TV

• Bookish - Gatiss’ latest, and everything that I expected that it would be from him. Only one episode in so far. Nothing surprising or challenging, but looks like it will be cozy, camp entertainment.
• Dept. Q - fine visual design, with the sharp dressing, colour keyed scenes and geometrical designed contrasting with Morck’s up-and-dressed-what-more style. Good, engaging performances too.
• Such Brave Girls - season two picks up from the first in the same style: holding nothing back.

but also

• Untamed - Loads of other shows have combined spectacular wild scenery with moody murder detectives. However after 15mins of this I switched off. The six fatal words for any show: I don’t care about these characters.

Film

• The Phoenician Scheme - Wes Anderson just doing more of the same. He can be great, but this was simply sterile repetition.
• Death of a Unicorn - comedy horror that never really takes off - or didn’t for me, at least. My wife greatly enjoyed it though, so there’s that.

There are really only a couple of occasions when I will.

1. When driving alone. Sometimes I will be in the mood for a podcast, but occasionally music instead. I have a single playlist of around 1600 tracks on my phone for this.
2. When my SO and I are eating at home. We both have misophonia to some degree. In my SO’s case this results in her wanting to stab anyone making chewing noises with a fork. It is slurping noises with me. To minimise the stabbing we listen to, typically, BBC R3 when eating together. Until recently we had a DAB radio for this, but reception is crap where we are nowadays, so we have a bluetooth speaker setup for our phones.

I was around 20 years too late.

They didn’t attend mine either, as it happens, on the grounds that they too were “late” by then.

It is 2.4km to my nearest shop (and most of that to reach a bus stop, as it happens). I have walked there from time to time, but I wouldn’t do an actual grocery shop there anyway: we have the weekly groceries delivered.

I have brought a full grocery shop home in a large rucksack that kind of distance, and more, in the past when on holiday, but I wouldn’t want to do it regularly.

I have also known a couple of other people who do that kind of distance with a huge rucksack for a monthly top up of specific things that their local shops don’t carry, but they are both weird in several ways other ways. Good weird, but still weird. This is not something that the majority of people that I have known would even consider.

There have, evidently, been a few of these in the past. Neither my personal phone nor my work one has ever received one though. Nor has my SO’s if it comes to it.

Edwards insisted that lessons had been learned and that in 2023 National Highways had carried out a full soil survey and a three-month tree analysis.

This revealed they had planted the wrong species in the wrong place, and provided valuable lessons about the most appropriate season in the year to plant a tree, he said.

As someone who has been involved in planting schemes, I can say that this is absolutely bog-standard basic stuff. There is no excuse for this at all. No-one employed as any kind of ecologist should have got this wrong. People should be sued for this at the very minimum.

There is a short story - I can’t recall the title - in which we find that the Abbot is actually the Dalek duplicate of the First from The Chase, revived and sent through time.

Film:

• Deep Cover (2025) - thoroughly entertaining, especially Orlando Bloom, but not outstanding in the long term.

• The Quiet Girl (2022) - beautifully shot and with a great, understated performances. A moving character study.

TV:

Murderbot, Babylon Berlin & Your Friends and Neighbors continue to be as good as ever. Poker Face has gone completely off the wall in season 2, but mostly works.

Sirens picked up a lot after the first episode. It was evidently adapted from a play, and you can clearly see some of the original scenes scattered through it: typically the best ones. There is probably too much filler between them though. Enjoyable overall though.

We watched the first couple of episodes of Stick. The obvious comparison is Ted Lasso, but whereas TL was a comedy with a sport setting, this one is a dramady about sport. Too much sport and too few laughs or worthwhile character beats. Also, too many scenes and too much dialogue that reminded me of Better Call Saul, but not in the same league.

I don’t know whether it is ‘the best’ but one that I find springs to mind quite often is a moment with a new Christmas present once. It was one of those walk-along-then-spin-and-shoot robots - a very simple thing, since this was in the early '70s. However, my memory is of utter joy and entrancement as I set it going then leapt out of the way, on to the furniture, before it opened its chest and fired.

It must have been a present from my parents, so they were probably happy that I liked it. Whether they were quite so happy after the first hour or two of the same thing, I don’t know.

The first three of Dennis E Taylor’s Bobiverse tales, definitely: easy reads and the most compelling that I have read for a long while. The next ones may be too - I just decided to take a break before continuing.

Also Dan Simmon’s Hyperion for it’s breadth of styles if nothing else.

The early Murderbot diaries by Martha Wells. After the first five there were some elements that started to get a little repetitive, so I took a break there. I expect to enjoy them again when I restart though.

And then The Road, of course, which is by far the most literary, and probably The Player of Games so far from the Culture tales.

The least favourite would be This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which I found naïve and unconvincing.

This year I have been catching up with some SF: broadly alternating Banks’ Culture series with others. A few weeks back, after finishing Use of Weapons, I read McCarthy’s The Road - which kinda counts as SF - and that spoiled other books for me for a while. His excellent, sparse use of language topped off a brilliantly understated and impactful tale.

Life got in the way for a bit following that, and rather than going into the next Culture novel, I happened to have Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye to hand and so started that, but not only was the writing extremely mundane compared to McCarthey, but the setting of “Nelson’s navy in space” left me comparing it to O’Brien’s Aubrey and Maturin tales - and it didn’t do well on that front either.

So I will not continue with that one and will be starting Excession - which I believe many find to be the best of the Culture books - shortly.

I grew up near Slut’s Hole Lane. It didn’t have a sign at the time and I only found the name on an old map, but the sign has been put back since.

More recently a regular walk would take me past a woodland called Fiscal Policy. I did find an explanation for this one. I can’t recall the details, but it was rather dull overall.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest: Shroud. So far, it hasn’t grabbed me in the same way that Children of Time did, but I’m enjoying it and am interested to see how the worldbuilding goes.