Celebrity Sightings II

Dave and I were touched by greatness last Wednesday night. Having spent the summer following beautiful folkie Seth Lakeman at various gigs around the capital, we had tickets to see Franz Ferdinand again, this time playing the Forum in Kentish Town. Another stonking gig. However, Dave and I dined in a nearby Ethiopian restaurant beforehand, and to our amazement, Alex Kapranos, Robert Hardy and Paul Thomson walked in halfway through our main course and sat two tables away from us. Actually, to be honest, we didn’t think it was really them at first, as it seemed too improbable. A band due on stage in less than an hour casually popping out to dine rather than choosing to take three lines of coke in their dressing rooms? Plus, for such giant icons of post-punk, they seemed rather small and ordinary-looking. But our assumption that they were just lookalike fans quickly dissipated when a couple of people went up for autographs and took pictures on their mobile phones. I nearly choked on my injera and started trembling as I texted another friend of mine who was going to join us at the gig. Of course I didn’t go up and say anything. Though they were being perfectly charming to anyone who approached, at the time I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound totally trite or moronic, like, “I think you’re really good” or “I’m coming to your concert tonight.”

I suppose I should have asked Alex K if the restaurant was going to be featured in his Soundbites column in the Guardian, which charts the eateries Franz Ferdinand frequent as they tour the globe. I really hoped it would since that way I could show the article to my friends and say “Look, I was there!” However, on Friday, the last ever Soundbites column appeared which was about rude tourists in Prague, where the band had played two weeks earlier.

It’s been a good season for celebrity spotting in our own locality too, which means I can update our list as follows:

Celebrities spotted in Crouch End since we have lived here:
Sean Hughes (in O’s Thai Café)
Juliet Stevenson (crossing the road near the Clocktower)
Cliff Parisi (Minty from EastEnders) (in Florian’s, the Vietnamese Café and outside what used to be The Creamery; alas (?) we missed him opening the Hornsey Vale Community Centre Christmas fair)
Nigel Harman (in the gym)
Stephen Merchant (on a W3 bus)
Dermot Murnaghan (buying a paper from the stand outside KFC, with his family in the kindergarten zoo that is Monkey Nuts on a Saturday lunchtime and most recently in the gym)
Eve Matheson (walking along Weston Park)
Iain Lee (walking along Weston Park and in the gym), who claims Banners to be his favourite café in the whole world.
One of the McGann brothers, possibly Joe (at the Nationwide cashpoint on the Broadway and outside the Fairwind Trading Company).
Steve McFadden (on Priory Gardens near Highgate tube).
The guy who played Danny Moon in EastEnders (pissed up outside the pub on Crouch End Hill).
Bob Dylan (headlining at the Fleadh festival in Finsbury Park June 2004).Though all we saw was a crumbly old bloke in a hat and shades hiding at the back of the stage behind a keyboard, croaking out songs and refusing to acknowledge his audience. It could have been anyone really. According to Crouch End legend, Bob once ended up sitting drinking coffee in the lounge at a plumber called Dave’s house, thinking he was actually visiting Dave Stewart. However, Time Out claimed this week that he was put off buying a house in the area after being snubbed by waiting staff at an Indian restaurant and Banners.
Simon Pegg, who filmed much of SHAUN OF THE DEAD in a house on Nelson Road and in our local corner shop on Weston Park (hereafter known as the Zombie Shop) (in the gym, several times).
Dan Stevens, who played Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty, at the W7 bus stop.
Carolyn Pickles, actress (in Highgate Woods).
Peter Capaldi (the mad spin doctor in The Thick Of It) crossing the road between Woolworth’s and the Clocktower.
Paul O’Grady (or his twin) on Inderwick Road.

Parisian

This week’s Time Out contains the preposterous claim that Stroud Green Road has a Parisian air about it. I’m not quite sure what inspired the writer who made this comment – though I don’t know Paris as well as I might, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t consist of a long line of Wig Worlds, Polish bakeries, Caribbean goat curry haunts, pizza parlours, Asian supermarkets, charity shops and tut-tut containing Thai restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Stroud Green Road, though I spend more time viewing it from the inside a traffic-jam bound W3 bus than anything else. But it’s just not French.

A similarly ridiculous claim was made to us recently about Hull. Dave is currently applying for jobs outside of London and this included the post of Head of Policy at Hull City Council. We’d heard bad things about Hull, but a friend assured us that the capital’s long wide-open streets (albeit only wide because they had been cleared by the Luftwaffe) had something of the feel of a Parisian boulevard about them. Well, this has to be the biggest clutching of a straw I have ever heard. Hull is hell. Nearby medieval Beverley, where we thought we might lay our hats were Dave’s application to prove successful, was fairly pleasant with its mini-York Minster and gorgeous open pastures of the Westwood, but it also proved insufferably dull once the shops closed at five, and totally lacking in employment opportunities. So you were faced with the prospect of commuting to Hull for your day job, and staying there after hours if you fancied a trip to the cinema or theatre. And if that isn’t a reason to slit your wrists, then not much is. I have never seen so many chavs per square metre, so many teenage mothers screaming at each other in the streets, and so many people requiring Shopmobility wheelchairs because they were too obese to walk. Even the Princes Quay branch of Monsoon sold shellsuits. Large screens in Victoria Square showed propaganda films about how the City Council aim to reduce crime to “nearer the national average”, improve the health of the population and make Hull “a nice place to live by 2011.” Fortunately Dave didn’t get the job – he arrived for his interview to discover that the Council had sent him a letter to turn up on a Monday but had told his interview panel to expect him on the following Tuesday. A true shambles. Not exactly the Champs Elysées.

I suspect a trip on Eurostar may be in order.

REBECCA

Connections

It's finally cooled down a little after the excruciatingly tedious heat of July, so Dave and I are re-emerging from our enforced hibernation in front of a giant fan and starting to trail around London again. Last night we tried out the pub quiz at the Maid of Muswell public house in, er, Muswell Hill. In an amazing stroke of luck rather than than genius, our team won. I say luck because we only scored 33 out of 65 and the usual group of bearded Mensa- member TV-quiz-show professional-trivia-geeks who show up to these events, sit furtively in a corner and win by a country mile must have been on holiday (or at least in the queues to get through security at Heathrow in a bid to go on holiday).
Everything's pretty quiet in the capital at the moment. The gym is deserted. We only know this because our bathroom is currently out of action (long, expensive story) so we are forced to go and shower there in the mornings. Anyway, we were very pleased with ourselves but rather shocked to win, since we'd totally failed to know who wrote A Man For All Seasons, what the smallest breed of rhino is, who serves as Black Rod's deputy in Parliament, or anything about round-the-world yachtsmen, Michael Jackson number-one duets in 1987 or Peter Falk's acting career prior to Columbo.
One round was called Connections in which you had to say what linked a set of answers. In idle moments at work, I sit and wonder if DVD releases of older TV series and films are based on random themes. Obviously you get boxed sets you might expect, such as Anthony Trollope adaptations or Alan Bleasdale dramas. But for example, two series from different decades starring wooden and now late actor Maurice Colebourne (Gangsters, Howards' Way) were sent to us in the same week. As were series whose main characters were called Jean and Lionel (Brush Strokes, As Time Goes By). This week it's been films starring doctors from ER in much younger guises - Poison Ivy 1 and Hangin' With The Homeboys. Though the same two films are linked by the fact that both contain long discussions about the spermicide Nonoxynol-9. Hm.

REBECCA