A day out of the office. To say we’d been trying to find a date when we could all get out of the office at the same time for a year isn’t an exaggeration. In the end it was a case of just picking a date and then getting on with it.

We all met in Nero on Piccadilly and, full of coffee and enthusiasm, we took an open-topped bus from Green Park. After looking at the route maps for a couple of weeks, we settled on the red route, setting out west and then curling back east down Regent Street, on past Parliament, and then up to St Pauls, all the way accompanied by the resident bus comedian doing an hour of Alan Partridge-esque commentary.

It was freezing. Imagine sitting on a park bench. In the middle of winter. On a high street. Two storeys up. And it’s windy.

And then take off another couple of degrees.

Coats and scarves a go-go.

It was quite a relief to get to St Pauls after an hour of sitting out in the cold. I’d not been there in years, and back then I only made it as far as the whispering gallery. This time we traipsed all the way to the top of the dome and looked down on the streets below.

Not a bad view, but still a long way from the one you get at the top of the BT Tower. It was still a bit misty, and the view quickly dropped off towards Parliament, but you could see as far as the office in one direction, and Essex in the other. Down below, there was Tate Modern and the millennium bridge, both of which looks so much better from above than they do in real life.

So, after over 1000 steps and an hour on a frozen bus seat we were all pretty much ready for lunch. We sat around in the crypt, looking at pictures, and then wandered across the bridge for a long, slow lunch on the south bank before heading north - almost as far back as the office, for The Incredibles.

The Incredibles is pretty worthy of its name. Not for the characters, but the skill of the animators - or at least the people who wrote the software that rendered it. At times it looks like you’re watching a film, rather than an animation.

There are all sorts of influences in there, but the two main ones seem to be the chase through the forest in Star Wars, fairly accurately ripped off in a chase through a jungle, and You Only Live Twice. Twice-esque monorail pods. Twice-esque soundtrack. Twice-esque rockets coming out of volcanoes.

My only complaint would be the speed of the first half hour. Of course half hour is half hour, but it felt much longer. Lots of exposition, explaining the skills of the various characters that could have been done so much more subtly than have a troop through all their abilities soap-opera-style.

Worth a second watch? Most definately. Particularly if you’re running 30-minutes late.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2004 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Journal, London, Picture story, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.