Thursday night was the MacUser night out which inevitably meant some pounding heads yesterday morning (Friday). As we all say around slowly stirring our tea and nibbling half-heartedly on corners of toast we went over the night before.

Ads, of course, stayed out the longest. They have far more stamina than even the most hardened journalist.

We started at the Marquess of Granby where it was warm enough to stand out on the pavement drinking sloe gin, which turned out to be sickeningly sweet, but at the same time strangely moreish. There’s a whole clutch of embarassing pictures of us getting less steady on the kerb edges until we slid off altogether and headed off in search of food.

Julian likes jugs – pic by Chris of the Brennan

We should have booked ahead, of course. This was a Thursday. The new Friday. And the whole of Fitzrovia was full. We paraded up Charlotte Street, losing a few along the way, and ended up doubling back towards Soho, by way of Strada, which would have no problem seating us… if we waited two and a half hours.

Soba, always a good standby was almost empty, fortunately, so we marched in and sat at the far end on the long yellow tables. Putting us that far away from everyone else didn’t make much difference. It must have been awful being in there with us as it didn’t take long for the conversation to degrade to the level it usually only reaches in the office.

It’s not surprising they brought us the bill unprompted.

We decamped to Jamies where the shot-takers sent themselves giddy with Baileys and sambucca, and the rest of us wisely stuck to a very ladylike wine.

Yesterday, then, started very slowly after all that, and culminated in a dance-off just before home time to the tunes of Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie and Ring my Bell, regardless of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The people outside desperately wanted to join in.

You could tell.

According to this story in the Guardian, Pierce Brosnan has quit the Bond films.

Hmmm… if he has it’s a bad thing, but then Roger Moore apparently quit after pretty much every film. They were even looking for a new Bond before The Spy Who Loved Me, which was only his third outing. Quitting and then going on to do more films is a well-known Bond trait, so perhaps he’s just bargaining for more money.

If he does go, though, who would step in? That story suggests Clive Owen, Jude Law or Ewan McGreggor. The first would be a disaster (I don’t think I could watch it). The second would be an excellent choice, and the one I’d go for. The third, though, would be the most logical. Bond’s father was Scottish (his mother Swiss) and the first Bond actor a Scot, too, so it would bring things full circle.

The worst possible potential outcome would be Robbie Williams, who isn’t mooted in the piece, but would certainly attract a younger audience, and has shown a fascination with the films in the past.

Whatever the truth behind this story, Brosnan did make one comment that has a lot of truth in it:

[He] then spoke less affectionately of the Bond producers, saying that: “They don’t know how to move on. A sense of paralysis has set in.”

So perhaps he is off, after all.

I think it’s the excitement of having come in to London with me every day for the last week, but Barbra, my iBook is clearly unwell this evening.

She seems to be having some kind of a disco thing going on, with her screen overlaid three times on top of itself and a hundred horizontal bars racing up and down the picture. The computer equivalent of a migrane, poor thing.

I presume this is the fabled iBook logic board problem that has already befallen two others in the office. Only trouble is, it seems to be somewhat intermittent. She’s been doing it for an hour now, but earlier she was fine, then all headachy then hazy again.

She’d better not embarass me in the service centre. I don’t want to take her in for a routine check-up and find out it was all hypochondria the moment they stick a probe up her output port.

I’d also rather like her to be working properly again by the time I go off on holiday. Not that I’ll be taking her with me.

Bizarrely, I can see through the haze that she has just popped up a reminder: ‘Issue analysis, MacUser lab. Wednesday 14 July, 14:30pm’.

Poor dear. She’s clearly going soft in the head.

Time seems to be flying by at the moment. Already it’s Sunday. The next will be my last before doing away.

This weekend, though, has been a mix of work and fun. Most of yesterday was spent writing, and without any distractions I burnt through several thousand words in a fairly short space of time, which was rewarding. Celebrated by heading out into town for dinner with Trevor, Jon and Paul and, finding practically everywhere full, we ended up in Gerrardos, which we’d sworn we’d never go to again after waiting almost two hours for crap service once before.

Fortunately this time things were much better, and it stayed open far later than anywhere else in town. By the time we staggered out at half midnight the town was full of drunken lads pissing up alleyways, ankle deep in McDonalds cartons.

Trevor had been looking back through his diaries and spotted that the dates and days for 1999 were identical to those for this year, making it five years to the day since we came home from our week in the lighthouse. It was a fantastic week. We were out in the middle of nowhere. Whichever way you looked, it was pitch black at night. Behind us was heathland, and in front only cliffs falling off into the dark sea. The only light was from the top of the lighthouse as it slowly swept around and around above our heads and out into the channel.

Very eerie, but at the same time quite beautiful. Not at all like The Fog, which scared the willies out of me as a kid.

Unfortunately yesterday was also the best weather of the weekend, so I missed most of that, but today was at least warm enough to sit outside on the upper patio round at mum’s to eat lunch with Sal and Dan. They’d come over to cook and show us all the plans for their new house. Seems I’m the only person not on the verge of moving house at the moment.

We all ate far too much, as we always do when they come around, and the only way of working it off was a slow mooch around Bluewater, after last week’s abortive efforts to get there. I’ve not been this year, I don’t think, so it was a fairly interesting way to pass the afternoon, even if I wasn’t there for buying.

I suspect this week is going to be as hectic as the last, but I am seriously counting the days now until going away. I can’t be arsed with thinking about itineraries or what I’m going to take, but the idea of a pool, a beach and a book is very, very appealing.

Two weeks (and a day) from now I’ll be off on holiday. It’ll be my first break in ten months – the longest stretch between holidays for years – and I can’t wait. These last few days I’ve been getting up at six so I can do a couple of hours’ work before going into work. It’s quite nice, actually. The sun is up and it’s warm enough to have the windows wide open, and you can watch the world waking up. It does mean I’ve not been swimming in over a week, though, so I have a serious case of gym guilt going on.

It’s kind of booked. Well, bits of it, anyway. The flight to Faro, and the first week’s villa. After that it’s on to Seville by either train or bus (most likely bus as the line doesn’t yet stretch across the border) and then Madrid, Barcelona and, eventually, Provence. Nothing after Faro has been booked yet. It can’t be too tricky to buy train tickets in Spanish, can it?

The stupid thing about it all, though, is the only bit that will take place in the UK – the Eurostar trip home. Paris to London – single – is

Take the battle scenes from Lord of the Rings, the underlying plot of Gladiator, and mix in a dash of Robin Hood, and what do you have?

King Arthur, which goes on general release at the end of the month.

Oh, and get Clive Owen to play the lead, too, just to spoil it. He was terrible. It doesn’t matter if he’s happy, excited, angry (lots of that) or upset (plenty of angst here) – he’s always got the same expressionless face, and flat, bored voice. I am sure there must have been an autocue strapped to the front of the camera so he could read off his lines.

So, what was I expecting? It was a Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun) retelling of British history, so it was going to be heavy on the drama, but even the battle scenes, of which there are really only two, were surrounded by acres of dull waffle. Fortunately, when they came, they were well worth the wait, and the one on the frozen lake, which the press invite described as ‘one of the great cinematic fight scenes of all times’ was fairly edge-of-your-seat. It wouldn’t go so far as agreeing with that quote, but it certainly had me thinking that finally we were seeing something we’d not seen on film before.

But ultimately it’s been done by others before, and it’s been done by others better. Lord of the Rings had bigger battle scenes, and Gladiator did the whole ‘fight for your freedom’ lark back in 2000 with far more panache.

A more dynamic leading man may have been able to carry it off, but it seems even Clive Owen realised he’d heard it all somewhere before, but not until the first day of shooting, by which time the contract was signed and it was all too late.

So the only thing he could do, was plod through.

Which he did.

Basildon today, which I’ve studiously avoided for the last 8 years. It’s two steps short of being Lakeside, which is three steps short of being Bluewater, which in itself is a short stroll shorter than being somewhere decent, but traffic jams on the M25 made crossing the river a slow and tedious chore, so a turn-off into Basildon seemed a good idea.

The windows, at that point, were firmly wound shut.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. It used to be full of grotty shops on grotty windswept streets. Now it’s just the people, and their abundance of FCUK t-shirts (and a startlingly popular l33t-speak abomination that requests you ‘ki55 my ar53′) that stands between what it is and what it could be.

Still, it has a good coffee shop, which is something.

The vaguely interesting Savacentre has now become a Wall*mart, though. I have childhood memories of drinking lurid blue drinks in there with sugar contents so high they were close to toxic. The crappy clock made of bicycle wheels and metal birds has moved up a couple of floors, but beyond that, and the fact that most of the speciality shops seem to be shut, leaving the top floors of the shopping centre dark and depressing, little has changed.

All that aside, though, it’s not nearly as bad as I’d been remembering. In fact, it made for an interesting excursion – if only because it showed up how soul-less Lakeside really is.

The end of the week was a long time coming, which made today all the more welcome. In fact, I think it was a pretty long week for us all, largely on account of the fact that we were listening to David Hasselhoff, which is pointless as only Germans can hear it. Kind of like the way only dogs can hear dog whistles.

Anyhow, today was spend in Wimbledon. Not watching tennis, but kicking back in a jacuzzi, alternating between Pimms and champagne, which are fine on their own but turned out to be a rather grotty combination by the time we were mixing them in the same glass.

I guess there was 30 or 40 of us, and a good mix of people, although we were massively outnumbered by the swarms of flying ants that burst out of the ground with exquisite co-ordination and spent the next four hours alternately crawling up out necks and dropping in our drinks.

In the middle of the garden was a very bizarre sculpture – a pair of buttocks, effectively rising up out of the lawn like someone had been murdered and the killer done a bad job of hiding the evidence. It was strange enough in itself, but doubly bizarre when it became clear that it was also the source of the nest, and had 50,000 queens emanating from its crack.

I was lucky to get there at all, having arranged to meet Ross at the station and then forgotten to bring the directions. After half an hour of aimless walking, we eventually found it, having passed a stupid man having a barbeque on his balcony and letting the smoke gush in through the open windows of the flat above, and an insane man on a street corner who bade us good day and asked how we were. As we left, seven hours later, he was still there, still wishing us a good day and still wanting to know how we were.

Oh, and a man on the high street who wanted to give us

I feel completely worn out at the moment. I am so behind on my emailing (sorry, Stina, sorry Kev, sorry all), and have been very remiss on the blogging front these last few days.

It all started last weekend. I had a bucket-load of work all neatly planned out, but then this happened and that, and I ended up having to dash around doing other things that came up, and it never really recovered. I started the work at half ten on Sunday night and finished at one on Monday morning.

Two more 6am starts this week so I could get in a couple of hours work before heading into the office, and late nights most nights – apart from tonight when I knocked off 20 minutes early because I’d arrived an hour early.

Anyhow, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and this weekend is looking like it might be quite relaxing, with very little apart from some Saturday afternoon drinks planned, at which point normal service (and life) will be resumed.

In the meantime, I’ve fallen asleep on the train home three times this week. In the seven years I’ve been doing that journey, I’m thinking that takes my total to five.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a James Bond geek. I must have seen them all a hundred times each. So, the offer of a trip to Pinewood, where all but Moonraker was filmed, was too good to pass up. And so it was that I found myself in a 20-seater limo cruising far too slowly out of London this morning.

From the outside, they look quite flash, but in actual fact limousines are the most hateful vehicles ever produced. Almost everyone has to sit sideways on, facing the bar, which means that when it accelerates or slows down you alternately slide backwards and forwards along the polished leather seat. Then there’s the lack of legroom, and the heat (18 people in a 20-seater car is a very good test for the air con).

So, we crept through the traffic to the outskirts of the city and then buzzed down to the studios, finally pulling up on Goldfinger Avenue, so-named because it was used in the climax of the Aston Martin chase in that film. The doors to the next studio were sat wide open and through them we could see the massive sets of the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film, which seems to have taken over several of the biggest studios and almost all of the office outbuildings in the complex.

Rather disappointingly, we weren’t on the 007 Stage, which was built in 1979 to house the Liparus set in The Spy Who Loved Me. The finale sets of several Bonds since then have been the same shape: sloping walls and a peaked roof. You can see why from the outside.

Instead, they took us into a smaller smoke-filled studio to watch the filming of three scenes from what they told us was a British remake of Oceans 11 (which, I believe, was an American remake of the British Oceans 11 in the first place). I’ve not seen it, so I don’t know how accurate it all was, but they dispatched us with a copy each on DVD, so I’ll have to check it out at the weekend and find out.

I’m not convinced they were being entirely honest, though. We were there for the launch of a new broadcast video camera, and the scenes they chose to film rather conveniently showed off all of its best features. The ‘director’ had the air of actor about him, too, which was immediately suspicious.

One of the scenes involved them blowing the door off a bank vault using marzipan. Of course, in the film it wasn’t really marzipan: it was plastic explosive, but on account of the fact that the charges underneath it caused it to explode and pepper us all with sweet almondy paste, it was like cracking a door with a volatile Christmas cake.

Once inside the safe, our balaclava-clad villain had to creep around without breaking the laser beams that cast a vivid green net on the floor. Bizarrely, the clapper board guy seemed to be confusing real life with fiction, and spent a lot of his time very carefully stepping over them so as not to break the beams. Strange boy.

We must have watched them filming for an hour or so, then wandered through the backlot past 007 Drive and several other Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sets (including the Floater thing where they go floating up to the big fan at the top of the room and almost get sliced up until they burp away their gas) to the manor.

It has a very grand entrance: all carved dark wood, around which are plaques commemorating some of the great and the good of Pinewood History. One of them was for Peter Rogers who directed the Carry On films there, and apparently still eats in the canteen every day, having nothing else to do.

Opposite was the British Comedy walk of fame, which is a grotty outdoor corridor on the walls of which are another series of plaques. One is for the 40 years of ‘humour’ in the Bond films. Hmmm…

We stopped there for lunch in the dining room they used as the consulate in Carry On up the Khyber. The food was fantastic, and the hallways fascinating, being plastered with photos of some of the most ambitious sets to have been built there (including the Liparus). It made going to the Roger Moore commemorative toilets (probably not called this, but they should be), and walking past them all, a very lengthy undertaking.

I’d been up hours by then, having started work at seven this morning, so barely eaten anything all day. The wine went straight to my head, so I popped out with Rosie for a walk in the gardens. These, and the ornamental bridge by the Q memorial, were used in the opening scenes of From Russia with Love. Very beautiful.

Exciting though it all was, I was quite glad when it was time to move on. It was issue closing day, so I needed to get back to the office.

We got lost finding our way back to the limo, and ended up on the backlot again, where we walked past one of the costume departments. Three women and a very short man sat sewing together long strips of grass, and called us in to look at what they were doing. Turns out they were making costumes for the Oompa Loompas. They were very beautiful and not at all like the dolly-mixture brown tops they wore in the original film.

Standing in the corner was a dummy wearing a chocolate-coated outfit, no doubt destined to be Augustus Gloop’s unfortunate costume.

The only mildly embarrassing moment was when Zoe asked the short man if he was an Oompa Loompa in for a fitting. Turns out he wasn’t. He was just short.

Back in the limo, we cracked open the champagne and did out best to forget out indiscretion.