After my recent forays into East London, I kicked off my Weekend Cultural Runnings a day early with an almost unprecedented Thursday evening in West London - Notting Hill to be precise. Strange how you can live in a city for years and stick fairly closely to your own area, as if there are some crazy ley lines or something. I’m sure Iain Sinclair would have a view on this. Though if they try to make me go to South London, I’ll say no, no, no. Anyway, my trip west was necessary because I was keen to celebrate the birthday of my friend Scott at the Notting Hill Arts Club and great fun it was too. The night was called ‘Yo Yo’ though I was sad to miss the Ragga Twins who were playing later as I had to skedaddle owing early due to a crack of sparrows meeting the next day. But it’s all good. Talking of the Ragga Twins - and in Islington, we speak of little else - I’ve got me a copy of this really good compilation put together by Soul Jazz. It’s great. What’s more, it has ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ on it. I know from experience that DJing at weddings can be a somewhat restrained experience - one has to take into account the sacred ceremony one is celebrating, the diverse age-groups present - but when my pal opened his set with that at my friends’ nuptials a few years ago, I saw it as a distinct statement of intent.

With this dreadful weather, never has there been a better time to sit and read indoors. I’ve been working my way through Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘the Good Soldier’ which I’ve found fascinating and it has reminded me greatly of the unreliable narrator in ‘the Great Gatsby’, though John Dowell in Ford’s book is even more sketchy on the details. I’ve also been re-reading George Elliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ for the unforgivably lazy reason that my Ford book was upstairs and I was sitting next to my book shelf downstairs. How terribly decadent.

Talking of decadent, I’m really looking forward to BBC4’s programmes about George Melly this week. Catch them if you can.

Finally, my cultural runnings have been a little light on the visual arts recently but I’ll be putting that right when my wise and patient father takes me around the Salvador Dali exhibition at Tate Modern in a couple of weeks. I’m not a fan, based on those ubiquitous melty clocks and I’ve always thought Dali was a total charlatan, but I’ll be heading there with an open mind, or at least, trying bloody hard to.