Partying for J. Williams, the northern hemisphere but not the PM

Paid a visit to Jon Williams as he gave a fuller-throated celebration of his Tuesday 2nd October birthday for the weekend. The two venues, a pub and a club, seemed to have tinnitus thrown in as a freebie, but I enjoyed the headline live act at Koko, the converted vaudeville theatre (rather what I imagine the fleapit where Dorian Gray first met the young actress he was to be initially entranced, then horrified by). There was the screen projection filled with faux-naive and counter-cultural images, inescapable from any club these days it seems, bookending the acts, and when it came down for a final time, exuberant moshers tried to haul it down altogether, before being foiled by bouncers and a hasty upward retraction of the screen. I stayed the night at Jon's priest-hole of a room. In the late morning, I ate in a nifty litle cafe round the corner from Jon's, before we went back to his place to watch 300, a hyperactive movie about valiant Spartans defending Greece, which was better than I thought it would be. I left mid-afternoon.
It caused me to forget about the England rugby game, which was quite a surprising victory. I tuned in for the second half of France-New Zealand - played in Cardiff - and I was hoping for the All Blacks to give the French a good beating, since the French had shared the World Cup with the celtic fringe and for them to go down in a foreign land would be sweet. But the sight of plucky underdogs and a rousing rendition of allez France from the crowd, swung my loyalties the other way before France equalised for the first time and even when they went behind again. To crown it with victory for Les Bleus in such a great game certainly had my heart beating for a while after. And now England vs France in the semis; who would have thought it?
Gordon Brown deferring an election was something few would have guessed since it has caused all this election speculation to spectacularly backfire. It jeopardises any plans for a spring 2008 poll and he may wait a full three years hoping to rebuild some credibility. This will be longer than a 72-hour hit, since it will be endlessly debated when he does indeed call an election. But he saw adverse opinion polls and lost his nerve because to come back even with a reduced majority would have damaged his leadership. It's his first major misstep and it's a doozie that will take some time to regain his balance from.