Life's about experiences. These are mine.
In 1998 the curtain came down on the satirical TV sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey. Set in the fictitious newsroom of the Globelink News organisation it was recorded close to transmission and included topical jokes based on the week’s news. It made stars of several of its cast most notably Stephen Tompkinson, Neil Pearson and …
My annual round-up of the year just gone (you can read the previous year’s reports here). This year I was interested to see how the fact that now I am pretty much fully retired would have had an impact on some of these stats. For a start, I feel that I have listened to less …
Musicals – they’re only for women and gay men or so they say. Given that I’m quite partial to musicals I’m not sure what that says about me. I’ve seen quite a few over the years. Some such as Amélie we’ve been to see a few times. Some I’ve fallen asleep during (Wicked I’m looking …
My annual round-up of the year just gone (you can read 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021‘s reports). This was very much a transitional year as I moved from working part time to retirement at the end of August. I haven’t fully retired yet as I am still doing some consultancy but my daily rhythm has …
On a trip up North over the last few days we visited Scarborough home of the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Most closely associated with Alan Ayckbourn (all but four of his plays have debuted there) but we weren’t seeing an Ayckbourn but the revival of a play called Constellations by Nick Payne. When we got in …
Continue reading “Constellations, Stephen Joseph Theatre – Into the Multiverse”
This is the fourth summary of my year that I have done (you can read 2018, 2019 and 2020‘s reports) and, for reasons I will outline below, this year is very much incomplete. Nevertheless it is still worth taking time to assess the year. Data for this report has as ever been taken from a …
Well what a year that was! Not quite the one I was expecting to have that’s for sure. We didn’t get to go on the holidays we had planned but we got to see a lot more of our granddaughter which was more than adequate compensation. For me the adjustment due to the pandemic wasn’t …
God, who we all know is Alanis Morissette, is clearly not very happy with the inhabitants of planet Earth. Those hints about climate change were clearly too subtle for many so she decided that another forty days and forty nights of rain leading to flooding might clue some people up. When that didn’t have the …
Continue reading “Relative Strangers (and God). The Mill at Sonning, 14th March 2020”
This has taken me longer to sort out this year than it did for 2018 but here, finally, for you delectation is my 2019 in numbers. Once again these figures have been culled from a number of sources including Exist, last.fm, Audible, Swarm and a couple of spreadsheets that I keep. Healthily I managed 124,000 …
A couple of years ago we went to Progress Theatre’s annual Writefest. This is an evening of seven short plays written and performed by local and up-and-coming actors. As you can imagine there is real mixed bag of plays on offer and the quality and therefore the enjoyability is also variable. This time out the …