever. On Saturday afternoon, I met Lydia at the Odeon Covent Garden. We'd planned to see SPELLBOUND (the spelling-bee thing, not the Hitch classic), but it turned out to be on an hour later than we thought, thus rendering it incompatible with my oh-so-hectic schedule.

Dismissing the other offerings with summary execution -- "That's about a middle-aged woman, not interested; that looks like a French film about nothing in particular; that's totally boring; that's about a horse." -- we ended up seeing BLIND SHAFT at The Other Cinema.

BLIND SHAFT tells the heartwarming story of two guys with a scam. They find a naive out-of-work miner and sign on at a new mine pretending he's the relative of one of them. Then they kill him, make it look like an accident and collect the family compensation from the mine boss as a pay-off for them not telling the authorities.

This sort of goes wrong when they next mark is a schoolkid without enough money for study fees, whom one fo the men is reluctant to kill. It's good, though the lack of music makes it a bit soporific (it could do with being about twenty minutes shorter). For those of us who speak Chinese, the accents are alarming more than anything else, but I'd say on the whole it's worth watching.

After that, I went to Ascot for Tom Jeatte's birthday party. The house was vast, I didn't go to sleep, I have no idea what I was doing for about five hours of my life. These things happen.
The next day, the best film ever made was on TV.