Watching Newsnight Review

I'm watching Newsnight Review and eating Jarlsberg. Living in London has its compensations. The first is that the heavy metropolitan bias in arts reviewing makes it highly relevant to me. In the past week I have walked past the cinema that has been turned into a theatre to show the play of Brief Encounter ('Not the film - the play' as it says on the film posters outside) and set out to go to the new show at Tate Modern but failed to get there, distracted as I was by trying on clothes - in every store on Oxford Street - that I might have worn in 1982 and rejecting them because... I already wore them in 1982.

Both these shows have just been critiqued on Newsnight Review and it appears that I should have gone to them instead of thinking about them. And will do so at earliest opp. Don't you wish you were on that programme? Getting paid to watch TV (in this case, the new series Mad Men about ad execs in 1960s New York) and tell the whole country (or a few hundred thousand of them) what you think? Having said that, I do get paid to tell people what I think of 5 books a month and it pretty much wrings all delight out of reading.