A few observations...

1) I went up to Durham last weekend for my friend's Sam's wedding. It was the first friend's wedding I'd been to and was a very exciting affair. The girl in the photo is actually my friend Sarah, but I can't be bothered to go searching through for a photo of the bride, so I figured that would do for now. However, my good mood was somewhat ruined on the way home, when GNER did their classic trick of delaying my train by an hour whilst cancelling the next one (for no apparent reason). Both trains were booked full of reservations as it was a bank holiday. Anyway, on embarking the train (after fighting my way through people and luggage) I discovered that a child was sitting in my seat, with her parents next to her. I apologised to the mum and showed her my ticket. She glared at me, sighed and said very loudly 'Right guys, we have to move as this lady wants Laura's seat. She'll have to sit in the aisle or something'. I momentarily felt awful as I sat down, then realised that a) It wasn't Laura's seat, it was mine and b) I wasn't going to spend two and a half hours standing up when I'd spent half an hour on the internet just so that I could make a reservation. It was her responsibility to sort that out, not mine, especially if she was travelling with children! Obviously I only thought of these comebacks after they'd stormed off, so I sat there fuming for the rest of the journey.

2) As you may have gathered from the last point, I'm not all that great with confrontation (actually, I'm very good when confronting on behalf of other people, just not when its down to me). The other day, my friend Ben and I went for lunch at my favourite restaurant in Leigh broadway 'J.T.'s Diner' (doesn't sound all that but trust me, the place is awesome). We ordered our food and waited in anticipation. For an hour. When we got there there was only one other family, but by this time the place was getting pretty busy. I had a view of the kitchens from my seat and I could see the waiter holding up our written order, pointing at us and looking very angrily at the waitress, saying something along the lines of 'What is this still doing here?!' Unfortunately Ben's not all that great at confrontation either, so we both sat there a bit longer, watching the waitress hide other people's food orders under her table so she didn't have to walk past us to deliver food to customers who had been waiting 10 minutes. Eventually our non-confrontal natures paid off as the boss came over and whispered 'I am SO sorry. We've had a problem with our order system. Obviously you don't have to pay for a single thing'. So the story had a happy ending, the meal was lovely and we both ordered dessert, just to make a point. We went away feeling very pleased with ourselves.

3) I discovered that you shouldn't big up a film before you've seen it. Years ago, I saw 'RENT' (a.k.a. 'Aids: The Musical) on stage and absolutely loved it. Everyone who went to see it felt the same. So I got very excited last night when Matt announced he had the film version on dvd... 'It's SO good' I exclaimed about six times before he put it on. It was not good. In fact, it was probably one of the worst films I have ever seen (almost on a par with 'Date Movie). I just couldn't understand how something could be so good on stage and so awful on screen, when essentially all the songs and characters were the same! I think it was partly because you can get away with singing the whole story on stage, whilst it was getting a little ridiculous watching dialogue on tv being exchanged quite unnecessarily in song. For example:

'How are we gonna paaaay the rent?'
'I doon't know, but I have AIDS...'
'Meeeee too'

It does make you start wanting to sing instead of speak though, it makes boring instructions such as 'Pass me the fooork' that little bit more interesting...