Category: tv

Mid January Update

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Film, Garden / Allotment, tv, Wildlife/Nature, work

Welcome. If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter (Fifty From Fifty / Life After Fifty) and you missed the last post there I’ve moved you across to my blog as I will be discontinuing my writing there. I hope you’ll stick around but if you don’t want to then there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. If you did see the last post then you’ll already know what is going on and hopefully you are receiving this.

I noticed that there were a couple of duplicate subscriptions (i.e. people already subscribing here with the same email as the newsletter), and have tried as far as possible to make sure you’re not on the list twice! If however you subscribed to both using different email addresses then it’s possible you will get two copies and will need to unsubscribe from one of them. It’s not a perfect system but overall the move seems to have gone okay.

Right, enough housekeeping.

An Update from the First Couple of Weeks of January

I find it hard to believe that three weeks have passed since Christmas already and I’m not altogether sure what it is I’ve actually done in that time. I know I took some time away from work and pretty much everything for a while to reflect on a not particularly great year gone by and plan for a better one (as much as you can) in 2024.

Life moves forward at a regular pace, but I think sometimes we don’t. We’re either trying to push on ahead or fall behind and I don’t think either of those things are particularly healthy. Time is probably our most valuable commodity, and it was something that I felt like I had less of than I needed in 2023, so some of my decisions for 2024 were to guard it more jealousy. Of course I’ve already found myself challenging that decision when a work offer came in. I have however stuck to my decision and turned it down. It was hard, but on balance it feels like the right thing to have done and honestly it’s unlikely that I’ll ever find out anything differently, so…

Reading

I’ve read a couple of good books so far this year. Holly by Stephen King and Local by Alastair Humphreys. I recommend both.
The Stephen King is more on his crime writing than horror, although some of the crimes in the book are pretty horrific and has the returning character Holly Gibney.
Local is the culmination of Alastair Humphreys year long exploration of his local Ordnance Survey map, visiting on square on the map randomly each week and writing up what he finds. Originally a series of blog posts during the pandemic/post pandemic it’s packed full of his adventures and lots of facts and information about what he discovers. Also recommended.

TV / Film

It seems we really don’t watch much TV anymore but I did sit and watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny yesterday. I loved the opening but didn’t love the film as a whole. Raiders and Last Crusade are my two favourites of the series, the others I’m pretty much not interested in. I’ll watch DoD again but I’m not expecting my opinion will change much.

The Garden

Bit too cold for much to be happening out there are the moment. I have however cleaned out the greenhouse in preparation for the growing season and I’m still shocked everytime I walk past and realise how much cleaner it is now. It’s positively shiny! I’ve also sown some tomatoes, chilli and sunflower seeds in a tray in my office – I like to sow something each year on New Year’s Day, to mark the turning of the year, plus chillies have a long growing season and the early you can get them started the better. The sunflowers have already germinated but no sign of the chillies yet.

Work

I think I’ve pretty much covered that above, otherwise I’m just doing some new year admin stuff.

Outside

It’s been a bit of mixed bag weather wise, and I long for the lighter mornings, but being out early and hearing the calls of tawny and little owls is a bit special, as is seeing the eyes of deer light up in the beam of the headtorch.

Well that’s it from me. I hope to write a bit more here this year and I hope that you’ll stick around for the journey. If not however I understand and no hard feelings if you choose to unsubscribe. I’m not sure how frequently these will be coming however and I’m not planning to stick to any schedule, I’d rather write something when I have something to say rather than write something for the sake of a calendar date.

Talk soon…

End of the Year 2023

On By TontowilliamsIn Annual Review, books, Dog, Film, Garden / Allotment, Life, tv, walking, Wildlife/Nature, Wilson's Story, work, writing2 Comments

I couldn’t decide whether I was going to sit and write one of these this year or not. I’ve done something like this most years but the latter part of this year I’ve not been really feeling the desire to blog or write my newsletter or even be on the socials much. Some of this is because in the case of the site formerly known as twitter it’s pretty much a horror story these days and unless you’re paying for your account you’re unlikely to show up in anyone’s feed, so why bother. Most of it though is because I’ve just not felt much in the way of creative energy to write, I pushed through AudioMo because I do genuinely enjoy it but the energy just hasn’t been there since April when we lost Wilson.

He was 13 and hadn’t been well for a number of years, one thing on top of another was finally too much and when he stopped eating and drinking it was obvious. I try and remember the good times, but I miss him terribly and genuinely struggle some days.

I am hoping that I will be writing more in 2024, and probably here rather than anywhere else. I think that perhaps my newsletter has run its course, and I have more control over what happens here than anywhere else. I’ve heard some people talk of a resurgence in blogging since the demise of twitter, I’m not sure if that is likely to be true or not but I’d rather set out my shingle here than anywhere else.

So what else has been happening in 2023? Let’s see shall we?

Books
I’ve read a lot this year, at last count 109 112 books, more than I’ve ever read in any year previously that I’ve got a detailed record for. You can check them all out on GoodReads here. I’ve been continuing to read some old favourite series such as Simenon’s Maigret novels and discovering some newer ones too. I also finally managed to read all of Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” probably ten years after it came out and I bought it in paperback. I actually enjoyed it too and have been enjoying a bit of a King renaissance this year, which I’ll probably continue next year, along with a couple of other authors. A couple of stand-outs for me though were some of the most troubling books that I read. “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “Berlin Diaries” by William L Shirer. I wanted to read the former with a view to seeing if what happened 80 – 90 years ago bears any resemblance to what is happening in the world now, and in particular is reflected in some of the politics of this country. Whilst what happened then might be remembered as being some extremes of humanity, it didn’t necessarily start that way and I think we would be well advised to remember the times before the world was at war and what was happening. It’s a slippery slope and there are certainly examples of gaslighting and lying and reinforcing those lies in our modern political discourse that are exactly the early behaviours seen then.

We can and should be better than that and as nations and governments are too good at ignoring the facts because they do not fit the narrative that we want to tell, rather than being honest about them.

Watching
I haven’t watched much of anything this year, hence why I’ve had so much reading time. I did enjoy the final season of Jack Ryan on Amazon but other than that I haven’t watched much. There are several things that I would like to see, the new seasons of Foundation and Slow Horses on Apple TV+ but we stopped our subscription to those as we weren’t watching. I also have a stack of things recorded that I should try to watch or delete if I’m not going to. I was planning on doing some of this over the Christmas break but I haven’t managed it yet.

Work
This year started slow, but picked up a lot of pace in the latter half of the year. Overall I’d say it’s been a successful year for me. Some old clients and some new ones, and some interesting projects that blurred the lines a little between work and personal projects (in a good way).

Gardening
There is always more I could have done this year in the garden, but I think I’d say that I’ve pretty much hit the minimum targets that I had and a few additional things. Next year I am hoping to devote more time to the garden generally and now we’ve seen it through a full year that means we have a better idea of some the things that we want to achieve next year.

Outside
I’m still walking between 5 and 6 miles most days (a bit less when it’s raining hard) and it’s a delight, it has helped to keep me balanced mentally and physically and it is not something that I am planning to pull back from next year. I’ve kept notes pretty much everyday of the things I’ve seen and heard and want to double down on that particularly next year.

To 2024
As I said at the outset I hope to be more present here in 2024, but please don’t hold me to that, I need a certain amount of mental space to be able to write these posts and ones similar to those I have before and during a good chunk of 2023 I just didn’t have it. There are a couple of big changes that happened at the beginning of December however that were bigs things for me to have removed from my life and I hope that now gives me the mental space and more importantly the time to be able to get back to writing more.

January 2023 Update

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, tv, walking, work

I’m pretty sure that a year ago I wrote something like I can’t believe that it’s the end of January already. This year I’m glad it is and this month really feels like it’s been dragging. We’ve had a few unexpected things happen that has made the month more stressful than it might otherwise have been and some of these are going to be expensive to put right. Others just are, and there is little that we can do about them for the time being.

Firstly we had the boiler in our “new” house serviced and discovered that there is a small problem with the gas supply. The problem is not urgent but is going to need to be fixed and will cost quite a bit to put right. On the positive side we also had the chimney swept and can now use the wood stove. I have mixed feelings about this as I have concerns about the air quality and climate change issues surrounding it but it has been a definite boost to morale and when our tumble dryer broke a helpful way to dry clothes.

We also discovered that the old conservatory has a leak somewhere and this will also need to be attended to, probably means we need to replace the building itself. Again more expense.

Most recently we have had groundwater flooding. This is basically where the water table reaches such a height that it breaks the surface of the ground and causes flooding. It’s not been as bad as I know it can get, but it has meant that we’ve had to be careful with out water use as it has impacted on our sewerage system. I’ve had to rig submersible pumps and think about things that I’ve not had to for some time and would really rather weren’t an issue. Other houses in the local area are much more badly affected by it, but sometimes it is difficult to see beyond your own immediate experience.

All of this has made January feel like it was never going to end and why I’ll be glad when the days start to lengthen and the weather gets warmer. I’ve realised how much I hate rain. It has become something we are hoping will not happen (as this exacerbates the flood impacts) and it has had a big impact on my mental health at times.

Reading

I’ve had a little less time to read this month and have mostly been sticking to crime novels. Nothing has really jumped out to me as something that I think I should mention here, some were better than others.

Watching

We haven’t been watching much TV, and in reality what we have watched was catching up with things we didn’t watch over the Christmas period. Christmas specials of All Creatures Great and Small and The Detectorists as well as other shows that we would normally watch if they were on as well as highlights such as The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse and reruns of the Wallace and Gromit claymations.

Garden

I have made a little bit of progress in the garden when it’s not been too wet or cold to get much done. I’ve managed to start to repair the raised beds that were already here and have recently discovered that I have more spare bits than I thought I did so will be able to do some more work on these in due course. I’ve also made a start on this years crops with potatoes that are chitting ready for planting towards the end of March (hopefully) and some onion sets and other seeds ready to get started in the next month or so.

Work

It’s been a quiet start to the year which wasn’t entirely unexpected, but I do need to get things going again and get some income in (as mentioned above we have some unexpected expenditure on the horizon). I had a meeting with a client at the end of the month, which was the first time that I’ve seen them face to face since before the pandemic.

Outside

This still remains one of my highlights and daily walks have really helped my mental health and deal with some of the low points over the last few weeks. It’s hard to overstate how much this is one of the pleasures of living here now.

In other news I’ve reached the Fiftieth post in my Fifty Things From Fifty Years newsletter and decided to keep going. You can read more about what that means here. It might also have an impact on what happens here to, here’s what I wrote about that:

Away from the newsletter I’m thinking about using my blog more. Perhaps as more of a status update or more immediate news. I haven’t quite thought this through. You can also subscribe there (if you really want an overload of me in your inbox) or use an RSS reader or just stop by now and again. I’m thinking of this more as a replacement for Twitter unless by some miracle that’s rescued by someone sensible, which seems increasingly unlikely.

Well I think that’s it for this month, thanks for reading, stay safe and take care. Expect the occasional extra post over the coming weeks as I adapt to my new ideas about how this site will be used.

December 2022 Update

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Dog, Garden / Allotment, tv, walking, Wildlife/Nature, work

I’m not yet sure if this is the end of the year show or whether I’ll do another post looking back across the whole year before the end of the month. I’m feeling very tired at the moment so I suspect that this might be the last one you’ll get here, but you never know a break across Christmas might just revive me enough to write something else.

So why so tired? Just life. It’s been busy, new house, work etc., just things occupying my time. Busy is good but sometimes you think that some things are really surplus.

We’ve been continuing to unpack our stuff and now that we have a bit more sense of what we want and how we want it set up, move furniture about a bit. There’s still a ways to go, particularly with books and ornaments. I suspect we’ll tackle this afresh once the Christmas decorations come down and we don’t have a tree that seems to be in the way.

We’ve had another round of visits to the vet with Wilson, and are about to embark on a change of diet for him. I’ll be honest here and say that I think the vet is grasping for straws, but I’m willing to go along with him for now. He is young and eager and not as old and jaded as me but I’m increasingly feeling that there is no cure and we should be settling for the situation and making the best of what we have. It feels a bit like we are repeating the same things we’ve done before hoping for different results. Wilson is happy enough in himself but perhaps we should just respect that for what it is.

We received the news at the start of this week that the care home where my Mum lives have had another outbreak of Covid. This means that for the third year in a row our Christmas plans have changed. I’m sure we’re not alone in having last minute alterations, particularly if your plans require any sort of travelling, but it is frustrating. For me personally I’m also being careful where I go and what I do as I was in the care home visiting Mum on the day that they undertook the tests revealing the outbreak. Although I was masked and as always careful about hand sanitising etc., I have taken a couple of tests subsequently which have both been negative and am watching for any symptoms.

The farce that is Twitter continues to provide “news” on a nearly daily basis. The manbaby Musk seems to only think that free speech is what he says it is and not what the rest of the world understands it to mean. In fairness he does own the company but it seems to be getting worse. I’m not even sure that him standing down as CEO will make for much difference. I’m sticking with it for now, although mostly staying away, but did create a Mastadon account just in case. I don’t intend to use it unless things get really bad. In the meantime I’m going to be sticking to writing here and using Instagram as my main outlets. Also my newsletter once I’ve decided what I am going to do with it when it reaches it’s originally intended limited run.

Reading

The only thing that I’ve completed this month is Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot which I wrote a newsletter post about. There are a couple of reasons for my lack of reading, firstly there’s being too tired and second I’ve been struggling to find anything that I’ve wanted to get stuck into.

Watching

This is a bit of a similar story to my reading. We’ve barely had the tv on this month, mostly this is down to tiredness and a succession of early nights. I’m hoping that over the Christmas period I might be able to indulge a bit more and having had a look at what’s on there are a couple of things that look interesting so we’ll see.

Garden

I’ve been continuing to do a little bit of tidying and planning for next year. We’ve had a spell of very cold weather with temperatures dropping down to -6°C which put some things on hold while the ground was frozen, but as it’s thawing now I should be able to get back to it in due course.

Work

The start of the month was very busy finalising some reports but now it looks like it will be quiet until the New Year and I’m planning on not being actively chasing things until January. I feel like I need a break and a recharge until then.

Outside

I’m enjoying my daily walks and going further when the time allows. There is much more space for walking here, away from other people and without having to walk alongside roads. This is such a bonus for us, and the dogs enjoy it too.

Well that’s about all I have for this month, as you can see that isn’t much. So I’ll wish you a good break over the forthcoming Christmas and New Year and I’ll catch you again soon. In the meantime stay safe and take care.

October & November 2022 Update

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, Kindle, tv, work1 Comment

Well it’s been a while. I missed doing an October update (and it’s taken me this long to get to it that I thought I’d just as well do November as well before we hit Christmas) due to our house move. We moved in early November, but with packing and trying to continue to keep my work going things became very hectic and naturally time to do this was at a premium.

So we’re moved and slowly unpacking. The day of the move was pretty much torrential rain all day and it continued afterwards. I’ve realised how much I dislike the rain, although there are times when I quite enjoy it as well, it’s a bit of a weird paradox that I can’t quite explain.

Leading up to the move as we were madly filling boxes with all our worldly possessions and realising that we have just too much “stuff”, I was still trying to write daily in my journal and had rationed myself to just my Kindle for reading.

I love our new location. I’m walking more than I ever have done, and apart from a few blisters due to not having worn my wellingtons since last winter am finding it just a completely relaxing experience. I enjoyed walking at our old home but never felt it quite like I do here. I hope it’s not a novelty that will wear off.

Twitter

I’m still using my Twitter account, but mostly on a broadcast basis only. I am hopeful that despite all the damage the manbaby Musk seems to be doing that someone else might swoop in and save the day, but it doesn’t look likely. Most people who are leaving seem to be doing so for Mastodon, but I haven’t taken the leap yet, nor am I sure that I want to. If you want to get in touch via the socials I am still on Instagram (@tontowilliams) and you can of course contact me via this website or leave a comment on this post.

Reading

As I mentioned most of my reading has been on Kindle recently, I’m slowly unpacking my books, and have quite a few that I had preordered which arrived in the run up to the move that went straight into boxes. I’ve had a pretty decent run of reading the next three Bernie Gunther novels in the series by Philip Kerr – “The One From The Other”, “A Quiet Flame”, “If the Dead Rise Not” I quite enjoy reading these, although they can be a little bit drawn out at times, and the language is certainly well placed for the time they are set – 1930’s to 1950’s. I also read the “Bicycle Diaries” by David Byrne which I enjoyed. I’m hoping that my reading will settle down a bit again and perhaps I’ll get to some of those preorders just as soon as I find them!

Watching

This will be pretty short, as in the run up to the move and beyond we’ve not had much time for tv, and also because at a certain point all of that equipment was packed and we didn’t rush to unpack it. I will say though that we thoroughly enjoyed the latest season of Ghosts and am looking forward to seeing if the US version which is about to be shown on BBC3 is any good. Also of note, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it was Rings of Power on Amazon. It was okay but also a bit meh.

Garden

The category that would formally have been known as “Allotment”. Again I’ve not had much time to do very much here, although I have been making use of the cardboard from the boxes as we unpack to cover up some of the raised beds that we’ve inherited to try and suppress some of the weeds. I have plans for the garden, but it’s going to take a little bit of time.

Work

I was a little bit inundated with work at just the wrong time around the point of the move and had to do a few things on the fly in order to meet client deadlines. Things haven’t quite settled back into their normal routine at the moment, but I am having some long thinks about what I want to be doing when I’m on one of my walks.

Outside

I feel like there is a whole new category I should be writing about. Things I saw when walking or something like that. I’ve been inundated with the riches of the local flora and fauna with buzzards & sparrowhawks and roe & fallow deer. The autumn colours as well. We started autumn at our old house and have caught the end of it here, by the time we arrived it was really at its peak. So maybe I’ll add something here.

If you’re a subscriber to my Fifty from Fifty newsletter, you’ll know that I’m approaching the 50th edition and the theoretical end of it’s run. When I asked subscribers what I should do the emphatic response was “don’t stop, we don’t care what you do, but don’t stop”. This was so heartening to read, but I really haven’t decided what to do. With Twitter circling the drain, I did think posting more here – shorter but perhaps more frequently – might be an answer and I have other ideas for what the newsletter might become. Anyway suffice to say I might be posting more here or I might not. We’ll see, but in the meantime, thanks for reading and stay safe and take care.

July 2022 Update

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, tv, work

What two words would I use to describe July? Hot and busy.

The temperatures have been intense at times and we’ve not had the worst of it. We’ve escaped the really extreme temperatures and the fires. We’ve been lucky. Out leaders are asleep at the wheel when it comes to climate change, even if they acknowledge that it’s a thing at all, they can’t or perhaps won’t do anything about it for fear of upsetting a small right wing minority that refuse to accept that something has to must be done about it. Yes we have targets – net-zero carbon by 2050 – but there are few actions that will take us there. 2050 is far enough off (I’ll be 78 if I live that long), for the current crop of politicians to think of it as someone else’s problem. Of course we can’t wait that long because there’s already enough climate change locked into the system to make these years high temperatures feel quite mild.

In practical terms the hot weather has meant a change in the pattern of my day. I’ve been getting up early and taking Ruby for a walk before it gets too hot and then coming back to get on with work. Working until lunchtime when it was becoming too hot in my office to be able to think productively. I normally take a break at lunchtime for sustenance and another dog walk, but it was too hot to take any dog out in those temperatures. (If you’re in any doubt, take your shoes and socks off and go and stand on the tarmac. If you can’t stand there for more than a minute it’s too hot for them to be walking on that.) So our lunchtime walk was taken in the evening when the temperatures had dropped and the sun was much lower in the sky.

The days are getting noticeably shorter though so temperatures will start to drop a bit more with less sun.

I’ve also had a lot of work connected with the house move to do, including laying a carpet which I haven’t done for years, so it was good to refresh that skill set.

Work

It’s been a busy work month with multiple projects on the go for one client, they’re all strands of the same master project but need to be worked on separately. I’ve spread the work out a little more than I strictly needed to, but with the high temperatures I really needed to be able to maximise the cooler times of the day.

Allotment

We’ve had a good healthy crop of beetroot coming through which has meant it’s become a bit of a staple vegetable for us over the past month. I posted this public service message which you might want to read if you are similarly thinking of eating a lot of beetroot.

Books

I haven’t had a lot of time for reading this month, but I did finish a couple of books that I started a while ago and for some reason put to one side. I tend to do this occasionally, particularly if I’m not really enjoying the book because my mind isn’t really in the right place to be enjoying it. I’ll come back to them again later and normally finish them, on an odd occasion I might not but it doesn’t happen that often.

So I finished Pharmacopoeia: A Dungeness Notebook by Derek Jarman and The Book of the Raven: Corvids in Art and Legend by Angus Hyland, both very good and I’m unsure why they got sidelined but I’m glad I finished them. I also reread Call for the Dead by John le Carré, which is the first appearance of the character George Smiley and a very different character in some ways to the later books.

TV / Film

I’ve been particularly bad in the past about remember what I’ve watched over the month. So this month I’ve been making a conscious effort to write down what I’ve watched each day. It’s also been interesting to see how much TV we do watch. On average over the last month at least we’ve watched between two and two-and-a-half hours each night. A lot of repeats and a few other things.

We watched a series on Amazon call Totems which is a French (with subtitles) spy story set in the cold war. Really good and I’d recommend it. We also watched Trom which was on BBC4, set on the Faroe Isles and in Faroese and Danish with subtitles. It started out quite well but felt a bit contrived towards the end. Still worth a watch though. We also watched Murder in Provence which I quite enjoyed but you need to suspend your feelings about the lack of French accents. It’s basically English actors pretending to be French but without any trace of an accent or French mannerisms. If you can do that and get over the lead actors have played strong characters in other series it’s good. The accent thing seems to have upset a lot of people but I can think of other series where this hasn’t really been a problem. There have been at least three different adaptations of the Maigret novels with an all English cast and similarly an adaptation of the Zen novels which are set in Italy with and all English cast. I’m not sure why it’s so noticable in Murder in Provence, but it is.

I also watched Beau Miles latest YouTube video and recommend that you do too:

Well that’s about it for July. If I post this soon, it might even still be July wherever you’re reading it. In the meantime take care and stay safe:

Update April 2022

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, tv, work2 Comments

Well April has been a busy month for me, and mostly productive. My work has been focussed on a key project rolling forward and quite a bit of work to do to keep up with developments, it’s not something that I can say very much about but it has taken up quite a bit of work time. When I’ve not been doing that I’ve been sorting through some very large boxes of slides, negatives and photographs that I found while clearing my parents house. I’ve nearly worked my way through all of the slides, and have found lots of memories there (see above). I’ve been using the SlideScan and FilmBox apps to process as many as I can, although I’d say I’m actually digitising less than 10%, partly because they have no relevance to me now but also because they’re just not of sufficient quality e.g. underexposed, to enable the software to make a decent transfer. It’s been a fun project though and I’ve also been able to surprise a few members of the family with pictures of them or their relatives that they’d not seen before. I still have many more to do, so should keep me going for a number of weeks yet.

I’m still publishing my Fifty From Fifty Newsletter, which is why posts here have been less frequent and I’ve now passed the 20% mark in terms of the 50 posts. You can subscribe via the link above, new posts typically go out on Monday mornings UK time. One of my recent posts was about some of the music from 50 years of life and I created a playlist to reflect this:

I’ve also been picking up my film camera again, particularly as we’ve had some really good spells of weather and I’ve exposed a couple of rolls of film which I’ve sent off to be processed. One I’ve sent to a new lab which is even more local than the one that I’ve been using that I thought of as local. They have slightly let me down however as they advertise a three day turnaround (from receipt of film) however I had an email from them to say that it will be at least seven days before they’ll be able to process mine. It appears that they’ve updated their policy without updating the text on their website. It’s not a big deal, but it is a bit frustrating particularly when trying someone new for the first time.

I was hoping that I’d get them back in time for writing this post but alas not, so I’ll write up something else (assuming the photos are any good) when I get both rolls back.

Allotment

I’ve been getting the plot going again properly. The potatoes are just peeking through from their ridges and some seeds – beetroot and lettuce – have been sown directly. I’m also bringing some squash, tomato and bean seeds indoors, to plant out later. As we’ll be moving somewhen soon, I’m being a little bit cautious with what I plant, as once the move happens we’ll have to give up the plot.

Reading

I read Len Deighton’s Spy Sinker and with it finished the middle trilogy of the three trilogies. Faith; Hope and Charity are the next three books and the final trilogy, but I haven’t started them yet. You can also read my review of David Cranmer’s Dead Burying the Dead Under a Quaking Aspen which is an outstanding collection of poems and I thoroughly recommend. Other than that I am trying to read more and spend less time on social media which seems to be working and have now reached 29 books read this year. Considering how busy work has been that’s a pretty good achievement. I’m not doing it for the numbers but in many ways that is the only metric I have.

Watching

We watched the new version of The Ipcress File which we enjoyed but I’m not sure why they needed to make the Harry Palmer character look like Michael Caine. It wasn’t necessary and I found it quite distracting. I think it would have been better if they’d just let the actor play him how they wanted.

Also Slow Horses on Apple TV+ which is very good, and a shame it’s only six episodes, even though they have already completed the second season.

Well that’s about it for this month. Whatever you’re up to stay safe and take care.

My Best TV of 2021

On By TontowilliamsIn tv

Unlike my films of 2021 post yesterday, there’s a bit more to this, even if looking back some of what I’ve enjoyed most this year are things that were made some time ago, so case in point:

Maigret (Michael Gambon) and Inspector Morse were both made back in the 1980’s and 1990’s but still stand up really well today, obviously the latter has had spin-offs (Lewis and Endeavour) and the former a more recent incarnation with Rowan Atkinson as the French detective, but we watched all of both of these series from start to finish when they were repeated this year and enjoyed them all.

More up-to-date but set back in 1970’s was Adam Dalgliesh based on the books by PD James, I liked that they kept the ’70’s setting (unlike the Martin Shaw adaptations) and a series that I hope we’ll see more of.

Shetland made a welcome return and ended on a bit of a cliffhanger. I felt that this season wasn’t maybe as strong as previous ones but we still enjoyed it and I believe there’s another series to come so hopefully that will be resolved.

The excellent Ghosts was back for a third season and I believe that there’s a Christmas special to come. This season started to tell more about the ghost’s backstories and how they ended up as ghosts, I wanted a bit more about some of them, but maybe that will come.

And finally All Creatures Great and Small had a second season which continued the excellent retelling of the James Herriot books and is a worthy successor to the original BBC adaptations, and also has a Christmas special to come.

Reacher

On By TontowilliamsIn Film, tv

Now I didn’t mind the Tom Cruise films, they both had their moments, but Tom was no Jack or at least not as he’s written in the books. So I’m kinda looking forward to seeing if this is any better. At least physically they’re closer.

Tree’s Up TWTW # 154

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Cooking, Garden / Allotment, The Week That Was, tv, work

Well it’s a little windy out there at the moment. I’ve just come back from my morning dog walk and we have a fair breeze blowing. I dare say it’s not the 100mph winds that have been reported for storm Arwen in other parts of the country. Although you can’t see it easily from the photo that blue dot is us, and we’re right on the edge of one of the weather warnings so hopefully will escape the worst. If you’re in one of the other areas then I hope you stay safe and take care if you have to venture outdoors, probably better to stay inside in the warm and dry though if you can.

This week has been mostly been about the work again, trying to move some things forward and finish off others. I’m aiming to take the Christmas and New Year period completely work free, so would like to tie things up before then.

Outside of that I’ve been booking booster jabs, which has proven to be quite a torturous process with the website insisting that the nearest centre with appointments available is on the Isle of Wight which is an expensive ferry ride away. Eventually we managed to get booked in a little closer to home and without the sea crossing.

We also put up our Christmas tree. I suspect we would have done it this weekend anyway so we were probably a few days early but it feels like we should make the most of having it up, rather than putting it up last minute and then taking it down a week later.

So we put on the original Now Christmas album (on vinyl) and decorated the tree. Just need to write Christmas cards now.

I’m also planning to make our Christmas pudding over the weekend at some point. A few years ago I made a video about it here:

Work

As mentioned above I’ve been busy on different projects this week. I was also supposed to be at a couple of workshops yesterday and today, but mysteriously they were cancelled without notice or explanation on Tuesday. My assumption is because of the bad weather but I haven’t been able to contact the organiser to find out the reason. I’m not disappointed that they were cancelled due to the rising Covid numbers, I wasn’t looking forward to being in a room of potentially hostile members of the public.

Allotment

Nothing to report today, I’ll pop down there once the storm has passed to see if there is any damage but it’s probably best to stay away while the wind is so strong.

Reading

I mentioned that I’d started The Small Heart of Things by Julian Hoffman last week, well I finished that in fairly short order. It was a quick but brilliant read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Given it’s been tucked up in my “to be read” pile for so long it was a delight to read it. I hope there are more of the same in that pile of books. Since then I’ve been reading March Violets by Phillip Kerr, which is a Bernie Gunther mystery novel.

During the week I read an article – which I now can’t find – that said men don’t read much fiction. I initially dismissed this thinking that I read a lot of fiction. Later in the week I was looking through a book list of mine and realised that it was almost entirely non-fiction, so I had a look at the books I’ve read so far this year on GoodReads, and it’s pretty much a fifty-fifty split between fiction and non-fiction at the moment, so maybe there is something to that article after all?

TV

Nothing much to report this week, a lot of the things we have been watching have come to the end of their run, and Shetland finished this week. So not sure whether there’ll be much to report over the coming weeks.

Well that’s it for this week. As mentioned I’m off to be boosted next week, otherwise I’ll probably be working on client things. Whatever you’re up to Stay Safe and Take Care.