Hypatia Avenue

IT'S IN THE STARS

Okay, everyone who is ever in West London looking for a beautiful, elegant, chilled out place to have a drink and a meal, go to the Seven Stars. A whole gang of us met there last night and it was an appropriately special place to host our special occasion. Well, it wasn’t such a special occasion, more a case of us all being in the same room at the same time which has so far been so rare an occurrence that it can be classified, if you squint your eyes and look at it sideways, as special.

The food is excellent, and the wines are good, the décor and atmosphere very relaxing and stylish. The dining room had broad dark wood tables and dark green leather high backed chairs, as broad and deep as armchairs but as high and stiff as dining chairs. The walls were maroon and the whole place was done up in dull dark wood and dark green leather: it had an odd, antiquated feel to it and made me think of the dusty dark drawing rooms of colonials trying to relax in a genteel Victorian way in the wilds of the dark subcontinent.

And the thick white dribbling candles placed on every possible surface lit the place in a soft shadowy glow so that the colonial feel was intermingled with a faint Gothic tone, giving an edge to what would otherwise have been a subtle and quite neutral room. And it was Halloween and was appropriately shadowy and candlelit to assuage our guilt at not participating in the festivities.

Actually, we did do something for Halloween: there was a prolonged series of impersonations - James and Sarah wearing glow in the dark false teeth and doing creepily accurate Drusilla impressions - and a really frightening moment when Sarah popped some change into a wee poppet’s trick or treat bag and said, in all sincerity, “Go and buy yourself some sweets, dear.” Oooh, spooky.

James, if you’re reading this, I want you to note that I have name-checked you twice in this entry and there has not been any “freaky techie shit” at all. So there. ::raspberrypppphhhhhhppttttttt:: And I’m sure I’d have more comments if enetation (my webby comments service) were to ever stop going offline to upgrade itself. Though I hope the recent extended offline upgrade period will reveal some new and exciting personal web publishing stuff a la Movable Type. Which I’ve just been reading about and am finding terribly exciting stuff.

Oh. Just realised that was a whole bunch of “freaky techie shit.” Sorry.