Sleep, alcohol & in-flight entertainment
Jan. 18th, 2013 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseIt may just be that my circadian rhythms have finally caught up with my working hours. This morning, having gone to bed drunk last night, I actually woke up around about the usual time, got up and showered, and actually went to have breakfast in the club lounge. Granted, I'm 5 hours behind my normal schedule but I did still wake up just before 5am, as I would have done at home, on a normal working day. Of course I don't normally shower in the mornings but rather the night before, but having drunk 2 local beers very quickly, with nothing in my stomach but 2 oysters, that's entirely justifiable.
I did find the Samuel Adams Boston Larger to be wonderfully smooth which can't have helped the speed I drank it at. It also has a lovely dark colour to it. The UFO Hefeweizen came with a slice of orange, the flavour of which, really complimented it's rich flavour. Unfortunately, by the time my second beer arrived the bar had begun to fill up with people filtering out from a corporate AGM so I polished my drink off promptly and made my way up to the lounge to see if I could do something to sober up, not that I had much time for it because my companion arrived more or less just as I'd sat down with a can of some fizzy drink. So we headed off to dinner, where I decided that a cocktail was in order, picked at my meal and, eventually, when we got back to the room had to be told to get under the covers because I'd just fallen on the bed in a drunken heap. Granted, for all my good intentions at the airport, where I deliberately didn't have any alcohol with my obligatory breakfast of fois gras and melba toast, I did get fairly giddy on the flight via gin & tonic, and white wine with my lunch, which I also mostly picked at. I chose fish options for both lunch and dinner, salmon and lobster respectively, so possibly I simply wasn't in the mood for seafood despite all the good intentions behind my dietary choices.
Faintly sozzled lunchtime as it was, I did have a rather delightful chat with a finance manager, about building relationships in the workplace for the duration. I also managed to watch Anna Karenina, which turned out to be a beautifully stylised film, with a soundtrack that I may well need to track down. I'd heard complaints about the stylistic format of the film but it worked remarkably well to convey the high drama without having to divert into long exposition or lingering shots of city or countryside to illustrate the environment. The deliberately theatrical staging, complete with stage setting, meant that many scene setting details could simply be hand-waved away, leading to a far tighter focus on the key story elements and a heightened sense of almost claustrophobic fatality about things. I'm sure there are details I missed and aspects that didn't occur to me on this watching, so this is definitely a film that I'm going to have to watch again, on something bigger than an in-flight screen.
Aside from the above 2 hour long film, I also managed to watch a documentary about the production of the Aston Martin One-77, which was something of a paean to the Aston Martin aesthetic and philosophy, and made an interesting point about design proportions.
And lastly, having heard it recommended from all sides, I also watched Accused: Tracie's Story, the famous 'Sean Bean plays a transvestite' TV drama. Intense, sympathetic and suitably down-beat BBC drama just about sums this one up. This is the sort of TV that we're good at and seem to have bouts of forgetting to produce. And having discovered that this episode was part of a series I'll have to look into the rest.
I did find the Samuel Adams Boston Larger to be wonderfully smooth which can't have helped the speed I drank it at. It also has a lovely dark colour to it. The UFO Hefeweizen came with a slice of orange, the flavour of which, really complimented it's rich flavour. Unfortunately, by the time my second beer arrived the bar had begun to fill up with people filtering out from a corporate AGM so I polished my drink off promptly and made my way up to the lounge to see if I could do something to sober up, not that I had much time for it because my companion arrived more or less just as I'd sat down with a can of some fizzy drink. So we headed off to dinner, where I decided that a cocktail was in order, picked at my meal and, eventually, when we got back to the room had to be told to get under the covers because I'd just fallen on the bed in a drunken heap. Granted, for all my good intentions at the airport, where I deliberately didn't have any alcohol with my obligatory breakfast of fois gras and melba toast, I did get fairly giddy on the flight via gin & tonic, and white wine with my lunch, which I also mostly picked at. I chose fish options for both lunch and dinner, salmon and lobster respectively, so possibly I simply wasn't in the mood for seafood despite all the good intentions behind my dietary choices.
Faintly sozzled lunchtime as it was, I did have a rather delightful chat with a finance manager, about building relationships in the workplace for the duration. I also managed to watch Anna Karenina, which turned out to be a beautifully stylised film, with a soundtrack that I may well need to track down. I'd heard complaints about the stylistic format of the film but it worked remarkably well to convey the high drama without having to divert into long exposition or lingering shots of city or countryside to illustrate the environment. The deliberately theatrical staging, complete with stage setting, meant that many scene setting details could simply be hand-waved away, leading to a far tighter focus on the key story elements and a heightened sense of almost claustrophobic fatality about things. I'm sure there are details I missed and aspects that didn't occur to me on this watching, so this is definitely a film that I'm going to have to watch again, on something bigger than an in-flight screen.
Aside from the above 2 hour long film, I also managed to watch a documentary about the production of the Aston Martin One-77, which was something of a paean to the Aston Martin aesthetic and philosophy, and made an interesting point about design proportions.
And lastly, having heard it recommended from all sides, I also watched Accused: Tracie's Story, the famous 'Sean Bean plays a transvestite' TV drama. Intense, sympathetic and suitably down-beat BBC drama just about sums this one up. This is the sort of TV that we're good at and seem to have bouts of forgetting to produce. And having discovered that this episode was part of a series I'll have to look into the rest.
