I quite liked how this mystery played out, with a dinner party game being played and even though no secrets are revealed at the time, the fallout is quick and severe. Six friends at the start, and by the end, they are being picked off and whittled down until the big showdown. I had no idea who had done what or why, although it was clear Ted’s wife knew a lot more than she was letting on right from the start. A good, quick read, with short, sharp chapters.

Apple held their traditional September event today, focusing in on three main areas: Watch, AirPods, and iPhone. The event was called Far Out which led a lot of people to think they were improving night photography but, it turns out, the space age part of the programme was about reaching out to satellites in an emergency. More on that in a moment, instead, let me start with the things I might actually get some use from.

I was in two minds about even reading this, given the ongoing furore surrounding the author (well the author behind the pseudonym, anyway). But ultimately I wanted to know what happened with Strike and Robin, and I figured it was worth giving it a go. I was really disappointed with this one, if I’m honest. The crime being investigated was based around online trolls and battles between right and left wing politics (can’t imagine where the idea came from!), and there were so many online conversations and Twitter threads, it felt disjointed and hard to follow.

The last time I wrote about Stranger Things, I’d just absolutely whipped through season two and apparently loved the whole thing. I don’t have a huge recollection of that now, but that’s what the blog is there for! My recent rekindling of the Netflix love affair means I’ve caught up on season four now, so potentially I have two seasons to talk about… but I don’t remember a lot from the last one.

I loved this. Romesh writes his memoir with exactly the write tone and balance between stories and jokes. Sometimes comedians shoehorn jokes in that just don’t work on the written page but for me, Romesh’s stories were both hilarious and honest in equal measure. It’s nice to hear the behind the scenes of a journey to stage and screen, via teaching of all things, and Romesh opens up about his approach to writing comedy and what gets included in his material.

This was an odd little memoir. Obviously Carrie is an absolute treasure and her writing is brilliant - witty and insightful, startlingly honest and cutting but also warm and endearing. However, the structure of the book felt odd, it’s in three main parts. The first is a fascinating look back at how Carrie got the role in Star Wars in the first place, at such a young age. Then there’s a big segment focused on notes and poems from a diary written during an alleged affair with Harrison Ford. And finally, a look at what it’s like being famous and getting older, and more removed from the part that you’ll forever be known for.

Lovely, sweet Emma Bunton doing what she does best here - being lovely and sweet. These are some nice pop songs (the cover of Sunshine on a Rainy Day is a bit of an oddity but we’ll go with it) and What Took You So Long stands out pretty well. I missed the Tin Tin Out remix of the final track too. The problem is it’s all just too saccharine, too sweet, very little emotion comes through. It’s, dare I say it, only one or two steps removed from cruise ship singing. But I still love Ems so it was never a disappointment.

I was quite looking forward to this, having enjoyed previously Panic! songs, but I’m not sure this fully lived up to my expectations. The first three or so songs were brilliant and I thought we were all in for something fantastic, but then it went downhill for me slowly until the end when it was really quite depressing. It’s never been more obvious how much Brendon wants to be Freddie too, which is a great aspiration, but maybe just reign it in a touch.

I enjoyed this one a lot better than the previous one, but it’s still just mindless Jason Statham doing martial arts sequences and driving fast. Pretty mindless and some moments where you just have to suspend your disbelief (why would the villain choose to explode rather than fall out of the train with the car?) but ultimately a fun finish to the original trilogy.

This movie loses its mind somewhere in the middle and just can’t come back from it. The whole kidnapping part is good, the crazy lady just needs to put some clothes on but otherwise, a good thriller. Then firstly a virus is let loose in a conference centre and just never mentioned again, and then the flip-flopping plane is ridiculous, like when a child has a toy plane they wave about in the air. Apparently physics just don’t count at all in Miami.

I recently finished watching the new series from Stefan Goleszewski on the BBC called Marriage. It got mixed reviews because it’s steeped in the trademark of Goleszewski’s work - understated, quiet, and calm alongside real, moving and insightful. Previously, I’ve enjoyed Stefan’s first breakthrough Him & Her, although I have tried to revisit that before and found it just a bit too cutting. The sister is too mean, the neighbour too easy a target. Which is on me for being too sensitive but is also a shame because I love Russell Tovey enormously.

This was a really good thriller, I thought I had guessed the big whodunit twist and then that was revealed within the next couple of chapters, and so I wasn’t all that smart after all. The real twist was why and who was next and would they be caught in time. Occasionally it felt a bit drawn out but ultimately I enjoyed it. Annoyingly, it’s the second book in a series which I didn’t realise until I was halfway through so now I have to go back one before moving on, but that’s okay, I’ll live!

This is typical me. My Apple Watch fitness goal for August was based on completing a certain number of kilometres across the course of the month. I achieved it, just, but have now decided for September, I’m going to do a bit of walking every day. If I’d done this last month, I’d have easily achieved that badge. Oh well.

So good. Well played, gentle movie, just guiding you through the growing dramatic tension until the end - an unrequited love where real life has to be given a higher value over the dreams of what might have been. So lovely. And incredibly short but you never feel short-changed or that it should have been longer. It’s perfect.

I feel like this movie didn’t know what it wanted to be. The music and the initial vibe was rom-com style, until it became clear that the husband was bad people. Elements of drama and thriller, although it was another film that took a while to really get going. Then the rom-com came back for a bit until it ended up back with thriller and even moments of horror - jump scares, and the why-won’t-you-die piece at the end. It was okay, but Julia has certainly done better.

I’ve seen this quite a few times as a kid but not for a long time, so I was interested in what I would think of it from a slightly more knowledgeable position. I really love the music, the songs, the dancing, Tevye and his many sidebars and thoughts and stroking his beard. The situations are irritating, because they are so patriarchal, but they are of their time. And then there’s the tragedy of ongoing Jewish persecution. The musical is too long for my tastes, and the second half is really so depressing it’s hard to push through it, but overall, it’s just as good as I remember.

I don’t know if it’s just me but August has felt really long. In some ways that’s good, we’ve enjoyed some good weather (we’ve also endured some heatwaves) but also plenty of daylight, sunshine, and generally good vibes to offset the never-ending stream of bad news in the country and the world. My challenge this month was to try and eat a salad every day for lunch, 30 Days of Salads, if you will. I knew it wasn’t going to be completely practical and there was bound to be the odd day off, but in the end I only missed three salads. None of them were due to hangovers, which I give myself a pat on the back for. Instead, it was two separate days out which weren’t feasible for salads, and then one day at work where I hadn’t the energy to get prepared in time.

I whipped through this book, it was quite a light and fluffy read. It felt a bit weird that the first half was setting up the scene of a love life for a fifteen turning sixteen year old - it all felt a bit sincere for such a young age. And then, of course, when we pop forward into the future, it’s quite obvious what’s going to happen. But I still quite enjoyed the process of reading and getting to that happy ending.

This movie gets off to such a slow start that it’s a good thing we have the twenty minute rule in place otherwise it probably would have been switched off quite quickly. Christian Slater is great and captivating considering he spends a lot of his time in a room by himself just talking at a microphone, but that couldn’t sustain a movie without a bit of story. Thankfully, once it got going, it picked up momentum well and I was engrossed by the end.

I don’t know if this has always been the case, but I’m loving how much information Nasa is providing about the Artemis I mission. I know they’ve always had to be very open as a government organisation, and I’ve always been quite grateful for the free pictures, videos, podcasts and other media they have offered up, but there’s so much more to discover as well.

I’ve been playing catchup with Andy Weir books - having loved the Martian a bit more than is healthy, I was less bothered by Artemis, so a lot of pressure was on this most recent one. Thankfully, I liked it a lot more than Artemis, but it did take quite a while to get going. The mystery of the amnesia was interesting but I wasn’t sure it was going to sustain the book. Thankfully, after Rocky arrived, it was really great - I loved the way the pair learned about each other, how to communicate, and ultimately how to save their planets. They worked together and it made me feel slightly positive about humanity as a whole. Great book.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Gillingham & Shaftesbury Show as a family catch-up day out. It’s a farm show located between those two towns and it’s been going for a long, long time. It’s not a huge show but it’s well stocked with cows and sheep being judged, lots of tractors, some old steam engines, plus plenty of independent stalls from people selling their high quality wares. I loved having a good nose around the various stands, and I think I was quite self-controlled to only come away with a couple of arty animal postcards.

There are so many slightly odd things about Only Murders in the Building that it’s incredible it works at all, let alone is really, really good. First off you have the bizarre addition of Selena Gomez to a more understandable duo of Steve Martin and Martin Short. But together, they are brilliant, her dry sarcasm against their bumbling enthusiasm and/or ineptitude works perfectly. Then you have the fact that they started out as true crime podcast fans before getting mixed up in a real life murder mystery of their very own, in one of those old-school self-contained apartment buildings where there’s a doorman and a code of conduct and probably a dress code and more. The first series follows the trio solving a murder in the building, the second series sees them framed for a second death, and the third… well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

After watching the Elvis biopic and being very moved by that, it seemed only fitting to dive back into my journey through Elvis’ work. This was his first studio album back after being in the army (I skipped the album of Christmas songs) and there’s a feeling of sort of wistfulness, gratefulness maybe, a bit unsure of where he is in his life. Good songs though, still quite early in his career, finding what his voice is. I really don’t like Fever, as a song, it’s so boring! That’s not Elvis’ fault though, only that he chose it to be second ont he list. Otherwise it’s that good sixties rock and roll sound, what’s not to like?

This was an okay album, good tunes, but I’m not sure it particularly stood out one way or the other for me. I always think Kasabian are a band I really like, but actually I only know a couple of their songs from previously, so I went into this with a weird mixture of expectations. It was very listenable, good songs, weird spelling in the track names, but yea, I don’t think I’d be seeking it out in future.

This was SO GOOD. A score out of five doesn’t do it justice because it was off the scale. It’s such an impressive feat to have an original movie from so long ago that is so well respected and liked, and a cultural phenomenon… that one totally stood the test of time when I watched it for the first time 26 years after release… and now it has been followed by a sequel that is as good, if not better than the original.

What a great idea for a story, a fascinating journey into discovering what intelligence is and what effect it can have on your life - whether you have it or you don’t, and what happens when you go from one to the other. I loved how the writing improved as the intelligence did, gradually spelling mistakes went away and the vocabulary increased massively… and then the same in reverse. I thought the book was a bit stretched out, you could sort of tell it was originally a short story that was elongated, but considering how long ago it was written, it stands the test of time amazingly well.

This was a good mystery thriller, following a family that gradually drift further and further apart as they get entangled with a new family until the ultimate dramatic accident occurs that brings everything to a head. The book dips back and forth in time, gradually unravelling more of the mystery until it comes to the conclusion. The only thing I didn’t like about it is that all the way through I couldn’t see how it tied in with the prologue… and it turns out that prologue chapter was a dream. A bit annoying. But it’s a good mystery, trying to guess what’s happening and why, and very interesting when it’s all revealed.

Earlier in the year, I cancelled my Netflix subscription as a temporary measure because, you know, cost saving, and the sheer volume of streaming TV out there to watch. However, I’ve saved up enough things to need to watch on there to make it worth a month of streaming, then I imagine there’ll be another pause to be ended just in time for the next adventures in the Netflix Christmas Universe.

One of the things the TikTok algorithm thinks I like is watching people create their junk journal pages. It can be quite relaxing, but what I really like is having been introduced to something I didn’t know existed. It’s not a new concept but it had passed me by - effectively filling the pages of various notebooks and sketchbooks with collections of… for want of a better word… stuff.

Despicable Me and the Minions franchise has been quite a rollercoaster, dipping up and down in quality at the same rate it jumps back and forth in time. This one was a sequel to Minions, but still a prequel to Despicable Me, so I’m not sure some of the activities stack up timeline-wise (the three became kung fu experts and then just never used it ever again?) but hey, let’s not apply logic to these amazing yellow creatures.

All that conversation led to picking this album this week, and even then it wasn’t easy. The Apple Music version had Set Adrift missing so I had to cobble together my own Frankenstein style playlist. Anyway, when I finally got it all together, the album was great. It’s hip hop but a more gentle style, not so much angst and anger but just skipping along nicely. I loved it!

I really liked this album, but interestingly, it felt quite old school. Not proper old country, obviously, but it felt like the kind of country we used to listen to a few years ago, when we first started really getting into the genre. There’s nothing wrong with a nice bit of familiar gentle country, though, and I found it quite comforting. I also liked some of the messages in there - the first track talking of how he’d still be doing this even if he wasn’t doing it, and Better Back When, that you think things seemed better but the probably weren’t. Definitely not a groundbreaking album but a really nice one to listen to.

I always think I like Harlan Coben books but then I’m quite often not as keen once I get in it. This was another one of those, it was fine, a decent enough mystery, although it required quite a lot of exposition to start with. There was so much back story required to get to the unravelling of everything in the current timeframe it really took a while to get into it. But it was a satisfying mystery that came to a good ending - although I would have liked to know how the conversation that must have immediately followed The End went.

This was an emotional rollercoaster for me. The first 10-20 minutes I found really difficult because it had that frantic Luhrmann feel that makes me feel dizzy and nauseous. I wanted to stick with it though because I knew there were going to be good songs throughout and it gradually became more and more clear to me that I didn’t know anything about Elvis’s life. I know all the obvious stuff, and I knew that he was considered vulgur and dangerous early on, although I didn’t know he was threatened with jail because of it. So after I settled into the film it was a fascinating journey and I learnt a lot and really, really want to learn more.

Last year, the American country music singer Eric Church released a triple part album, entitled Heart & Soul. Each of those three words was the title of one part of the album, and they were released over the course of about a week. At the time, I listened to the albums a little bit reluctantly. Heart came first, and then & was released only as a vinyl release, so I said: “Already I’m on the back foot as I’m not going to be able to hear the middle part of this trilogy… nevertheless, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give the first part a go, and I’m glad I did.”

I’m a fan of the moon. Weird thing to say, I know, but I love that big grey rock up there just minding its own business and inspiring astronauts all over the world to want to step on it. I’ve been ignoring space travel news (other than the fictional For All Mankind style stuff) for a good few years and I guess it feels like an odd time to be getting back into it again, what with the planet we’re actually on burning up quicker and quicker every day - who are we to sink billions in the atmosphere between here and our nearest orbital neighbour?

Before I started building up a digital bookshelf with seemingly every book available via Kindle or Apple Books, I used to pick up most of my reading material from charity shops. There’s usually a good variety to choose from and one of the great things is seeing the older books that are dropped off for re-use. One of the best genres in this category is movie novelisations - an author’s official take on the plot of a film with more prose and less script. They can offer a lot of interesting insight where films don’t do so well, getting inside the head of the protagonists or antagonists, but at the same time can sometimes steer quite far away from your take on the original material. It’s always a bit of an adventure.

Any musicals fan has to read this. I know Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t so popular at the moment after the disaster that was the Cinderella musical, but there’s no denying what he has done and continues to do for musical theatre. This autobiography is written with wry wit and humour, more self-deprecating than I was expecting, and also a lot harsher - there’s a lot of details and communications and back and forths about who did what to whom in which business deal, and I was quite surprised!

With any new hobby that you get stuck into, you can probably find a podcast out there that will offer up help, tips and advice. My increasing obsession with veg growing and gardening means I was quickly searching for green-fingered podcasts and this one caught my attention quite quickly. Epic Gardening is a mission founded by Kevin Espiritu and with a host of expert collaborators to get people growing more plants.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to dominate a lot of my viewing, with recent additions having mixed results. I’m loving a lot of the TV content they’ve developed, while some of the movies have been less successful for me (I’m looking at you Eternals). One thing I’ve really enjoyed, though, is the Marvel Studios: Assembled series. I’ve mentioned it before when it highlighted some great things about the making of Shang-Chi but there have been a lot more episodes since. For every big TV series or movie that is released, the team put out an accompanying Assembled episode which goes behind the scenes of how the content has been put together. (Oddly, the first six were grouped together as a series and the rest as standalone episodes but you can find them if you search ‘Assembled’.)

If you had to say to me, which of the Guardian’s of the Galaxy would make the perfect subject of their own spin-off TV show, I don’t think Groot would be my first choice. Baby Groot is, of course, adorable, but the limited dialogue offered by everyone’s favourite tree-based character would seem to reduce what any follow up shows could be about.

Oddly, It Feels So Good was featured on a 1993 episode of Top of the Pops that the BBC are re-airing, and it just put me in mind of this dance version which I knew better. So it had to be time to dip into Sonique’s back catalogue and this is some proper late 90s/early 00s dance pop that is wonderful to hear. I loved pretty much the whole album, except it feels like an odd choice to stick a remix of the lead song at the end that is so much worse than the original at the top. Bit of a weird note to end on but otherwise, I loved it.

This is a good album from Paolo Nutini. I’ve liked his work in the past but not really kept up with what he’s been doing lately. It was pretty much what I expected, a mix of slow and fast, singer-songwriter good pop, with perhaps a stronger Scottish accent than we’ve heard before. Really the only complaint is it’s just a bit long, and that’s not necessarily a problem but it feels like it tails off towards the end, too many slow songs in a row. But overall, a great piece of work.

I didn’t know a six-part documentary charting the beginnings and growth of Industrial Light & Magic was in the works so when the show arrived on Disney+ last month, it was a pleasant surprise. I love a glimpse behind the scenes at how the magic is made in the film industry, and watching creative and brilliant people do what they do just fills me with inspiration and joy. So, as it turns out, this show was absolutely made for me.

Being in the Apple device cycle means putting up with the unfortunate changes they make to their devices until either you get used to it or they roll it back. I tend not to complain too much about them because I’m still so hugely in awe of how brilliant my phone and iPad are, so the benefits far outweigh the cons.

I had seen a couple of people talking about air fryers on TikTok, but not really paid it too much attention. It sounded like just another cooking fad that would pass me by, like slow cookers (I did actually try a slow cooker with disastrous results) and pressure cooking. But then a couple of friends were discussing their own joys of frying in only air and my ears perked up.

I watched Downton Abbey relatively recently and whilst it was alright entertainment, I don’t know that it grabbed me the same way it did a lot of the nation. However, I figured it was worth giving Julian Fellowes works a go in a different format - this time a book. At first, it did feel a little bit slow-going, setting the scenes and introducing a lot of characters. Not too many, but how they all fitted together was mind-boggling. At one point, I genuinely had to draw out a little family tree to get my head round it. But once I got past that, and as the action gradually drifted towards a conclusion - secrets being revealed and all the ramifications that followed - I was hooked! A fun read.