I met a couple of friends from university for an evening of live music from Mount Forel, Anteloper (who are looking for a new name, I think because there’s a US band called the same), and Cosmorat (“Our aim is to become the biggest band on LinkedIn”). All put on a great show. I cut it quite fine but managed to catch the last tube home from the Deep North (well, the northern Zone 2/3 borders).

We saw The House of Shades at the Almeida theatre. It’s long, but kept my attention throughout. A trite summary of it might be to call it a socialist alternative to Years and Years (I only saw one episode of that and did not want any more). For a play written before the great intermission of the past few years, it seemed eerily prophetic at times. It was a bit clumsy in other places, but it gave me much to think about. The highlight was the 80s Thatcherite outfit: hilarious and perfect.

Before the play, we managed to get a table for a quick dinner at Tofu Vegan, a vegan Chinese restaurant which is absolutely excellent. Alas, I did not try the spicy wontons. Next time. There will be a next time.

I spent the week in the most extremely competitive Duolingo league. (In short: Duolingo assigns you to a “league” of 30 or so players of the same ranking each week who have taken their first lesson of the week at the same time. Each week the top few people move up to the next rank, and the bottom few are relegated.) I’ve been in the top Diamond league for 126 consecutive weeks, but the level of effort required to avoid relegation varies a lot. A couple of weeks ago, I came top with about 4000 points. But in last week’s league, you needed 3378 points just to stay out of the demotion zone. To give you an idea of how much work that is, a single lesson is 10 points (up to 15 if you make no errors). In order to get some quick points, I decided to learn the Arabic alphabet (well, abjad), so maybe I’m studying Arabic now. It’s quite a short course by the look of it.

Cell Tower is a fun game if you want something a bit more challenging than Wordle. Do read the instructions, though, a it’s a bit tricky until you’ve grasped how it works.

I haven’t been on Crossrail yet.