Window Lean

Look at these fellas, they are cleaning the windows of the Sage building in Gateshead. That's very high up, what if you suddenly need a wee, or worse. It's not as if you can have a go up there because everyone inside the Sage will see. Wonder how much they charge, and where do they keep thier bucket! So many questions.

So here's to you Mrs...

We gave the small theatre a go last night, watching an adaptation of the oscar winning film, The Graduate. They’d picked a young Dustin Hoffman look-a-like who played the part of the 21 year old really well. Mrs Robinson was very funny and quite convincing, even when she got her kit off (honest!), a naked woman on stage, I nearly choked on my nuts. The Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack was used inbetween scenes which brought back memories of when I watched the film (I was very young though). The overall performance was quite captivating (if you managed to ignore the poor American accent from Dusty Bin’s dad). Driving home in the eery fog, we couldn’t get that well known song out our heads…..so you’ll be singing it now….

In Vivo

You've got to try Cafe Vivo in Newcastle. Honest Italian food. At last, an Italian style restaurant in the town that doesn't ram pasta and pizza down your throat as if there's no other option. We were knocked back by the flavours they packed into the food. The girlfriend had the best bruschetta with portobello mushrooms ever tasted and I would second that cos I knicked some. I had prawns with lemon and chilli dressing and they were superb, followed by succulent moist Tuscan pork. I thought my eating partner was going to faint when she tried her steak, cooked rare with true flavour. So good. The restaurant has to be a winner, it should be, it's a Terry Laybourne thing, the man behind Jesmond Dene and Cafe 21. A great start to the night, just before going to see Sarah Millican.

Sarah's Not Nice

Well we didn't have to wait long to get tickets for South Shields comedian Sarah Millican, I got them for a surprise Christmas present for that beautiful lady in my life and we went along at the weekend. She was absolutely great again, with her 'Not Nice' set with jokes about her divorce and life after. We got to hear her new material too which was just as good. I think Sarah is something special on the comedy circuit at the moment, great comedy timing and I reckon she will go far.

We can't work it out

Yoko Ono is mental. We went to see her Art Exhibition and were confonted by a stack of black umbrellas, piles of books, bottles of water and a video of her getting her clothes cut with scissors. What a mess, I just wanted to tidy it all up. I reckon John Lennon is still alive, he just needed to get away from her, now he's a Nowhere Man.

How do you get a traffic warden out of a tree? Cut the rope.

Put your hands up if you hate traffic wardens? Put them down, you stink. Anyway, how come the council are cleverly making car spaces to look like parking bays? I parked in what I thought was a space, it had no yellow lines, no 'Loading Bay' markings, no other signs and parking meters either side. It was in between two parked cars and the length was just right for a car. I got a valid ticket only to come back to a ticket for £30 on my windscreen. I'm appealing of course but I'm sure they will win with their crazy rules even though there was a 20cm faint trace of what could be a yellow line just before my front wheel. Feel free to punch a traffic warden in the face for me.

Scarey Sky

I just had to take this photo, really spooky, very eerie, the birds stopped singing, the air was thin. Everything was really really quiet. Until I pumped.

Forget pub crawling

You're supposed to start the new year off watching what you eat but circumstances led us to visit 3 restaurants in 2 days. The first being Danielle's in Hexham. Ran by an over-enthusiastic Italian fella, he loved touching my shoulders as he put down my lamb shank which was a treat in its red onion gravy! The next day we went to Uno's for lunch on Newcastle Quayside, it used to be the place to go. In contrast to Danielle's, they were a bit unfriendly when we asked for a table for 5 as if we were putting them out. The food is bog standard, bog being the operative word. For dinner, we went off to Zeera's in South Shields, a contemporary Indian restaurant. A great menu (away from the norm along that street), especially the fish. The lamb should be so tender in my Pasanda but wasn't, I would still go back though to try the fish. They did try and keep the change from the bill at first, a misunderstanding...mmmm.

Wheely silly

It's not every day you go for a nice walk along the beautiful coastline and see someone riding a unicycle, but I managed to snap this fella just before he fell off. It was really funny, I felt like I'd got to see a clown in practice. I wonder how he rings his bell?