Books read
None. Not a one. Maybe 100 pages of Justina Robson's Natural Selection which I didn't finish for Book Club in December. An issue of Empire magazine. A bunch of articles on the internet.

Films watched (9-20) (5 at the cinema, 4 DVD, 1 tv, 2 stream)
Byzantium
Coriolanus (Fiennes version)
Zodiac
Death To Smoochy
Inside Llewyn Davis
Philomena (rewatch)
Oldboy
Bridesmaids
Her
12 Years a Slave
Dallas Buyers Club
Coffee and Cigarettes

Gigs, comedy, clubs etc (2-7)
Coriolanus (NFT version at cinema, Hiddlestone)
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, Itch (gig, Junction, Cambridge)
Sensing Spaces (architecture exhibition, Royal Academy, London)
Bill Bailey Unplugged (comedy, Leicester Square Theatre, London)
Avenue Q (musical, Mumford Theatre, Cambridge)
Of Montreal (gig, Oval Space, London)

Books incoming 1 (reader copy)

In February I got rid of my cough enough to get out to the cinema and catch some of the Oscar nominees (still want to catch The Wolf of Wall Street) and beforehand got shown some fine DVDs some of which I hadn't known of before. I also got out to quite a lot of gigs etc. Taking the last week of Feb as annual leave helped with this :-)

Gigglesome: Bill Bailey, Avenue Q (but why does it have to take such accurate swipes, darn it? I thought I was special!)
Fab: Of Montreal. Amazing show, I saw poor reviews of it elsewhere because this is the stripped down version they're touring Europe with.
Good films: Her was not the painful unreconstructed 50's build-a-girlfriendbot story I had feared; Coffee and Cigarettes is full of awkward conversations; Zodiac was great; Philomena still good on a second viewing; Oldboy was brutal.

I've not seen or read Coriolanus before, it was interesting to watch the recent theatre version (2014, starring Tom Hiddlestone) and a fairly recent film (2011, dir and starring Ralph Fiennes) and compare and contrast to see which themes were strongest. One Coriolanus was early 30s, the other late 40s, which gave a different interpretation of where they might be in their career/readiness for politics/skilled in social ways. The Fiennes version was set in a more contemporary setting, which highlighted how some issues were current. Seeing the same dialogue from two sets of people helped me understand it more, Shakespeare's words were not always that clear in meaning.

Books read (47)
London Falling, Paul Cornell (2012)

Films watched (148-167) (4 at the cinema, 6 DVD, 3 video, 6 tv, 1 stream)
Nebraska
Faust (Jan Svankmajer)
Control
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (rewatch)
Matinee (rewatch)
Saving Mr Banks
Kung Fu Panda (rewatch)
Enduring Love
The Woodsman
Queen of Outer Space (rewatch)
Fracture
Rock of Ages
Elf
Zoolander (rewatch)
Everything Must Go
Performance
Quartet
Emma
Planet 51 (rewatch)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Gigs, comedy, clubs etc (37-39)
Fairhaven Singer, Music for Advent and Christmas (Cambridge)
Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People (comedy, London)
Jesterlarf (comedy, Cambridge)

Books incoming 1 (1 gift, read 23/30)

WOO HOO - I have succeeded this year in reading more books than I acquired. I bought 10, was gifted 3, loaned 14, others were free/proof-reading.

Good films this month: Elf is lovely, very funny. I had thought I didn't like Will Ferrell but I was wrong.
Nebraska, Control and Performance. Performance was weird. I had heard about it from an early age in Smash Hits magazine (famously having Mick Jagger in it!) but I'm glad I did not seek it out to watch back then.
Zoolander is a classic. I seem to watch it most years.
Watching Matinee on a recorded-from-the-telly video and seeing how much it goes for on DVD has encouraged me to get the technology together to transfer some of my videos to digital format. Though maybe as a Feb/Mar project.

I get to this time of year and reflect on what I've done in the year that has been good, but it is so easy to forget things as time passes and people tell you to do emergency graphs that I often forget the good things. This year I have been writing them down.

... transition at work from a Strategic Health Authority to Health Education England in April. Many colleagues kept their jobs through the restructure, we're still working out at many levels what the new organisation does, and things are settling down. Jolly busy though, and we have not yet sorted out the firewall issue to allow us to connect to the online database.

... proofreading and transcription. Proofread a couple of short sf novels/novellas. I like this, I get to be helpful and fully indulge the pickier aspects of my nature :-) I started transcribing some interviews for Take One, a film reviews site which started out as the Cambridge Film Festival newsletter but has massively expanded. I have tried and failed to write reviews, it's like blood from a stone, but I can type up interviews, especially with scientists. It has been very interesting at the beginning, noticing how different people speak, that some slow speakers are easy to transcribe and others not so much, how people talk over each other and trail off sentences and while listening your brain is happy that it has absorbed all the concepts but it doesn't make any sense as plain transcribed words. One chap was a lecturer and managed to speak in whole sentences, a skill I had not properly appreciated before.

... met and fed lemurs (LJ post). Lemurs! I can still smell the banana in my hair and feel their little paddy paws.

... physio. Made massive leaps on the long-standing (sic) back problem to the extent I can now use underground trains when in London and drive to work and stay at the pub till nearly closing time. I hope to travel further afield next year. Several "I can never do this without hurting my back" have turned into things I can generally do.
Driving includes reversing into the garage, which I have been terrified of for the ten years I've lived here, but now it's fine, largely thanks to a parking lesson with Máiréad who I recommend if you are in Cambridge and want to learn to drive.
I have renewed my passport which expired a couple of years ago and has been languishing unvalidly in a filing cabinet while I give grouchy glares at people who said "You should renew it (for £££), it's useful for ID!" Now its corner is snipped off and I have a shiny new one. Paris in the the Spring, maybe?

... made a beaded butterfly bracelet for my mum who was very pleased with it, didn't get a good photo though. Painted some dinosaurs (Twitter pic). Made three cross stitch Christmas cards. Did not finish Many Other Things.

... had kitchen out of order in the summer due to a leak. Kitchen is so well repaired now I forget it happened.

... had some very nice meals, including at Alimentum who are always good about the dietary restrictions while being inventive and delicious. I'm tempted to see if I can get a gfdf tasting menu one day. Had a Fumo Martini (not at Alimentum), which had oaky smoky liquor and was garnished with a thin slice of bacon. I have had the experience, so now you don't have to.

Plus all the good films, gigs, concerts, comedy gigs, theatre, art exhibitions, first ever trip to the opera, books etc that I write up every month. I've had a good, rich cultural year.

Books read (45-46)
Phonogram vols 1 & 2, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie (2006-7, 2008-10) (graphic novel)
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1940)

Films watched (131-147) (8 at the cinema, 7 DVD, 2 stream)
Scott Pilgrim vs The World (rewatch)
Amour
Gravity
Big Trouble in Little China
Full Metal Jacket
Forbidden Planet (rewatch at the cinema)
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Hellraiser
Philomena
Scott Pilgrim vs The World (rewatch at the cinema)
Shorts: Meditation (London Underground Film Festival)
Shorts: animated (London Underground Film Festival)
I'm A Cyborg, But That's Ok
The Selfish Giant
The Butler
The Consequences of Love
M

Gigs, comedy, clubs etc (29-36)
Phil Hammond: Games to Play with your Doctor (comedy, Cambridge)
Mark Kermode: Hatchet Job (book tour talk, Cambridge)
Stewart Lee: Much Astew About Nothing (comedy, London)
Emiliana Torrini (gig, London)
Victoriana (art, London Guildhall)
Sarah Lucas (art, Whitechapel Gallery, London)
Wellcome Collection (exhibition)
Georgians Revealed & Permanent Collection (British Library, London)

Books incoming 1 (1 purchase, read 22/29)

A few days of holiday in London helped fill out the gigs etc list this month. I also seem to be back on the films after a slow October after a packed September, and saw a few classics I'd not watched before.

Good films: The Selfish Giant, Gravity, M, Full Metal Jacket, The Consequences of Love, the weird final film in the Meditations shorts

Stood up surprisingly well to a rewatch: Scott Pilgrim, watched for costume references because went to a dress-up quotealong event, where London Gigging Buddy and I were the only ones dressed up but it was fun anyway, and liked seeing loads more tiny details on the big screen.

Good other: Stewart Lee, Emiliana Torrini, Victoriana

I posted about Cokezone ending their reward scheme on Oct 15th. Since then I have bought enough bottles to get up to 150 and one last cinema ticket - but today fell foul of the rule where you can only enter 50 points-worth of codes per day, as it turns out it is 50 points per week and I stuck at 109 with another 42 sitting on the shelf un-enterable. My cinema-going loss is World Wildlife Foundation's £5 gain though. *kicks self for not entering the codes a week ago when I bought the Coke*

Books read (39-42)
The Derring-Do Club and The Empire of the Dead, David Wake (2013)
The Devil in a Forest, Gene Wolfe (1976)
Saga Vols #1 and #2, Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (2012-13, 2013)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (2013)

Films watched (92-122) (25 at the cinema, 4 DVD, 2 stream)
(Cambridge Film Festival post to follow)
Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers
Kill List
The Great Beauty
The Machinist
Twelve Monkeys (rewatch)
Tron (rewatch)
The Ipcress File
Once Upon a Time In Mexico (rewatch)
Just Before Losing Everything (short)
Hawking
Blue Jasmine
The Lebanese Rocket Society
Growing Pain (shorts)
For Those In Peril
Hannah Arendt
Blackbird
Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth
No Surrender
Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure: John Otway The Movie
The Fifth Season
Roland Klick: The Heart is a Hungry Hunter
Deadlock
Upstream Colour
Natan
White Star
Thomas Dolby: The Invisible Lighthouse
Anguish
Dead Cat
Eyes On The Sky
The Redemption of the Fish
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Gigs, comedy, clubs etc (20-25) (cheating a bit as the Otway and Dolby were film/live performances and are on both lists)
Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis (photography, Natural History Museum, London)
Neil Innes, A Second Chance to Get It Right (music, Junction, Cambridge)
Austentatious (improv, Leicester Square Theatre, London)
John Otway: Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure (film/music, Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thomas Dolby: The Invisible Lighthouse (film/music, Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Creative Cabaret (Union Bar, Cambridge)

Books incoming 4 (1 loan, 2 purchased, 1 proofread, read 20/26)

Good: lots of stuff

For those who are sad that they often do not find out about it until after it has happened:
http://www.extremeelectronics.co.uk/cambridgeteslathon/
Museum of Technology, Oct 26/27

Or go and learn how to build one in Nottingham on Nov 30 -
http://www.extremeelectronics.co.uk/blog/tesla-coil-building-workshop/

If you're interested in Cambridge cinema you might like to know about this - following the takeover of Picturehouse by Cineworld, the Competition Commission have decided that this is a Substantial Lessening of Competition in Cambridge (and Aberdeen, and Bury St Edmunds) and have suggested the sale of either a Cineworld cinema or a Picturehouse cinema. Decision to be taken in late Sep/early Oct.

I'd be unhappy with this, they are great complementary cinemas with well differentiated programmes.

Comment at Take One (and subsequent posts including "Why not run it as a Co-op?")
and analysis at Movie Evangelist (and subsequent posts)

It is quite nice to have sawing and electric screwdriver noises coming from the kitchen and it not be yourself having to make them. The carpenter says the same about people typing things into computers. It is good that we do not have each other's jobs. It took me 40 minutes last night to clear the kitchen ready for them. It is a fiddly job to empty drawers, especially when you don't really have anywhere to put things. Anyone who has lived with me will be able to imagine the teetering piles of carefully-balanced spatulas in the dining room.

Apparently the bits of wood that run along the bottom of cupboards are called "plinths". I thought they were "kickboards". Everything has a name!

Me: have made plans with London Gigging Buddy and have tickets for something in Sep, Oct and Nov which are nice to look forward to.

Small hamster: has inherited big hamster's vertical wheel as well as his own flying saucer running dish, and he loves it very much.

And I've just overheard a passing cyclist (we get a couple of seconds of conversation as they swoop by) saying "I am a knight of the realm" in ringing tones. I wonder what he said before and afterwards?

Also - GIP: I seem to have acquired rather a lot of hair.