Is that Trajan's Column in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Published on Wed 9 Mar 2011

I got a last minute ticket to see Stewart Lee on Sunday after one of my friends forgot that he'd got one and booked to see some Footlights show instead. Which I found funny on a couple of levels. There must've been a girl involved. Anyway, he was great, though 2 1/2 hours is quite a long time to be watching comedy. You get laughter fatigue. It was a bit less of a "whole show" than the transcripts in his AMAZING book because it was a rescheduled date from a tour last year that was to try out material for a TV show, but no less funny for it. The stuff he does seems to me to be several levels above what virtually everyone else I've seen is doing. Maybe I think that because said book has footnotes that explain just how deeply he's thinking about every word and everyone is treating it as a science. Maybe. Simon Munnery did 30 minutes at the start and was also very funny, in particular his deconstruction of Bruce Springsteen's lyrics. I was going to put an example in, but it seems mean. Go and see him.

I was at a work thing at Google's offices in London on Monday, and they are, as you'd expect, pretty funky. There weren't as many oompa loompas as I expected but there was a Google branded ice cream bicycle. An icycle? Or is that an Apple product? Hoho. None of their employees appeared to be brains in jars either which was a bit disappointing, but they probably have them in a basement somewhere. They didn't get where they are today by paying London rent for a room of brains in jars. It finished pretty soon after (the very nice) lunch so I met up with Jason and went to the V&A museum, which I don't think I'd been to before somehow (in my head it was just full of period costume. Actually, in my head it was under a bandstand in Hyde Park. Not sure about my head - I think as a child I became confused between the V&A and a statue of Prince Albert riding a horse and never really sorted it out) and is pretty spectacular. My favourite room (and his I think) that we saw was the one full of plaster casts of stupidly big things. Like Trajan's Column, which is in Rome and needed to be split into two parts to fit in the building

and the facade of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. What I don't quite understand is what the people of Santiago de Compostela thought the day that a load of Victorian British people came along to take a cast of the front of their church. Jason also recommended the huge Persian carpet, but we didn't find it. Anyway, not bad at all for a museum with no dinosaurs or mummies.

I'm watching the Champions League in HD. I've still not decided if HD is worthwhile inasmuch as I don't know if I enjoy what I'm actually watching more, or if I just spend my time going "wow, HD looks great". Whatever - it's no more expensive than not having HD. Much as I don't really like Spurs, their England circa 1986 shirt design is quite good fun. Oh my goodness Milan are a bunch of diving little fuckers. Come on Spurs. Unless Jermain Defoe comes on.