It really felt like summer had arrived this weekend. The sun was bright, the skies were clear and it was warm enough to sit outside without a coat.

Yet it was largely spent indoors.

Saturday, we cleared out the loft. It’s ten years since the first items went in, and some of them are fifty or more years old. Some, we reckon, had probably been in the family 80 or 100 years; some had perished; some we wondered why we’d ever kept. Eight hours after we started, the garage was filled with irrelevant junk that was only ever kept on the off-chance it might one day be needed, and we’d gathered together all the heirlooms, the photos of people who had died long before we’d been born, and the more useful trinkets that will be put back to good use.

It was back-breaking stuff, and I lost track of the number of times I walked into a rafter or beam, but it was very much worth the effort. By evening we were aching, and had jelly legs, but we also had a close-to-empty loft, a close-to-bursting garage, and a small pile of things that either couldn’t or shouldn’t have been thrown away. My pile consisted largely of fantastic aged ephemera, some of which I’ll post up here over the next few days.

Sunday, we traipsed into London to see Varekai. I say traipsed because that’s exactly what it was. Every time we venture into the city at the weekend we vow ‘never again’, and then a few months later we forget and find ourselves swearing at delayed tubes and trains, realising our mistake.

This weekend, the main train line was closed, so we drove to Epping to catch the tube from there. Half of that was shut, too, so we ended up having to catch a tube, then a bus, then two further tubes, and then reverse it all on the way home, so all in all it stacked up to seven hours of travelling to go 35 miles and back. a sad indictment of British public transport.

It was worth it, though. The show - the story of what happened to Icarus after he’d fallen back down to Earth - was excellent, and full of back-breaking, dizzy-making stunts with a distinct lack of safety nets, and a serious sparcity of things to hold on to.

Worth seeing? Certainly. Even with seven hours’ travelling. Absolutely.

But if you can drive there instead, do.

Technorati Tags:
london, cirque+du+soleil, cirque du soleil

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