Today the UK shifted forward an hour into British Summer Time and I continue to hate the concept. Every year that passes, the time change seems to rock my foundations more and it takes longer to get back to a sense of normalcy, but never mind, I’m in a privileged enough position to have nothing to do today but get over it.

I loved this! Gin Blossoms popped up on the Top of the Pops reruns recently and it’s just such lovely guitar pop Dawson’s Creek style music that I couldn’t help but have them as this week’s album. It’s exactly that, reminiscent of that period in the 90s where it was all sunny vistas and teenage angst and really great soundtracks to go with them.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this Spanish-language album from Shakira but it’s very listenable, great pop beats, veering into regaton on occasion, and with her excellent vocals and the odd shout of ‘Shakira, Shakira’ to seal things off. A good album all things considered!

I was really expecting this to be a disappointing film, particularly after giving up on the Arnie comedy Twins recently. But it was far better than it had any right to be. I mean, in reality this film is predominantly Schwarzenegger hanging around with six year olds and being completely adorable. But there are other elements of comedy that prop it up, the partner is brilliant, the baddies cartoonish, and the happy ending a satisfying one.

The first actual item of clothing I knitted was of mixed success so it’s taken me a while to try again. This time I went for a cardigan, as I’m a big cardigan wearer, using this free pattern. There are SO many cardigan patterns out there but I started with this one because it said all the good key words ’easy’, ‘beginner’, ’everyday’.

Loved this. There’s something about books like these that really get under your skin - just spending time with really interesting characters and hearing about the minutae of their lives. When it’s well written like this, as we know Nina Stibbe can do so well, it’s absolutely a pleasure to read, like dipping into a bath of engaging story and being disappointed when you have to pause, or the book ends. Loved it.

This film has such potential, but it doesn’t quite hit the highs it could. It’s a great idea, rich for mining - all the way through I kept thinking what a great television spin-off could come out of this. Kurt Russell is fab, there are some great cinematic choices and it’s generally an entertaining ride. But it’s definitely not perfect: the pacing feels off, very slow to get going, hours wasted at the start and then rush, rush, everyone dies, escape achieved, credits roll. There are some glaring plot problems (what is a jet glider and how does it work?) but it’s all wonderfully eighties and a lot of fun.

Really love this post from earlier in the month that celebrates the fifty year anniversary of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. It’s an incredible song and means different things depending on the version you listen to - Dolly’s soft-spoken heart-felt love song is the original and best, but Whitney’s passionate belting out of the track is absolutely iconic.

It’s not perfect - takes a long time to get going, and if we’re being honest, there’s not a particular story of substance in there. It’s really hanging a lot on Paul Rudd’s shoulders but thankfully he carries it off. I laughed a lot and it has a good message about people being themselves and sticking up for your friends, and it finished on a happy ending. Good times!

This is obviously a super popular book and one that has seemed to kickstart a whole cottage industry of gentle village-based murder mysteries (including the Marlowe ones I slightly prefer). I’ve kind of been avoiding this for no real reason but finally dipped in to see what all the fuss is about. It’s good, very character driven with subtle comedy and plenty of twists and turns. I did find it a bit sprawling and not sure I totally buy the resulting whodidits, but a good read nevertheless.

Just a thumbs up to Flexi-Hex, a product I pulled out of a recent delivery box and was pleasantly surprised by. Rather than the usual plastic and bubble wrap that you find when opening a box of, let’s be honest about it, gin bottles, Flexi-Hex takes recycled paper and makes a kind of accordian style cardboard thing that does just as good a job of keeping deliverables protected.

I enjoyed the first two seasons of Girls5Eva, a short and sweet comedy series about a girl group who had a brief moment of fame in the past and are now back in the public consciousness (sort of), thanks to a feature in a new song. They regroup, literally, deal with the fact there are only four of them now, and start tentative steps towards a career.

I really like The Lightning Seeds and the more I listen to them, the more I realise that is the case! It’s just nice, preppy, guitar music that picks you up and makes you feel good. I love The Life of Riley, but the rest of the album stands up to the opening tracks. A lovely, very listenable album.

This is a really good album, it’s almost like sitting around a campfire with a friend - not all the songs are absolutely going to grab you but they’re all from the heart and telling a story. Kacey has strong song-writing skills and it makes you want to listen along. I’m not on board with all of it, The Architect is a bit on the nose for my tastes, but as a whole it’s a strong album.

I must have picked this up at some point after seeing the film version starring Tom Hanks but this has been on my to read list for so long I almost forgot it was there. I finally got round to it and it’s a relatively quick read formatted nicely and well written. It pulls on the emotions but also keeps a level head detailing a really terrifying situation - the lead up, the actual pirate activity, and the aftermath.

This film gets off to such a slow start that I almost didn’t get past the twenty minute rule, but I stuck with it and I’m glad I did because in the end it’s just an entertaining 90 mins of teenages hanging out at a record store - which is the dream high school job, right? The only thing that rattled me a little was the fact that, whilst they’re all a bit messed up, it’s only the female characters that look to kill themselves or have a screaming hysterical row in the store. That aside, it’s not going to break any ground, but it’s a fun watch for what it is.

I think I just didn’t understand this film. The start was really Severence and I thought it was going in one direction, but then it took a different turn and then a few other ones after that. I don’t know why Meg Ryan played multiple characters, I don’t understand why Joe went along with the plan without asking more questions, and I am really not sure how and why the volcano spat them out at the end without any harm or injury to either of them. A lot of questions and no answers. There may have been some interesting messages in there about not selling your soul to the company store, but they were really hidden by the nonsense.

Really loved this book. Obviously had watched the TV show on Apple TV which was incredible, and so reading the book was like returning to an old friend. The adaptation is pretty close to the source material, so I could picture some of the scenes as they played out, but there were minor differences and I enjoyed seeing them. It was nice, if enraging from a feminist point of view, to dip back into this world and I hope that Elizabeth is a bit happier after the end of the book!

I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before, it’s such a good film. Good actors, great cocktail skills, budding romance and a twisting, turning story that comes to a sort of happy ending. It really reminded me of White Men Can’t Jump, in that it’s really two guys coming together and then making a lot of bad decisions and playing their egos off against each other in the worst possible way. But that does make for an entertaining film just as WMCJ did too.

This was SO GOOD. It felt almost like an indy film - slow, patient, quiet, but absolutely engrossing, focused on the people more than the story, letting them allow the plot to unfold around them. Of course it’s not an indy film, it has Gene Hackman and Harrison Ford in it, but it’s just brilliant. An unexpected but immediate favourite.

I’ve recently become a little bit obsessed with Geoff Marshall’s YouTube videos, following his stories about railways, stations, the trains that run on them as well as bus routes. It’s very London focussed, naturally, but there are excursions outside the capital too. As his about blurb states: You’ll find me travelling around London and the rest of the country on public transport, creating stories about stations, trains and buses, as well as engineering and design… In 2017, I visited all 2,563 stations in Great Britain, followed in 2019 by going to all 198 stations in Ireland, and I continue to visit new stations as they open. In 2024, I rode a section of all 544 Bus Routes in London.

I really enjoyed this album. I knew I liked Razorlight but when I looked at the track listing, it was only Golden Touch that I thought I recognised - turns out there were a good handful of tunes on there that I remembered from the first time round. Great millennium style guitar pop rock, with Stumble and Fall potentially standing out more than Golden Touch by the end!

Pretty good pop album from Ariana, featuring those intense and soaring vocals that we’ve come to know and love, alongside deep-dives into feelings, relationships, hardships, and just trying to learn to love yourself. I don’t think there were any bangers on there, so I’m not sure it’s going to live long in the memory, but it’s a nice one to listen to.

Let’s cut to the chase: I remembered this being better than it was. It was up there with Scream in my head, one of those 90s slasher movies that has pretty people, good tunes, and a brilliant horror mystery to be unravelled. It had two of those things going for it, but everything else was nonsense. The initial accident that caused the problem was blown out of all proportion and a lot of the choices made afterwards make no sense… laughable in places. The acting isn’t that great, really, they’re all quite young and go on to do a better job in other things, I think. Watchable but probably not a first choice.

I’ve tried to read this a couple of times, and I remember watching the TV show and liking that so thinking the book should capture me as well. For whatever reason it didn’t grab me before but I wasn’t ready to let it go… and I guess that’s worked out, as I got through the whole thing this time, hooray! It’s a good ghost story, well reasoned with only hints of the supernatural. The underlying story is horrifying, obviously, and very disquieting, but overall a good tense read.

This movie has some really promising elements but they aren’t used very well and the end result feels like a sprawling mess. Goldie Hawn is legendary, obviously, and can carry any movie she’s in, so she’s very watchable from start to finish. But it’s a real shame that the brilliant army stuff is bookended with some really boring men-are-terrible romance stuff. I would have watched much more of the middle third, but could live without the start and end… making for a rollercoaster viewing experience.

There’s no question that Arnie and Danny are a power couple in the comedy sense, and they do look like they’re having a lot of fun together in this movie. But I remember it being more fun all round, it actually ended up feeling really slow and ultimately quite boring. You could see where it was going and I just didn’t have the patience to go along with them to get there.

This did not feel at all like a John Hughes movie, it was more like a Gremlins film or something odd like that. It was really weird and awful and yet somehow kind of intriguing. I thought we might be able to make it through more of the movie but once they got drunk and Anthony Michael Hall started up the worst and oddest accent ever, it was all over. A rare JH mis-step.

The premise of this kept me reading, a woman disappears and there are tantalising clues about where she may or may not have gone - with not enough evidence of foul play for the police to get involved. The characters were well drawn and dialogue good, plus there are a couple of other viewpoints sprinkled in early on and we don’t know who they really are or how they fit into the puzzle. So it’s good from that point of view, but I did think the foreshadowing cliffhanger was overused and it seemed to come to a very quick end after so much build up.

I listened to the audiobook of this, read by the author Shirley Ballas. It was an eye-opening insight to Shirley’s life. I, like many, didn’t know of her until she was hired as the head judge on Strictly Come Dancing, and recently they did a small video that looked into her life and it sounded really fascinating - full of hard work and difficult decisions, and fighting your way in a male dominated world. This book is more of the same, well told, honest and insightful. I really enjoyed it.

I remember liking this previously, but oof, it has not aged well at all, has it? There’s obviously the problematic transphobic ’twist’ ending, but even outside of that there’s plenty of sexism, racism, general bawdy humour that doesn’t sit well anymore. Elements of it are still entertaining, and there a lot of quotable lines in there that still stick in my brain but I’m very happy to move on from this and never look back.

On the one hand, the sheer volume of intellectual property that Disney has control over continues to baffle and concern but on the other hand, you get to enjoy a game where all the worlds collide and Disney characters from far and wide come together in a game like this. I don’t think I would have paid top dollar for this but I might have picked it up in a sale… as it turns out, the game is free in Apple Arcade, so definitely worth a look!

As a category, this kind of game should be right up my street - it’s third person player, it’s a story-driven action/adventure and it’s an offfical Star Wars game. Sign me up! This was in the January sales for the Playstation, so picked it up with the intention of getting completely stuck in once I was done with Spider-Man. Of course, the webbed one took a bit longer than I’d thought but once I got through saving New York, I headed over to a galaxy far away.

I was subscribed to Paramount+ through their app and happily watching my way through Yellowstone and Frasier and other such high profile releases, when Apple TV released an update to their platform that integrated usability with certain streamers. From the outset that was already confusing, because you could add a channel, such as Channel 4, Paramount or Disney and it would bring in the traditional gallery of potential watches that would then take you to the programme.

We’re definitely seeing signs of spring everywhere, and if I’m honest some scary signs of summer even during February. The tentative blue skies mean it’s time to start thinking about the garden. I tried to be patient this year, just because there was a nice sunny day in Feb, I didn’t suddenly rush out and plant everything. I waited until March, until a couple more frosts had passed by, and then got things underway.

It seems to be something of a tradition for me to post a picture of emerging tree blossoms as the spring starts to unfold. 2021 - Tonight, on a very special Blossom 2018 - The golden hour

Loved this so much. Kate Bush is so talented, I can’t believe this was her debut album. This did have the problem I talk about a lot where classic songs are just so beloved that the rest of the album can’t live up to it - but in this case, the rest of the album was still absolutely brilliant, even with that. I maybe tailed off a bit of enthusiasm for the last two tracks but otherwise this is legendary.

I don’t know John Squire, so I was only really interested in one half of this partnership, and this was exactly what I expected it to be - reliving the glory days of the 90s with guitar music and whining vocals. It’s enjoyable because that kind of music is good, but there’s really nothing at all memorable about it. Worth a listen but probably not going on the repeat list.

I don’t remember a lot about the first film, other than enjoying it more than I’d exepcted. As part of 90s night, I was surprised to realise this sequel snuck into the chosen decade so we gave it a go. It’s more of the same surreal comedy as you’d expect, and although hit and miss throughout, there were many laugh out loud moments. And I hadn’t realised just how closely you need to watch, even paintings in the background could be a gag, or background actors doing something that you might otherwise miss. Good, funny, restores a bit of faith in films, even if nowhere near perfect.

Going into this, I was expecting the absolute worst of bawdy comedies so actually I was pleasantly surprised that this was watchable and had a few funny moments. But don’t get me wrong, it’s not a good movie at all. There’s a nugget of a good premise under there but of course it’s swallowed up in cheap gags, painful stereotypes and the inevitable laxative-related pranks. Still, I can see why Ryan Reynolds has gone on to bigger and better things, you can almost see little Deadpool seeds starting to be planted. Terrible but ticked off the list now.

It’s been well documented on this site that I’m not a huge poetry lover but I do like something accessible such as this novel - a story in the form of a diary, where the protagonist intends to write a poem a day but gets distracted many times along the way by the trials and tribulations of life. It’s witty and full of wordplay, and reminded me of a grown up Adrian Mole at times. Very good.

This is a nice gentle romance where two people going through some difficult times find comfort in each other - from a distance to start with, and then over a hedge. There are miscommunications and misunderstandings along the way, and if I’m honest some of it felt a bit contrived and over-dramatic, but equally, it was still compelling to find out if they would break the impasse and realise they were right for each other all along.

I recently finished watching the new streaming show The Artful Dodger on Disney+, a show that takes that fabled character from Oliver Twist and shows what he may have gotten up to in later years. We meet Dodger, going by his real name Jack Dawkins, in Australia setting up a new life for himself as a successful surgeon but his rogueish tendancies keep coming back to the fore.

I love, love, loved this album. I’m a big Erasure fan anyway, although not everything they do hits exactly the right spot. This album, though, is basically perfect. Some real bangers on there, particularly tracks 4 to 6, but all of it is great and makes you want to sing along, belting out the words I Love to Hate Youuuuuuu.

This was a pretty good pop album, I quite like that it’s more dancy than other pop records and it’s very listenable. On My Love stands out as the best track on the album, although that may be because it just reminds me of Strictly when Zara was doing the rounds promoting it. Solid album but potentially not one that will live long in the memory.

Recently spotted that there was a remake of this and as the original was made in the 90s, it fitted perfectly into one of our 90s nights. I didn’t know anything about it, and was pleasantly surprised. Overall, I enjoyed the film and it was an entertaining couple of hours, but if I drill down into it, there’s a lot I didn’t really like.

Loved this! It was so different to what I was expecting - I thought it would be a mildly amusing comedy about a sporting underdog overcoming the odds, and there was that but it was also so much more. It was completely oddball from start to finish but also absolutely adorable and a great way to learn a bit more about American Samoa. A sporting story I had no idea about and definitely want to know more about Jaiyah and her journey. Plus you can’t help but love ‘Who’s on the Plane?’, I think we could have a film length version of that next.

I saw Alan Davies on the Channel 4 program with Bill Bailey, where they walk around and open up a bit about themselves and Alan mentioned that joining a writing group had allowed him to go on to write a book about his childhood and being abused by his father - I suddenly remembered I owned this book! So I read it and boy is it a moving and difficult read but so brave and honest and like holding someone’s hand as they discover things about themselves and their past and about how hard it is to unravel memories. A must read.

The third book in the Ryan series, and I’ll be honest that this one didn’t grab me quite as much as the other two, but was still a very good read. This time Ryan is on the outskirts more than ever and the investigation, such as it is, is left to other members of the team. There’s quite a lot of introspection and injury throughout this one but it does feel like we’ve cracked open the case significantly so I’m curious what will happen in the next book.

I loved this. It took me a minute to get into it, but you’re soon grabbed by the premise and the countdown of days and the small revelations as and when they come. You know the sad times are coming but they’re still brutal when they happen but thankfully there are lighter moments too that keep you reading to what is ultimately a pretty happy ending. A quick read, not easy but gentle, definitely worth a look.