A unique take on a love story, this book travels through the alphabet, giving snapshots of a relationship in one or two sentences. Each is associated to a word from the dictionary, but really, it’s not the words that matter. It’s the glimpses of another life, in a totally random order, that are the real fascination.

This book chronicles the dark tale of one of the early settlers into the Sydney penal colony - a young thief from London with his wife and child banished to the other side of the world to start a new life. The book spans an entire lifetime, and dips into how flawed a character we are dealing with, but it’s that honesty that makes it fascinating.

Apple have increasingly upped the comedy in their ads, as well as bringing more and more celebrities on board to cameo. Their latest effort also raises the amount of cuteness and awesome to almost unacceptable levels. Potentially, the best ad ever.

A very quick and easy non-fiction read that guides you through the basic staple ideas of what makes a conversation function and how, no matter how good you think you are at making small talk, you can still adapt and do better. I liked the book for really being approachable and not judgemental, plus it was aimed at everyone - not discounting improvements for even great leaders or historical figures.

This is the second book I have read about conditions inside North Korea, reported by defectors who had the good fortune to escape, and it continues to make me wonder how it is possible there can be a country like this on Earth that no one is doing anything about.

Love this, it really tells of the time it was released. Some of the songs sound very similar, but the standout singles are incredible. Roll With It, Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger are three brilliant songs and to have them consecutively makes some of the best ten minutes of music ever!

A good album, some songs are far better than others, but none are the weakest link. Brilliant stories for some of them – Choctaw County Affair and Church Bells being two specific examples. Storyteller is an apt name for this album.

A super quick read, this is aimed at graduates and students as they embark on the world after leaving education. Fox is keen to reiterate he’s not giving advice but rather telling the brief story of his life to illustrate that things will probably work out okay, as long as you work hard.

Really enjoyed this book, although it’s dark underbelly was a little bit disturbing in places. I had guessed the bad guy almost from the start but that didn’t take away from the story at all. Here we have a traditional crime tale - a group of young friends commit a misdeed, and then are hunted down in the future in an act of revenge.

I liked the first half of this, whereby a prisoner of war spends his days watching the birdlife just outside the camp rather than dealing with the atrocities of life inside with the Nazis. It was interesting to see the relationship develop between him and the Kommandant.

Was scared of listening to this one, because, you know, Björk. But I actually loved it. Great instruments, a real ear for the sound of things, and some fun lyrics too. Violently happy, after all.

If things had worked out differently, I don’t think I would have ended up watching any of the Fast and Furious films. I like pretty people driving gorgeous cars as much as the next person, probably more so, but I wasn’t convinced they could make one feature length film out of such a thing, let alone seven. Yet, those seven movies later, I’m an emotional wreck. Paul Walker’s death was meaningless to me at the time, but is now steeped in so much poignancy it physically hurts to think about. The iconic stunts in their unbelievable and ridiculous nature still manage to take my breath away. And hearing any suped up car makes me do a double take of joy rather than disgust. I have genuinely never been so affected, so bruised by films, to the point where I have absolutely needed to take a break from the big screen. I’ve only just worked up the strength to post the Film Watch review and that’s over a week later.

If I thought the last film was ridiculous, this one took things to a whole new level. Preposterous stunts, crazy ideas, cars literally jumping across skyscrapers, and all the while the knowledge that one way or another, we’re in for a tear-jerking ending. Of all the crazy moments, the two standouts were the running up the bus scene, and the Rock busting open his own plaster cast. The rest was great but crazy and so you had to just relax and go along for the ride.

Upsettingly long title, and the song of the same name is in sentence case when the rest is in title case, grr! Otherwise, great start and finish to the album, but the middle gets a bit wishy-washy. Instrumentals that are nice but go on too long.

This was a super quick read that I picked up in one of the Kindle sales. It’s so interesting to read how someone really feels in domestic service, because from a distance it sounds like an awful job. And Margaret does admit to being bitter about the experience, but she also highlights the good parts as well - as few as they may be.

I found this one to be much harder work than previous Nicci French books, and that’s not because the idea wasn’t good but it just felt very drawn out. For a start, the original crime happened over twenty years ago, so we’re already quite removed from the drama. The extended family introduced at the start of the book boggled my mind a little bit, and made it hard to place what exactly was going on.

A modern retelling of the classic Jane Austen book Emma, this tale is a well known one. Emma Woodhouse likes to meddle in other people’s relationships, but it doesn’t always work out how she might have hoped. I liked seeing these characters brought into the modern age, but a lot of the story felt shoe-horned in. They didn’t quite ring true as characters - I mean, sure there are posher people living in stately homes these days, but if you’re trying to update a story, it might do better to be completely different rather than on the cusp of the modern age.

Loved this, it was infused with African influences which made it intriguing, tribal, wide-ranging and just a little bit jaunty in places. Clearly, You Can Call Me Al is the classic here, but I enjoyed pretty much all of it.

After listening to James Bay I was hoping this would be more lovely indy stuff but it wasn’t really. It was a bit too keyboard-heavy, slightly too experimental for my tastes. Solid work but I won’t seek it out again.

It was nearly seven years ago I wrote up some thoughts about Hawkeye, the super-accurate camera tracking system that allows line calls in tennis to be queried and corrected. At the time, I spoke of its benefits and pondered whether we would ever get to a stage where there are no linesmen at all, instead umpires would rely on Hawkeye to make all the decisions. This hasn’t happened, but more and more I’m starting to think it should. With the introduction of BT Sport came a wealth of WTA tennis into our lives. So much tennis has made me an armchair expert, and it’s come to the point where I really do wish it was down to Hawkeye to make the calls.

I found myself with a spare hour or so whilst in Bath recently, and suddenly remembered something I’d spotted online – an audio walking tour of the city. Rather than having to wait at a tour stop and join with a random group of people to be ferried around the famous streets, this was a solo adventure. The site offers two tours, for free, and the one I opted for was the Jane Austen Walking Tour.

This is just a lovely story from start to finish, detailing how a woman is mugged and loses her bag with so many precious memories in it. However, the bag is found in the street by a bookseller who proceeds to try and find her. The way these two twist in and out of each other’s lives without contact is incredibly moving, and I love the simplicity of the writing that draws you in to each moment.

This film was ridiculous, over the top, full of unbelievable stunts and generally just very silly. But I still loved it. The stuff with the tank was about as crazy as it gets, particularly people flying through the air like Superman, but it was fun and never taking itself too seriously, which is what made it acceptable.

Only knew one song from the album. It was a heck of a lot darker and more experimental than I’d expected. Moody, full of saxophones and that bluesy sound. Good though.

Another artist I judged too quickly, but realised I did like Hold Back the River. Turns out the whole album is fantastic, it’s all in the vein of the river one, and thus I loved every song on it.

I was browsing through the App Store recently and found a new app called Stride & Prejudice - an endless running game with a difference. Instead of traversing through jungle lands collecting coins, or jumping across rooftops to escape the cops, this one is far more simple. You’re a lady in a nice frock, running and jumping across the text of Pride & Prejudice. Makes sense, right? It’s primitive in its design, and could certainly do with a polish around the edges, but it only aims to do one job and it does that pretty well. The real question is: who is going to play a game like this?

When Emma Watson started up a new Goodreads book club that focused on works about feminism and equality, I immediately signed up. That was all I did though, and I’ve thoroughly ignored the email digests that have been emailed to me, and I have yet to buy the first book on the list let alone catch up to what the second one even is. That’s not to say I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s great to see someone famous endorsing something like this, and the joy of it is Watson has really thrown herself behind the idea with great gusto and passion. So much so, she’s reportedly going to put her acting career on the backburner for a year to concentrate on reading a book a week, thus turning the book club into something even more special.

The chill that went through me whilst reading almost all of this was incredible. It has tension almost from the first page, particularly as much of it is describing mundane things - painting houses, going for a run, picking up groceries, a boy meeting a girl then going out with her sister instead.

There were some brilliant moments in this film - great opening sequence, wonderful car chase around Rome, nice recall to previous films, amazing views of the train crossing the desert, fun with Q, Judi cameo, M sticking up for himself and his crew, etc, etc. Overall it was a great film, one of the better ones of Craig’s tenure.

Bless the Moomins! I loved the TV series as a kid but I never read the source material until now. It’s cute, short and sweet, packed full of ideas and inspiration, crazy characters and wondrous situations.

Whipped through this book in one sitting, it was really easy to read and digest, but raised some really big questions. The author chronicles his idea to set up a self-sufficient camp of fictional survivors of a global catastrophe, to see if it was possible and how it would all unfold. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as planned and he gradually became mentally ill with depression during the process, eventually leaving for a stint in hospital before departing altogether.

Didn’t know much about this band except for Teardrop but enjoyed the album a lot. Oppressive and intense, I wanted to just sit back, relax and listen. Teardrop the standout though.

Truly love this album – stacked full of pop with great beats and catchy hooks, plus some good messages too: be weird, who cares? First half better than second, but all very good.

Amazing-ness all round. I really did think this was the best so far, almost a perfect film. I was glad that Brian had stopped pretending to be a cop and it was so brilliant to see The Rock doing some actual police-work. Even when he showed his acknowledgement that they were good guys at the end, he didn’t just let them go Brian-style.

This music video from The Chemical Brothers is incredible. A single-shot sequence of a lone dancer moving around a grungy industrial warehouse space. So far, so normal. But gradually parts of her body become like wireframe, see-through, and that’s when the magic happens. It’s just so detailed and intricate. That you can see her leg through her other leg. That the red pants are wrapped around an essentially non-existent body by the end.

Ah ha, this is the sort of thing we started watching the series for! So much better than the third outing and fantastic to have the group, particularly Vin, back together. It was a bit frustrating that Brian was allowed back to the FBI, but that also continues to be a running joke for us, so not the worst thing ever.

On the one hand, this film suffers from not having any of the original cast members in it. (Except that cameo, the amazing cameo, more on that later!) It’s not the first time a series has shed all its stars, but perhaps it is knowing they are back in the later ones that makes this one feel quite so jarring.

I can see why Vin didn’t want to come back for this one, apparently his reasoning being they just ‘drum up a new story unrelated for the most part, and slap the same name on it.’ Which is exactly what this one was, but with only one returning character. This had all the good stuff of the first, cars, music and insane driving through traffic, but also more story.

This one was right up my street. Moody and blues, over a variety of different beats with a scattering of new soundbytes on top. Really enjoyed it but did make me crave the Bourne song.

Have been a bit of a naysayer about Foxes previously, but really enjoyed the album. All very dramatic and swooping but catchy with great beats. Loved it!

I really wasn’t expecting to like this very much - it’s probably just a bunch of pretty people racing cars to hip hop beats and not much else, right? Well, yea, it was that, but it also had more to it. There was actually a pretty good story tucked away there - quite Point Break in places, how undercover is too undercover for a cop to get? It gets a bit tortured in places, but stayed entertaining which is the main thing.

This film had some incredibly good things going for it, the individual elements that were really strong: beautiful scenery, great camera angles and shot placements, fabulous cast (although Emily Blunt was nowhere near as kick-ass as the trailer made her out to be), and a brilliant ability to increase tension with very little material. The scene on the bridge, with cars inching along in a traffic jam, it was bizarrely intense - the kind where Mr C and I looked at each other at the end and just let out the breaths we’d been holding.

Loved the singles on this one but found the rest of it a bit less memorable. I know it’s a highly regarded album, and it was good to listen to but I couldn’t name another song on it now.

Really catchy pop that sticks in the mind. Very fifties, in the style of Bruno Mars and Meghan Trainor. Couple of good guests, including Ms Trainor. Very listenable but not a classic.

We decided to catch up on the intervening X-Men films so that we could watch this one - people have raved about it, after all. The trouble is, it was nowhere near as exciting as I thought it was going to be. There were lots of yay, and gasp, and ooh moments but mostly that was spotting the characters of old. For example, ‘Hooray, Halle Berry is back!’ But ‘Oh, she gets to do just as little as she did in the first three.’

I wasn’t expecting to like this one all that very much, although I’m obsessed with Hugh Jackman and would watch him in anything. The trailer made it seem as though they were taking the greatness of X-Men and then making a film in a completely different part of the world with a completely different outlook. That’s exactly what it was, but it was no bad thing. I loved the look of the whole film, it was beautifully shot and with Japan as your background, you don’t have to try that hard to make a gorgeous picture.

James McAvoy was great, and I liked the 1960s look of the piece. I was a bit disappointed in January Jones’s character, which was clearly plucked straight from an Austin Powers movie. The real enemy of the piece though was Fassbender. From impressing with his variety of languages at the beginning, he then absolutely confounded us with his sudden Irish accent. Fair enough he’s a mish-mash of everything, but to have such a strong accent for no apparent reason was bizarre. It really took me out of the whole piece.

It started like this: John: Rumours? You ever heard Rumours? Kayleigh: What? John: What?! Rumours is one of the best albums in the whole wide world! Kayleigh: Never even heard of it. John: Excuse me? You’ve never heard of Rumours? Oh, you’ll love it. I’ll burn you a copy. Tonight. One of my all-time favourite albums. Kayleigh: Mine’s Now 48. John: Now 48?! Kayleigh: They’re all on it, all me faves S-Club 7, Steps, Samantha Mumba, Shaggy! It wasn’t me.

As previously mentioned, Mr C was unable to narrow his shortlist of top songs down to just five. And by the time we got to talking about films we were both pretty exhausted by the whole subject. So, I let him get away with expanding his list to ten films as well! I’m such a pushover. Anyway, these are in alphabetical order with links to my Film Watch reviews for a bit more of an insight.

Now, normally at this point in the year, I hand over a portion of my site to Mr C, allowing him to pick his top five songs and top five films that we consumed in the previous twelve months. It’s a joyous process for me - throughout the year, we keep a note of potential contenders and then I get to watch him writhe in agony as he tries to finalise his top five lists. Unfortunately, this year, the internal debates within him went on for so long that I had to put my foot down and demand a decision.