Being very grown-up (sort of)

This Friday saw our annual 'doing something loosely defined as 'cultural', when the Kiwi and I went to see Pygmalion at the Old Vic. It got off to a slightly shaky start, when (being used to films and concerts) we turned up on the dot of 1930, expecting it to start some time afterwards, and were made to wait upstairs and watch the first act on a monitor before being let into the theatre. Nonetheless, the remainder of it was superb, Tim Pigott-Smith attacking the Henry Higgins role with evident relish and Michelle Dockery brilliantly timed and spot on as Eliza Doolittle.

I've not seen the play before and, although this could be as much down to the performance as anything else, I was surprised by the savagery with which Shaw tears into the privileged classes, showing through Higgins a thorough hypocrisy and lack of humanity, particularly in the face of Eliza's articulate, grounded and self-aware father. Whilst Col. Pickering offers some hope of redemption for the upper classes, he's still shown as fundamentally juvenile and short-sighted as Higgins.

It also reminded me how damaging a 'happy ending' can be to a play's message - in stark contrast to My Fair Lady, there's no closure to Pygmalion. For the viewer, this means the questions raised in the play are still firmly in the mind long after the show's over; it doesn't offer answers, forcing you to mull it over for yourself.

Anyway, following that we wandered down The Cut to Livebait, where the food was brilliant but the service, unfortunately, was catastrophic. Hey ho. The rest of the weekend involved travelling down to East Sussex to see some friends of ours and their 5 month old baby girl, who's a right bundle of smiles - although for some reason the sight of the Kiwi was enough to reduce her to inconsolable tears at first.

Fortunately they made friends before too long and that afternoon I was treated to the mildly alarming sight of my girlfriend displaying what can only be described as something of a maternal side - even taking over (bottle) feeding duties for a while. She didn't even seem to mind being vomited on, which is totally not my experience of her. Well well, how times change...