On a more cheerful note, I went off to see "Johnny English" last night at the cinema, which I really enjoyed. If you remember Rowan Atkinson's old Barclaycard adverts, it's the same characters from there. They had a nice cameo by Bond (a string quartet who are infamous for appearing naked on an album cover). That inspired me to take a look around their website, where they have various video/audio clips, which I liked. The standard debate here is "Making classical music accessible" vs "Losing the good points that set it apart from pop music". But I think I'm pretty much their target audience, since I don't generally listen to this type of music - they got my attention because of their looks, and they kept it because of their music. So, I went out today and got their DVD ("Live at the Albert Hall"), and I've just finished watching that. I liked it - unlike the Classical Spectacular I went off to a few weeks ago, there was a much higher ratio of fun:boring music. (Only a couple of their songs were a bit dull.) Also, the problem I have with music concerts in general is that there's not much to look at, so my mind tends to wander. In this case, there was a strong visual component, which was good. It's not simply "4 attractive women" - it's more that since there are only four people occupying most of the stage, this gave them space to move around, so it was much more dynamic than previous concerts I've been to.
I also went off to my regular swimming lesson this morning, which went well. I'd never realised that you were supposed to duck your head underwater while swimming breaststroke - I'd always thought of it as a rather useless (i.e. slow) stroke, which just appealed to women who wanted to keep their hair dry. So, it's always good to learn new things. Also did some more diving practice at the end - I'm still doing sitting dives at the moment, and there was a frantic moment when I was just tipping in when the instructor said "You need to sit further back", so I had to grab hold of the side to pull myself back :) The final lesson is in two weeks, but I think I'll do the course again once it's finished (most of the other people are on their 2nd/3rd loop), so that I can learn the more advanced techniques.
