Barbie Genesis
After having a boat full of my best beloveds all week, they have all surged back to Leicester again and taken Jason and Oscar with them. Now it is only Derek and me living a life on the ocean wave for a few days until some if not all of them return. I have loved having them all here, but we are a noisy family on dry land. On a boat, it is significantly more intense and I am very much appreciating the silence this evening.
On Tuesday the kids and I went to see Barbie at the Genesis cinema in Stepney Green. The kids had already seen it but they took pity on their aged mother and agreed to see it again. It was an excellent film. It made me laugh a lot, it made me cry at least three times. It kicked ass. I wish films like that had been around when I was growing up. I would probably have decided to ditch English Lit in favour of ninja warrior studies and karate chopped my way to power.
The Genesis is a lovely venue. It’s an old school cinema that mixes blockbuster and arthouse films. It has a cake and coffee shop, a pizza place and at least two bars as well as the usual popcorn nonsense. I hate cinema food in general, so I am always extremely thrilled when I visit somewhere that allows you to eschew Tango ice blast and cardboard nachos with nauseating plastic cheese with a firm hand. If the girls hadn’t cooked a magnificent lunch for us just before we left to see the film, I’d have been head down in a stone baked pizza with a side of doughnuts and coffee.
Genesis started life as a pub in 1884 and then went on to become a music hall where people like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel played. When it became a cinema it hosted the premier of Barbara Windsor’s film, Sparrows Can’t Sing. Princess Margaret was supposed to attend but apparently got wind that the Kray twins would be there so she conveniently had a cold. After the film, everyone surged across the road to party at one of the Kray twin’s night clubs. All very seedy and exciting.
Now there are no nightclubs run by thieves and murderers across the road. Mostly it’s chicken shops, but it is very handy for Rinkoff’s bakery which I find much more glamorous and also less murdery.
After the film I took everyone out for dinner at Grounded, where Jason and I had had lunch the week before. I had French toast made with brioche. When it came, the brioche was so huge and pillowy, you could barely see the waitress behind the plate. It was magnificent. It came with a smorgasbord of fresh fruit, creme fraiche, almonds, strawberry jam and maple syrup. I very much enjoyed having pudding for my tea. One of the perks of being grown up that never, ever gets old.
Walking off dinner, we wandered through Brick Lane and Shoreditch and back home via Liverpool Street with a stop off at Boxpark for the kids to get ice cream. They refused the one I recommended in favour of a stall which, it later turned out, was a raw vegan dessert place. They hadn’t read the small print and were deeply aggrieved at the fact that their ice cream largely tasted of dates. After much face pulling and shrieking, it ended up in the bin. They were still talking about it when they left this afternoon. It will go down in family lore and they will get no less mad about it as time passes. It is the way of their people.