The People In The Playground

One of the joys of social media seems to be the periodic reappearance of a piece of bad verse that begins “I remember the corned beef of my childhood…” and then swerves off in to a list of details about British life prior to about 1980, none of which are worth getting nostalgic about. I’ve […]

The Call Up

We both got our call-up notices on Friday, with text messages from our GP advising that vaccination slots were now available, please click this link and book your time. We both chose this afternoon at 4pm and 4.30, and walked over to St.Paul’s Church at Thornton Heath. When we got there, 2 people in hi-vis […]

Time Capsule

I felt it was the right time to watch The Last Train, the 6-part 1999 series about a group of travellers emerging from a period of suspended animation to discover that the modern world had been overtaken by a cataclysmic event. I recommend it to anyone feeling nostalgic for an innocent era when we just […]

Biopolitics

I watched a documentary about a public health crisis. It was Collective, about the aftermath of the fire in the Collectiv nightclub in Bucharest in 2015. Many people died in the fire, caused by a heavy metal band’s pyrotechnics setting alight flammable wall-linings, in a crowded space that only had 1 small fire exit. Many […]

Offshore

I watched a film from the old times, before the lockdown. It was Bait, released in 2019. The time of the film is contemporary, as early on we hear a radio broadcast talking about the implications of the EU Referendum. The story is set in a Cornish fishing village where fishing has declined in importance. […]

Heliocentric Worlds

Season 5 of The Expanse finally made all the episodes available this week. In earlier, primitive times, TV shows would make their latest episodes available on a broadcast network at a specific time, and viewers were expected to make themselves available to watch it. If they didn’t, they had to wait until it was broadcast […]