The weekend was spent packing for Marrakesh, a little sewing and sorting and a trip to the Underworld to see a few bands ( Read more... )

I got three albums for Christmas. None were surprises. I asked for them. I knew roughly what they would sound like and I was very happy to receive them (thanks Cecile Dubuis) :) . With time I’ll grow to like individual tracks or hear individual instruments or counter-melodies currently hidden. With time they may become favourites but it’s been less ( Read more... )

For me this was an annus horriblis (to pinch a term from Queen Elizabeth). There was good stuff that happened… I’ll get to that later… but the bad stuff was pretty bad ( Read more... )

Alan Moore is a bad bad man. He wrote an amazing book (or a set of three books) of such a humungously silly scale and complexity that it slowed down my reading rate to a crawl. This is the least books I’ve read in a year since 2011. But I have at least met my self-imposed target of a book a week. Here’s my reading list for 2016 ( Read more... )

Knowing that John lives in Cambridgeshire on the edge of the fens, I assumed that a book called ‘Beyond the Black Earth’ would be a tale of a trip up the A1 to Lincolnshire but no, the black earth of the title is reference to the old kingdoms of the lower Nile ( Read more... )

Tradition says that at this time of year there will be a Dr Who episode. It probably won't be very good (Christmas specials are never very good!) but it will put a smile on your face and remind you how good this strange and uniquely British can be ( Read more... )

I was going to post this late on Monday but I logged onto the internet and discovered not only the continued attrocities in Syria but also attacks in Switzerland, Germany, and Turkey. Somehow my tales of last weekend seemed not just parochial but offensively blinkered ( Read more... )

Eating, drinking and talking all night with old friends is fun but blimey how did we manage to create so much washing up ( Read more... )

I've just returned from the vet ( Read more... )

At the weekend the 44th and associated friends, fellow reenactors and relatives had our Christmas party. The odd tipple was quaffed, there was small-talk, medium-talk and big-talk, plans for 2017 were discussed and Brigadier General Ed Parker dispensed a seasonal scattering of stripes and epaulettes ( Read more... )