Well, that escalated quickly. From testing out a random Cornish beer in a bottle, now I’m faced with a 5 litre keg of the stuff. Despite being called a mini keg, this thing is so big we had to dismantle the lower third of our fridge. Which in turn means we now have no food to eat, but five litres of prime Cornish ale will see us through, I’m sure.

Game of Thrones spoilers within! Hey people, we did it! I mean, I can’t pretend that I have joined you all on an epic eight year long journey to find out who would finally be sitting on the Iron Throne, but it has been a pretty intense ride for me too. I think the fact that I binge watched all eight series in about six weeks means that I’ve a slightly different perspective than the ardent fans who have waited and wondered and sat patiently and theorised and loved and let this show take over their lives.

Backstreet Boys have been celebrating the launch of their new tour, 20 years of their best album Millennium, and a host of other things. Lots of content, tweets, videos, competitions, the works. I really liked the recent videos they released featuring their videos from the Millennium album with added information. It’s like the good old days when MTV was actually comprised of music videos, and you could sit all day and watch pop videos with bonus trivia in the lower thirds.

Late last year, restaurant chain Frankie & Benny’s launched an initiative to ban families from using their mobile phones whilst having dinner. As in, handing over your phone to the restaurant while you ate, and then getting it back at the end if you were a good family and ate up all your greens. I, as well as many others, was outraged at the restaurant’s audacity, controlling streak, as well as just the general tone of disapproval of people who use phones at table.

I’ve been up and running with this new website structure for about two weeks now and I’m still loving it. I don’t know if it’s just the novelty of it all or if the effort gone into simplifying everything has paid off, but I want to blog more and when I do, I write more too. The film and album review process is more immediate which means I have more thoughts and more to say.

Just a bit of inspiration from an old episode of Radio 1’s Screen Time podcast with Ali Plumb. As I’ve said to people on Instagram and Twitter quite a lot lately, don’t be ashamed of your opinions. If you happen to, for example, not like The Favourite, and everyone’s saying how amazing it is, but you’re like, I don’t like it. Don’t feel ashamed, don’t be like, oh I’ve got to watch it again so I can teach myself to like it.

Today I managed to earn this award on my Apple Watch - 1,000 move goals. I don’t quite know how that’s possible, especially since a burst of energy a month or two ago sent my move goal sky high. But I’ve got a good relationship with the goals on my watch now - not over-taxing myself to try and reach them and then burning out, but using them as motivation to keep going when you just need that little extra push to get an award.

I’m currently listening to the audiobook Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. It’s focus is on the gender data gap - the ways in which the world is often unthinkingly designed for men and how that affects women in real and unexpected ways. I’m finding it hard going, not because of the book itself - it’s well written, researched and read - but because the unintended and far-reaching consequences of a simple lack of thinking weigh heavy on me.

Okay, Game of Thrones fans, look away now because I know you’re just enjoying some of the best episodes ever (apparently), but I am still miles behind you. Yes, that’s me, one of those people that gets caught up on the hype train at the very last minute and then has to watch seven seasons in about six weeks. I’m doing pretty well actually. I tried watching Game of Thrones a long while back and got through about an episode and a half, I think.

It’s been a long time since I made any significant changes to my blog and the system it runs on, and now, seemingly overnight, everything has completely changed. This isn’t the work of a moment though. This is something I’ve been thinking about for at least three years. The problem I’ve used Wordpress for many, many moons now and whilst I’ve always thought it was functional in a way that would work for most people, it never quite fit my purposes.