Taking a week and a half off after only three weeks of work was bliss, although the time sped by and the break was over all too soon. But I've slipped back into work mode very easily and I'm enjoying the experience greatly. I haven't worked in an office for any length of time since the early 1990s, but it turns out to be like riding a bike: you don't forget. There's an office dynamic you need to fit yourself into and I've hopefully managed to infiltrate unnoticed... I wonder if I can get away with not leaving?
My work schedule means I'm getting up at six in the morning and collapsing into bed around ten or ten-thirty in the evening, which doesn't allow me much time on the computer at home. My email browser (I use Thunderbird) started to fill up during December, most of which (but not all) I cleared during the days between Christmas and New Year. Now it's starting to build up again. I have a couple of magazines to review, which I'll hopefully get to over this weekend, but there are other things that I had hoped to cover – most notably the death of Terry Bave in December – that I haven't had a chance to research or write.
That said, I have a piece from Robert Kirkpatrick that I'll be running next week and the regular Rebellion and Commando releases should be back to normal as of this week.
So... I had a great Christmas and partied through to the New Year and that's pretty much all the news I have. We watched a few films over the holiday, including Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Tyne and The Darkest Hour, and we've started watching The Good Place, which everyone has been raving about... and, judging by the first couple of episodes, deservedly so. For our comedy entertainment we've watched the latest DVDs by Bill Bailey, Sarah Millican, Jon Richardson and Richard Herring. We're keeping an eye out for Joe Lycett's latest – the once comprehensive stand-up section at our local HMV has all but disappeared – and there are a few others that we'll pick up eventually from Go Faster Stripe, most notably Mark Thomas and Austentatious.
There were some fine programmes over Christmas: we like Gordon Buchanan's tale of grizzly bears and the snow wolf, and we've still got the Spy in the Snow penguin spy cam show to watch. The ABC Murders was an interesting interpretation of Agatha Christie's novel, with John Malkovich with a neatly trimmed beard rather than Kenneth Branough's outrageous and thoroughly distracting moustaches. I'm not sure that it was necessary to give Poirot a whole new origin story, but I'm not so wedded to the books that I dislike every attempt to move away from them.
I'm looking forward to watching Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which strikes me as the most innovative bit of TV that has been broadcast in quite a while. The new year has brought with it new seasons of The Orville and Death in Paradise, so we'll be happily curled up on the sofa during what is likely to be a cold snap over the next week or two. Vera is back next week, but we're avoiding Scandi-noir for the moment in favour of something a bit warmer and a bit more cheerful.
And that's where I'll leave it for now. I hope you've all enjoyed the Paul Temple serial. I wish these were available in book form, but I still haven't quite figured out the copyright situation. I'll keep posting them until somebody tells me to stop!
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