Weekend Reading #48

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

This is the forty-eighth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 21st December 2019. To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

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This week we got together for Three Body Capital’s Christmas party. It’s been a while since we splurged on a high end restaurant, so we decided to really go for it and book a table at legendary Mayfair steak restaurant Goodman. 

The food, atmosphere and conversation were excellent… big steaks, big wines, big fun! After the meal, with the clock edging close to 11pm, we decided to “bat on” for more drinks, but here’s the thing – we really struggled to find places that were still open at that (relatively early) time. We trekked through an eerily quiet Soho and finally ended up piling into the Soho Hotel, which worked well, until they shut the bar at midnight and we were homeless once again. 

To be fair, this was probably a good thing, as after a mixture of champagne, beer, gin and tonic and some intense Malbec, our weary bodies were screaming for bed. Perhaps we are just out of the loop, or simply too old and out of touch to know where the cool cats hang out in the early hours of the morning, but it seems that London’s nightlife scene has changed, and that hotels and members clubs now dominate the late shift. We would love to be proven wrong with some recommendations from our esteemed readers, so please get in touch if:

a) you know a good spot for a drink;
and
b) you fancy grabbing one with us in the New Year.

What we're watching.

“When a British soldier is charged with a crime, the tenacious young detective handling his case begins to uncover a multi-layered conspiracy.” That’s the pitch for The Capture, a BBC thriller that we smashed through this week. The show is about the impact of surveillance culture on our public and private lives – it’s gripping, unsettling and scarily plausible. Let’s face it – the BBC has struggled to compete with the cutting edge content put out by streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, but this is a valiant effort. 

You may or may not know that we are MASSIVE fans of Top Gun. We grew up bingeing on this movie (remember VHS?) and in many ways, it helped to define for us what a movie should look and feel like – bold, loud and fun! This week another trailer for Top Gun: Maverick (aka Top Gun 2) dropped and it didn’t disappoint. Yes, the new film looks like a shameless homage to the old one, complete with fighter jets, superbikes, sunsets and beach volleyball, but what else was it going to be? We're counting down the minutes until the movie’s release next summer by pumping out Kenny Loggins on the office stereo and doing incredibly bad Tom Cruise impressions. Perfect. 

What we're reading. 

Our good friend Hakan Tezguler drew our attention to this NYT article profiling Gaye Su Akyol, who has built a big fan base by reviving — and reinventing — a style of music once thought deeply uncool. 

That style is psychedelic rock, a sound that was last popular in Turkey in the 1970s. Iggy Pop has described Akyol as a “glistening seductive intricately poised richly Turkish chanteuse [...] so much more musical and satisfying than any popular music from the depleted West today.” Definitely one for the office Spotify playlist… or perhaps even going to a gig the next time we’re in Istanbul?

What we're listening to.

This week we stumbled upon this Spotify playlist from a digital asset chap we follow on Twitter called Hans HODL. It is called Viking Folk music and it’s a nice, cool vibe to have on in the background whilst reading, writing or wrapping Christmas presents. 

We are fascinated by the Vikings and, in case anyone is interested, we can recommend both Giles Kristian’s exhilarating Raven historical fiction Viking trilogy series as well as the Viking series on Amazon featuring one of the great Viking heroes, Ragnar Lothbrok, both of which, in different formats, really bring some of the greatest moments in Viking history to life.