We saw The Book of Mormon on Tuesday, my third musical in six days. I don’t think I usually manage more than one a year at most.

I went into it knowing quite a bit about the history and precepts of Mormonism but nothing about the musical. It’s funny, well-crafted, and the performances were excellent, but I felt very uncomfortable about the way it portrays Uganda.

The Book of Mormon lampoons the “African” tropes of The Lion King, but then undermines that with a version of Uganda that’s full of mean-spirited and inaccurate stereotypes. And apparently that’s after the 2021 revisions.

I enjoyed it, but not without reservations.

On Thursday, we went to Gauthier Soho for a big dinner of “French gastronomy without using animals”. Having learned our lesson about the wine pairing (it’s too much wine!) we instead picked a few glasses from the menu to accompany the food, drank plenty of water, and felt fine the next day.

There aren’t a lot of places that offer vegan fine dining, and still fewer that are exclusively vegan, but I’m glad there’s at least one.

We spent the weekend in Bristol, with the excuse of supporting a friend at the Raise the Bar: UK Poetry All-Stars event. It was the first time either of us had been there in a long time (nearly 30 years in my case). It’s distinctive and lively, full of independent venues and interesting creative things – the type that can only happen when you have affordable space, and which are now rarer in London. It’s also a city in thrall to the automobile, spoiled by the six-lane highways breaking up the city and the concomitant long waits for the green man.

It was fun to spot all the places recently renamed to stop memorialising slave trader Edward Colston.

A royal-looking coat of arms high on a building, supported by a lion and a unicorn. The lion has accurate genitals.

A coat of arms on an old gateway in Bristol featuring a lion with lovingly crafted gilded cock and balls detail

We happened upon the Haunted Bookshop on its second day of trading, shelves already stripped by the literature-ravenous goths of Stokes Croft. I picked up a couple of books: Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic from the British Library’s consistently reliable Tales of the Weird series; and a beautiful guide to The Korean Myths.

We visited a couple of very different museums. First was the Palestine Museum, curated by loving volunteers with information about the history of Palestine, its traditions, dress, music, and culture in all forms, and its occupation and ablation over the past eight decades.

After that, we went to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, which is full of the spoils of Empire and a substantial collection of paintings by some well-known artists. And dinosaurs.

A weekend wasn’t nearly enough to see much of the city, so I think we’ll go back again soon. We still have to plenty left to see, including the toppled Colston statue in the M Shed museum.

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