they're everywhere!

Follow-up on a couple of previous posts:

Firstly my post about the various Lounges around Bristol: I missed a couple of Bristol ones; firstly the original Lounge in Bedminster, and secondly the Banco Lounge in Totterdown. Since posting there have been a few new ones (following my shrewd prognostications about "future expansion"): the Velo Lounge in Bath, the Juno Lounge in Cardiff and the excitingly named TBC Lounge in Penarth (opening early 2008, by which time they'll presumably have thought of a name for it).

Secondly, my much more recent post describing my thrilling near-meeting with Robert Glenister in Sainsbury's. A couple of other thrilling celebrity encounters from my years in Bristol:

• I once gave directions to the Bristol Old Vic to DS Jo Morgan from The Bill, shortly after she was gunned down and killed in the line of duty.
• Me and my old friend Jonny stood next to The Sundays at the bar in the Highbury Vaults. I very foolishly said to Jonny something like "don't look now, but that's The Sundays over there", which needless to say (certainly needless if you know Jonny at all) prompted much conspicuous meerkat-esque looking around and shouting "where? where?", all slightly embarrassingly. Harriet Wheeler has a weirdly enormous head, incidentally.
• I'm pretty sure I passed Kathy Sykes (that's Professor Kathy Sykes to you) on Blackboy Hill a couple of weeks ago. And she gave me a rather lovely smile, which was nice.
• I once sat opposite Derek Thompson aka Charlie Fairhead from Casualty on a British Airways flight from Glasgow to Bristol.
• Sticking with the Casualty theme, I also once arrived back at Bristol Temple Meads on a train to find all the station signs had been covered up, slightly confusingly, by ones saying "Holby Central". No sign of any camera crews, but they must presumably have just finished filming.
• Still sticking with the Casualty theme, I once queued up behind Christine Stephen-Daly aka Lara Stone from Casualty in Somerfield on St. Michael's Hill. Strangely enough we were both buying toilet rolls, though I couldn't think of an opening conversational gambit to take advantage of this. Something along the lines of "Aha! I see you.....go to the toilet as well. We've got so much in common!" perhaps. Perhaps not.

Lastly, relating to the same post and the brief mention of Hustle: it's diverting enough entertainment, but if you want proper brain-scrambling twisty-turniness on the subject of confidence trickery and the "long con" in particular, then you should watch David Mamet's House Of Games and The Spanish Prisoner. And they don't do the annoying thing that Hustle does of trying to make you like the con artists, or give them some self-justifying back-story. They're criminals. Deal with it.