The Weekend With The Last Dinner Party

Georgia: “I love going to the Tate to look at the Pre-Raphaelite collection. There’s so much on in London all the time so it’s nice knowing I can always go and look at the Lady of Shallot and think about a mythical Camelot and Alfred Tennyson’s poem and the scene in Anne of Green Gables where she recreates it and gets stuck. I love the infinite inspiration loop that is history and art and literature and this exhibition is a reminder of that beautiful invisible thread.”

Abigail: “When I’ve been on tour for a long time I like knowing that when I come back to London there will be an enormous platter of gigs in independent venues around the city with a line up full of new bands for me to consume. My friend Ruairi has been running a wonderful night called Our Dear Friends, hosting a plethora of acts on perfectly beer-sticky floors. Inspired! Dancing! Alive!”

Georgia: “I am a classic fiction girl to my bones but recently I’ve been enjoying some histories. I recently came across Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, which is about a 16th century peasant who developed his own esoteric ideas about religion. He was burned at the stake of course. I haven’t finished it yet, but at university I loved going through archives and reading about people who were not remembered by history. This book feels like that – I imagine the fun the author had pulling the whole story together from very old records. Long live the library and the archive!”

Abigail: “Apart from Georgia’s substack I’ve been reading Sex Magic by Laura Berman, PhD. As an artist I think it’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed in the cerebral world sometimes and it’s just an important to ground yourself in your physical body. Apparently erotic energy is charged with the same frequency as creative energy so it’s felt like a powerful door has been burst open when you learn to harness them together. This summer is all about orgasms and putting your feet in the green grass really!”

Georgia: “When I’m on tour I take finding good restaurants very seriously. When I get home from tour though, all I want to do is chop up onions and garlic and go to the Asian supermarket for galangal and fermented shrimp paste and fresh rice noodles. If I could cook on the road, I would tour forever. Over the last few months I have been making my way through my favourite Masterchef Australia winner Nat Thaipun’s cookbook, Thai: Anywhere and Everywhere, and will be making her watermelon laab this heatwave!”

Abigail: “The only place where I want to have dinner during the London summer is The Sporting Club in Westbourne Park. It’s a Portuguese restaurant that feels like you’ve been invited to the afters of a wedding somewhere in rural Mediterranean town. The food is simple, fresh, perfect: roasted white fish, prawn skewers, buckets of vino verde. There are often children and dogs running around which only adds to the joy of it. On the weekends a man comes and sings YouTube karaoke covers on a tiny stage in the corner and slowly your table will stand up to go and join him to dance and scream along.”

Georgia: “I always go a bit feverish when the World Cup is on. I watch every game I can, and woke up at 5am to watch Australia vs Turkey. This is my least counter-cultural opinion but I would be lying if I didn't say I have been watching more football than anything else for a number of weeks now. I cried for Cape Verde like I was born there, I cheered for both Japan and the Netherlands against each other. I love learning about all the players. It's high drama prestige reality TV to me.”

Abigail: “The Prince Charles Cinema is my favourite cinema in London and they’ve just announced that they’ll be showing a restoration of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon this summer so I must go see that. Also rewatching True Detective for the third time because it’s the best crime show that’s ever existed and it makes me feel less crazy to imagine I’m in Louisiana instead of London in this heatwave.”