Aldi on Friday was out of chopped tomatoes, vegetable oil, pasta, liquid soap and there wasn’t much bog roll left.

It just seemed weird, but then I think that when KFC ran out of chicken people were phoning […]

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Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown
A biography of Princess Margaret that could make a republican of the most ardent royalist. She comes across as boorish and boring, petulant and needy. Given her privilege a […]

Quite enjoyed the light sabre fight on Southend pier. And the chase through the desert was good fun.

It was a decent enough film, but I’ve always felt that the new characters have been overshadowed by the old guard.

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The Underground Railway.
Takes the concept of the underground railway literally, with an actual rail system built to smuggle slaves out from the southern states of America. It’s sobering and vivid – tol […]

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Miami Blues by Charles Willeford
Willeford wrote like a dream and filled his crime novels with wonderfully off kilter characters.

March Violets by Philip Kerr
I could see that this is well written and […]

I’d like to add Bad Company to the list. Set during the civil war it centres on a young man who is escaping the draft and falls in with a gang of youthful criminals. The gang start out excited by the adventure […]

Enjoyed this podcast very much and thought I’d add my own two pennies worth.

I can’t remember the first Bond movie I saw – possibly Dr No on the telly in the mid 70s. The one I really remember was Goldfinger. […]

Haven’t posted for a while, so this is a bit of catch up of the last couple of months.
Read:
The man who came uptown by George Pelecanos.
Pelecanos serves up his usual, reliable combination of chewy, a […]

Hats – Blue Nile
Brotherhood – New Order
Joshua Tree – U2
Songs of Faith and Devotion – Depeche Mode
Out of Time – REM

Bubbling under
Tunnel of Love – Springsteen
Goodbye Jumbo – World Party
Of the […]

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IQ By Joe Ide
This LA set, modern take on the Sherlock Holmes story riffs on the Hound of the Baskervilles. The book is populated by a cast of weirdoes including a drug addled rapper, his coterie of hangers […]

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Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky – I rarely read SciFi but this one piqued my interest. In a near future, bioengineering has created militarised versions of animals that are being used to fight wars ( […]

Read this at the weekend (in a sci fi novel about bio engineering, of all things).

“Change hurts, but it hurts most those who shackle themselves to the past.”

Seemed apposite to Gill’s commentary about those […]

There are plenty of films that I would happily sit through on multiple occasions, but they aren’t on the telly very often.

Of the ones that seem on hard rotation on ITV / film 4 I can easily get caught up […]

Does ‘Hats’ by The Blue Nile count?

D’oh!
Wishful thinking I guess.

Seen
I’m enjoying The Good Place; a high concept sit-com in which an admin error results in a feckless woman being sent to heaven by mistake. Weird, imaginative and inventive with writing credits by Dylan M […]

Got the heads up from Goodreads. I knew the book was on its way this year and was looking forward to it – so went to the sneak peek expectantly.

The summary and the excerpt were meant to whet the appetite but […]

I liked when Baker launched into a game of hand shake poker (i.e. who is the most famous person you have met) and threw down his hand – the Beatles. Which I guess he uses to bulldoze most rooms.
Then Lineker said […]

And ‘we fear change’

Danny B mentions the show regularly on the podcast he does with Gary Lineker. Recently talked about how Alan Sugar had plod come round his house to threaten arrest (Danny had been telling […]