Marylebone High Street

A perfect middle aged Sunday. Upon waking it is miraculously sunny and beautiful and a wonderful change from an endlessly drizzly Saturday. Wander up Marylebone High Street to Le Fromagerie for my usual Sunday morning breakfast of coffee and two happy organic half boiled eggs with soldiers for an exorbitant amount of money. Miraculously am there before it opens at 10am, this has never happened to me on a Sunday morning before. So a quick stroll through the farmer's market whilst waiting, admiring the quiches and huge bunches of lavender. After walking D up to Baker St tube past the mystifyingly huge hordes of tourists waiting to see the waxworks I very directionlessly wander back down the high street, past more happy Sunday brunchers.

Daunt Books beckons with its lure of travel to exotic far flung destinations (you know, like the ones I hail from), but I stick to the fiction section and end up with a rather handsome slim volume of T.S. Eliot poetry. I always bemoan my lack of poetry reading so I am at last attempting to make some amends. I am only a few poems in so far but thoroughly enjoying them...

Farther down the street I nip back into the farmer's market for two oysters, freshly shucked, one with tabasco and lemon, one plain and tasting perfectly of the sea. Gorgeous. I share words of delight with the man next to me at the table, busy eating his half dozen. Yet farther down I veer off the the west and end up in Selfridges. It is something of a magnet, particularly its chocolate section by the food hall. I fail to resist both chocolate and a couple of cheap tops on sale, and eventually munch on a salt beef sandwich from the Brass Rail for lunch.

Head up to Angel for Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray. Really enjoy it; there is much to be said for his brand of hugely accessible dance theatre that draws enormous lay audiences. Dorian Gray appeals much more to me than his usual formula (family friendly comedy-shtick modern reworkings of big fairytale ballets) because it is Bourne for adults -- sexy, dark, dealing with all the usual themes of the novel very cleverly updated to the modern world obsessed with celebrity and fashion and that fragile outer surface. Some electrifying moments, particularly in the pas de deux between Dorian and Basil (turned into a fashion photographer). I particularly enjoyed the references to MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet -- the Sibyl in Bourne's version (typically for Bourne turned into Romeo rather than Juliet), dying of a drug overdose, struggles masochistically way across the stage and up and over the central bed in direct echo of Juliet's final death in MacMillan's ballet. Dance theatre like this I can certainly applaud and enjoy (I often struggle with the more avant-garde dance theatre which seems to abound in dance colleges). If you're going to make a piece of theatre about physical beauty, using a caste of limber sexy physically articulate dancers is certainly not a bad way to go about it. A very stimulating afternoon -- but I did miss slightly the moments of heart in mouth beauty that (I continue to believe) is the reason why we all go to the theatre. For that I am guessing Morphoses (Chris Wheeldon's company) will provide amply come their autumn season at Sadler's.