Monday

I realise now that I probably saw The Bourne Ultimatum film crew. Passing through Waterloo, as I do almost every day, I noticed a great amount of camera equipment piled up by one of the booths in the middle of the concourse. It seemed more professional, and larger, than any film unit I'd seen before. I didn't see any stars, or indeed a great amount of people recognisable as 'movie industry types' (they were either just setting up, or just leaving), and of course I didn't know The Bourne Ultimatum would have one of its major sequences in the station. But it was at about the right time for them to be filming it, so it's possible. Anyway, this sighting brings me to my main point about how great it is to see London on film. I frequently see film crews of some sort - either for TV, or small independent movies - but very rarely view the end result. Only a few weeks ago there was a line of trailers on Malet Street outside my library, and a bit earlier there was crew on Northcote Road opposite my work. To see the places you go frequently put into film is exciting. We're used to seeing New York, and indeed it was New York's finest director who first got me excited about seeing London on film. In Matchpoint Woody Allen put the places I knew into cinema, and in doing so created an event that might have collapsed the space-time continuum (if we were in an episode of Star Trek): I saw the film in the Chelsea cinema, watching the characters in the film go to the Chelsea cinema to see a movie. I saw them watching me, watching them, in the same theatre, sitting in almost exactly the same seats. Good times.