Walking down Great Ormond Street into Lamb’s Conduit Street in central London a few days ago I noticed that the Starbucks which used to be on the corner of these two roads had shut down. I haven’t yet been able to get any kind of ‘official’ confirmation as to why it closed down – and when I last checked about an hour ago Starbucks still listed it as open on their corporate website. A celebratory tweet of 26 October from The Lamb Bookshop is the earliest evidence of the shut down I could find from a quick online search: “Oh my gosh, Starbucks has closed on Lamb’s Conduit Street!

As The Tate, and in particular Tate Modern, gets increasingly populist there is a curious disjunction between the art world insiders who attend the private views and the audience at whom these exhibitions are aimed. On my way in to the opening of A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance I ran into Jemima Stehli, Milly Thompson and Coline Milliard, among others. The first room was reserved for the biggest names – who even most of the tourists who flock to Tate Modern will recognise – Jackson Pollock and David Hockney. It was here I ran into Avi Pichon who told me he’d just returned to London from a trip home to Israel.

Bleeding to death. Starting a fight. Hitting on a nurse. Sleeping (or at least remaining unconscious). Feeling the pain. Acting bored shitless. Agitated mobile phone conversations. Slumping in chairs. Throwing up. Falling down. Sobering up. Based on years of observation and the fact there are too many drunks in this world. Accident and emergency does not make for an entertaining Friday or Saturday night out, but you’d be surprised how many clubbers end up there! And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense! Comments Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-11-12 20:53:19 +0000 Chuckletastic!

Claude Pélieu was an associate of William Burroughs and his 1973 anti-novel Kali Yug Express is a continuation of the cut-up experiments begun more than a decade earlier by Brion Gysin. Although the book appeared in French (the language in which it was written) and German back in the 1970s., Kali Yug Express has only just been published in English. The English translation seems to have been made by Pélieu’s second wife Mary Beach many years ago. Pélieu and Beach also had a hand in the translation of many beat writers – including Burroughs – into French. While Kali Yug Express takes some major cues from Burrough’s cut-up trilogy – The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express – in terms of its space age mythology, the more autobiographical elements of Kali Yug Express owe less to the book’s most obvious source of inspiration.

I was talking to a female fitness instructor I know today and she gave me her take on why kettlebells have become so popular among male fitness enthusiasts in recent years. My friend didn’t put what she was saying in the words I’m about to use, but the crux of her argument was that doing the key kettlebell exercise – the swing – was the closest a guy could get to having sex in a gym. The swing is all about hip thrust and thus resembles male movement in penetrative sex! My friend’s take on the kettlebell swing was that it was a good exercise since it raised the heart rate and used many different muscles, but that you could do it just as effectively with a dumbbell.