A few things happened.
1) We went to White Hart Lane to watch Tottenham Hotspur play Liverpool.
Tottenham won 2-1, and the teams were kind enough to score all three goals at the end we were in, which was nice.
Strangely enough, this was my first ever visit to the Lane. When I was younger, my family could have afforded either tickets or the train fare to London, but not both. And then when I was studying in London, a phase of relative lack of interest coincided with soaring ticket prices, and it wasn't until I moved to Beijing that I got back into following Spurs. I first saw them play in the flesh at the friendly against South China AA in Hong Kong, and a chap we met who'd travelled from London to see it was kind enough to offer CK and me the use of a couple of season tickets in which he has a part share.
2) I was best man at a wedding. The groom is second from left here:
The suit hirer furnished me with an incredibly small waistcoat, which meant I had to keep my jacket on all the time, but that was pretty much the only thing that went wrong. My speech went fairly well, although the reception venue - an Elizabethan manor in Oxfordshire - was a little intimidating. One section of the guests stood upstairs in a minstrels' gallery for the speeches, giving the whole performance something of the air of playing the Apollo. Surprisingly, my speech was the most serious of the lot, although me and the bride's brother both managed to mention that time the groom wore a Spider-man costume designed for an 8-year-old. Shockingly, he's done it twice.
Other than that, we were up and down to London a few times - mostly to catch up with friends, but on one occasion for work. I had agreed to supervise the first day of a recording session. I've done some voice work myself, but it was very impressive to see top pros at work. What separates them from part-timers like me is the ability not only to turn the voices on and off but to keep them going, and to sing, gasp, sound like they're being tickled and so on, all in character.
