I'm not great at posting regularly to my blog, and then when I look back at the big gaps I rather regret it. So I'm gonna go back to doing monthly catch-ups, if for no one's amusement but my own ( Read more... )

Last weekend, when there was an astonishing overlap of good weather and a bank holiday I took a trip to the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. I've been there a few times over the years and would always describe it as 'lovely' although never spectacular. As an unadventurous Londoner, just being outdoors in nature is novel to me and the Wetlands ( Read more... )

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My brother and I were looking for a low stress 3 day getaway, we prefer travelling by train as it's so much more relaxing than flying and we decided to be 'adventurous' and depart the country. We somewhat randomly opted for Brussels which had the benefits of being surprisingly cheap, only 2 hours via Eurostar and a country neither of us had been ( Read more... )

Well, not too bad. 17 out of 23. The ones that I didn't guess the Oscar winner generally actually went to what I considered a better choice.

Best Picture - 12 Years a Slave, I was right and not too disapointed although I still say Gravity was the better film.
Best Actor in a Leading Role - Matthew McConaughey, right again and although I'd rather ( Read more... )

Every year I make an attempt to both watch and predict the Oscars. Last year I'm rather smug about the fact that I predicted 20 out of 24 winners. This year I'm not quite so confident and despite my best efforts there are a fair number of the films that I haven't seen, (the numbers in brackets for each category are the number I've seen).

Best ( Read more... )

Given that my summary of 2013 film was pretty long, to reflect the sheer number I watched, I thought I'd best separate out the list of things that have drawn my attention for 2014. Out already (or thereabouts) are all the Oscar bate films which half count as 2013 half as 2014. So 12 Years a Slave, Mandela, The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle ( Read more... )

Unemployment may be bad for the bank account, but it's certainly good for the film watching, with nearly 7 months off work, 2013 was my most unemployed year ever and correspondingly a record breaker for number of films watched, with an unlikely total of 187, more than a film every other day. (See bottom of page for full list and links to individual ( Read more... )

It's been a really pretty miserable failure of a year for me as far as reading went. In 2012, in a drive to increase my reading I set myself a 50 page a day target, which drove my book tally up from round about 20 a year to 49. I decided against continuing that for 2013 and have correspondingly seen my reading drop not just back to the 20odd, but ( Read more... )

My summer holidays this year have been rather undramatic compared to the almost overwhelming excitement of the Olympics last year. Most of my activity has been puttering back and forth to Cambridge to visit the doubled-in-number Whitfield clan, and while Cambridge and the surrounding villages are lovely, and there have been plenty of cream teas ( Read more... )