This year’s challenge: take a photo a day, every day for January.
4 January: The eleventh day of Christmas. Still Christmas, just.
31 Day Challenge: Day Four
All posts by Andy Todd
31 Day Challenge: Day Three
This year’s challenge: take a photo a day, every day for January.
3 January: Rangers v Celtic
31 Day Challenge: Day Two
This year’s challenge: take a photo a day, every day for January.
2 January: Advert breaks are only ever watched with family who won’t change the channel at Christmas time.
Music 2025 (Andrew)
Pulp, Oasis then to finish 1996, sorry 2025, Radiohead.
I mentioned last year that I like to pick a band and then listen to all their albums in order. Even better if I can read a book about them at the same time. For R.E.M., another band I loved in 1996, I read ‘The Name of this Band is R.E.M.’ and it reminded me that I’d never actually listened to their last two albums. They just drifted away until I didn’t even know the names of their last albums, which is fair with Accelerate, a forgettable album, but their final album, which they knew would be their last when they recorded it, had some of their best material since, well, 1996 too. A pleasant surprise even if re-listening to all their albums just reminded me that Murmur is their best, Automatic for the People is too famous to judge, and Out of Time is mostly awful.
But then I started listening to Radiohead and, just as I was finishing my re-listen, they announced a tour and I embarked on a re-relisten and re-re-relisten and re-re-re-relisten in preparation.
Album of the year was an easy one this year: In Rainbows by Radiohead, closely followed by A Moon Shaped Pool, Kid A and Hail to the Thief. But for something newer nothing came close to Lux by Rosalia
Rosalia: Berghain
Lily Allan: Pussy Palace
Pulp: Got To Have Love
Turnstile: Never Enough
Model Actriz: Cinderella
Getdown Services: Dog Dribble
Blood Orange: Mind Loaded
Tyler The Creator: Don’t Tap The Glass
The Horrors: Ariel
Djo: End of Beginning
31 Day Challenge: Day One
This year’s challenge: take a photo a day, every day for January.
1 January: The good old days.
Merry Christmas! (Andrew)
Film 2025 (Andrew)
A simple goal this year: go to the cinema as much as possible. Since the COVID years I’ve taken the easier option of watching all but the biggest films on TV once I knew if they were any good or not. This year I wanted to take a chance on more films and watch them the weekend they open. A goal which paid off spectacularly by a Saturday lunchtime trip to watch 28 Years Later before I knew anything about it, beyond it being the sequel to 28 Days Later. I loved it, despite it being messy and all over the place and with an ending that, if it had been on TV, it would have made me wonder if someone had changed the channel. I loved it for it’s wild swings and for Ralph Fiennes and the Bone Temple sequence. I can’t wait for the next one in January, in, if I’ve time this blog post correctly, 28 days!
The best hour in the cinema this year was easily Tom Cruise hanging off a plane in MI: Final Reckoning, pity the first hour failed to take off. While Brad Pitt in F1 was going to be my most fun film watched until a late challenge from Companion saw Brad almost lapped at the finish line. Almost…. of course, he wins in the end. He’s Brad Pitt!
Speaking of endings, I watched all for four hours of the Brutalist and couldn’t help admire an ending that did make me laugh as it appeared to not just cap the film but also, break the fourth wall, and speak directly to anyone who watched all four hours of architecture, frowning and bad accents in America. It may have been the ‘best’ film I watched this year, but it definitely wasn’t one of the most fun.
Another contender for best film, and one that was lot more ‘fun’ was One Battle After Another, but for most fun, I enjoyed the nonsense of Twisters, the men on a mission of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Conduct, Hugh Grant being evil, or not, in the Heretic, the twists of Companion and, finally, A Real Pain, a film which turned out to be more ‘fun’ than a film about two brothers on a holocaust tour might have been.
TV 2025 (Andrew)
A comedian with an impossible task. A comedian with a secret agenda. And a final episode where no one could believe that he got away with lying in plain sight for episode after episode. No, I’m not talking about Alan Carr in The Celebrity Traitors final, which was one of the funniest things I watched all year, I’m talking about Nathan Fielder in the Rehersal, my favourite TV programme this year.
The first season was, in the end, almost incredibly moving as it tightroped between a reality TV show about a reality TV show and what might actually be something incredibly real and raw.
The second season was better because it had a purpose, even if it was one that was not as obvious as it may first have appeared. To say more would be to spoil the surprises but, in its own, the final episode was like watching the documentary Free Solo and, despite knowing that climber Alex Honnold didn’t fall off, you still worried that he might fail. The last episode of The Rehearsal had that same feeling of knowing everything was okay, while fully expecting the worst.
For another spectacular ending, Nathan Fielder faced the challenge of… Nathan Fielder in ‘The Curse’. A programme that was very cold and kept the characters at arms length until 20 minutes from the end when, well, a million monkeys with a million typewriters would never have written that ending.
For utter rubbish, I give you ‘Paradise’, with a twist so stupid I watched all of it anyway. And while I can’t say it was worth it in the end, in episode 7, set in the White House, they managed to create the tensest hour of TV I’ve watched in a long time.
For comfort TV, nothing beats Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman driving round on motorbikes in Long Way Home where the greatest peril is wondering if Ewan and Charley will find a nice bed & breakfast in Denmark.
And if you want comfort and utter rubbish then Department Q did a great job of making Scotland look like another country because, well, despite being set and filmed in Edinburgh it used a fictional island for a murder investigation. An island that appeared to be on the west coast of Scotland, because that’s where all the islands which are not Shetland or Orkney are! An island with a shinty team, so likely on the west coast of the Highland, perhaps near Skye. But was also once part of the north east oil boom in the 1970s! The only way the makers of Department Q can solve this mystery is by having an island here:
Books 2025 (Andrew)
It’s rare for me to read a book again. Once I’ve read it, I know what happened, and I want to read something else, something new. The last book I re-read was “Boy’s Life” by Robert R McCammon, a book I read as a teenager and loved, and then read again a couple of years ago and loved even more as I could now see it not just as a coming of age tale but also a coming off age tale told by a middle aged man looking back at the Stephen King like tales and mystery of a childhood murder.
My worry about re-reading something is that it will not be as good the second time. If you know the ending, where is the suspense? Despite this, this year I decided to take a risk again with another favourite book as a teenager, ’The Dragonbone Chair’, now considered a fantasy classic. And this time, I could see why it was a classic and why sometimes a classic is a classic because it’s a bit… dusty. Tropes which felt fresh 30 years ago are now well worn and some of the characters and writing lacks depth. But most of it still stood up and I’m keen now to read the next two books as my memory of the original trilogy was that the first book was great, but the sequels were better and paid off in completely unexpected ways, none of which I can now remember.
I read a few fantasy books this year and can recommend ‘The Tainted Cup’, if you like your fantasy with a good murder mystery, ‘A Night in the Lonesome October’, if you like your fantasy as a calendar to read a chapter a day in October, or ‘The Spear Cuts Through Water’, if you like your fantasy with experimental storytelling or stories within stories within sentences. You make a note to yourself to buy this book. [This is the funniest use of italics I have ever written if you are one of the few people reading this blog to have read The Spear Cuts Through Water].
For biographies, I discovered Brett Anderson had written a second book, though technically his first. I really enjoyed his account of Suede’s success a couple of years ago but hadn’t realised it was the sequel to his first book: his childhood and first attempts at forming a band. The first book (second read) was just as good and offered an interesting look at how he found a voice when songwriting including, for someone who was training as a town & country planner when starting out, how important it was for him to know the place a song was set, even if location was never mentioned in the lyrics.
Best biography though was easily Trevor Noah’s ‘Born A Crime’ about growing up in South Africa, both the funniest book I read but also the one with an unbelievable but true ending.
Other factual books I enjoyed include ‘The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip’ by Simon Hart (including the revelation that Rishi Sunak would tidy up the number 10 boardroom when people left); ‘Hits, Flops and Other Illusions’ by film director Ed Zwick and ‘Coffee First, Then The World’ by Jenny Graham about her world record attempt to be the fastest women to cycle around the world.
Book of the year was also last year’s almost book of the year – see here – and it was ‘Lonesome Dove’. Every sentence perfect. Every paragraph perfect. Every step across America with a herd of a thousand cattle perfect. But the surprise was that, despite starting this last year and realising how good it was going to be, there was also another contender for book of the year: Hyperion by Dan Simmons, a vivid and imaginative sci-fi with one hundred and 10 ideas on every page. The book contains several short stories told by the characters and two of the stories – the monk’s tale and the father’s tale were stunning. Almost as good as Lonesome Dove, but not quite. Occassionaly Hyperion had a duff sentence. Lonesome Dove didn’t have a wrong word in 1,000 pages. I have never missed a book as much as I missed that one when I finished it. I might even re-read it, but not until I forget what happens in it…
Yearly target: Read 50 books
Books read: 50!
What Doctors can tell you about showers (Andrew)
For the last few months I have had an itchy back, which is annoying, as I can’t quite reach the itchy parts without first stretching and warming up with a full Yoga practice. Instead I’ve learned to scratch using the corner of a table, like a dog.
To help my skin I switched to using a non-soap body wash. If you don’t know, a non-soap body wash is one which doesn’t produce a lather and is meant to be kinder on your skin. The only side effect is that it’s impossible to tell which parts of your body you’ve washed as there no suds to wash off. You might as well be rubbing your body with an invisible gel. There’s nothing to see. How can I be clean if there’s nothing to wash off?
While the non-soap body wash helped reduce my itching I thought it would be an idea to check with my GP if there was anything else I could do. And he told me something I never thought I would hear. He said:
“Wash less.”
“Like don’t take a shower?” I asked
“You need to shower less,” he said, “washing too much can dry your skin out and you only need to shower a few times a week, not every day.”
I might have fibbed. When he asked “Do you shower every day?” I said “yes” because I didn’t want him to think I was a dirty stopout. But, with a shower every two days and often more than one shower in a day as I might shower in the morning then shower again after doing some execise, I probably do average 7 – 8 showers a week.
“It’s too much,” he said, “I can see from your back and neck that your skin is not getting enough moisture. Just use some moisturiser and don’t worry about washing every day.”
Like I said I never thought a doctor would want me to be less hygienic but, according to him, washing less is more hygienic than washing more.
Of course, if you start to smell, or start looking like you’ve spent all day jumping up and down in muddy puddles, you should still wash. Washing less may improve your skin, but it’s not going to improve your social skills if no one will venture near you.
So, if you’re currently on a training programme for a summer event and training most days, then remember that it’s okay to not wash. Not washing may be the key to getting you the start line fit and healthy (if not smell free)!
Twin brothers swimming, cycling and running in Scotland 