New Year

Well, it's been a busy couple of days. On Friday I was up at half past five in the morning and got into work at quarter past seven. The place was pretty quiet, but then New Year's Eve is a really big day Scotland (where it's called Hogmanay). There wasn't really much to do and I left at about five past midday. Back home I got ready for when my Dad was scheduled to pick me up at half past three and take me to my parent's house. There, there were Christmas and birthday presents from my brother and his girlfriend. I got a Film Posters of the '50s 2011 calendar, a bottle of Ampleforth Abbey cider, a Budweiser gift set and a couple of boxes of chocolates and mints. It was a nice New Year. We just rang in 2011 with the family.

On January 1st, we had another fairly quiet day. In the afternoon we watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which I thought was a really fun movie despite the overwhelmingly bad reaction it seemed to get form the internet.

This morning I went out with my Dad and we went to the Gyle shopping centre and had a scone and coffee. We split up and had a look around. I got a book called How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel. After that I went back to my parent's house and after lunch Dad took me back home. I've just been changing over my calendars and journals.

Birthday and Christmas 2010

On Thursday it was my 32nd birthday. I went along to my parent's house and in the evening we had a Chinese meal. For my birthday I got the graphic novel Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, the graphic novel Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, the novel Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, the DVDs of Inception and Alfred Hitchcock Presents season two.

I stayed with my parents over the Christmas period. On Christmas Eve we didn't really do much at all. We did the traditional Christmas thing of watching Carols From Kings which is like an annual carol service from King's College Cambridge, which my Mum loves. We watch it every year. Later on I was watching the Peep Show night. A whole evening of programming devoted to the show.

On Christmas Day the heating stopped working, which was difficult because the temperature was below freezing. We had to get small heaters out to keep the place fairly warm. I got a graphic novel called The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, a book called Live & Work in Canada by Frances Lemon, a DVD of An Idiot Abroad, the game Gods of War III for the PlayStation 3, a 2011 paper diary, an issue of SFX magazine and some chocolate and candy. My parents seemed to be happy with their presents. Their neighbours came through in the late morning and had a drink. They were there for about an hour. We had the traditional Christmas dinner of turkey, rolled up bacon, cocktail sausages, peas with onions, brussels srpouts, roast poatoes and stuffing. It was really good. Later on we watched the Christmas Doctor Who special.

I went back home today after lunch.

I really hope that everyone had a great Christmas!

Wrapping Presents

Last night I was watching the first part of the Red Riding trilogy on TV. They are a series of made for TV films based on the crime novels by David Peace. The first episode was based on the novel 1974 and starred Andrew Garfield as a young journalist who is drawn into a web of violence and police corruption when a child goes missing. It also starred Sean Bean, Warren Clarke and Rebecca Hall. It's good but unrelentingly grim and depressing. Not as depressing as the book, though.

Today I went out to the post office to pay a bill and get some more stamps and on the way home I got a sandwich, some sugar and the latest issue of Total Film magazine. This afternoon I spent my time wrapping Christmas presents.

It's my birthday tomorrow and so I probably won't be on much over the next few days because I will be very busy. It should all be good though, hopefully.

If I don't update befire then, Happy Christmas to anyone who is celebrating it.

Mr. Denton on Doomsday

Last night I listened to a radio adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "The Blanched Soldier" in which Sherlock Holmes helps an ex-soldier track down his missing friend, while Dr. Watson is away enjoying his honeymoon. It wasn't a bad story at all. Later on I watched an episode of The Twilight Zone called "Mr. Denton on Doomsday", with the audio commentary on which featured Martin Landau (who is probably best known for playing Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood). It was an interesting commentary, where Landau revealed that in his early days in Hollywood he appeared in so many Westerns that he developed a very painful rash between his legs from having to sit on horseback in saddles for so much time, he also said that during the early days of television the sets were so flimsy that it was a genuine worry for actors that the sets could fall down on top of them. I always think the best audio commentaries are ones where the speakers do have genuine affection for the show or movie, but at the same time are not blind to the flaws. Later on I watched another episode of True Blood on DVD.

It was another quiet day at work today. One of the team leaders had brought in food for one of the other teams and about two tables were full of four or five pizzas, platters of sandwiches, crisps, tortilla chips, miniature sausages, scotch eggs, dips, spicy chicken, cakes and so on as well as about six large bottles of fizzy drink. Most food at work, after about an hour, looks like it has been attacked by a plague of locusts, but because there was so much there was actually still a lot left and so a few of us who were staying in a bit later managed to have a couple of platefuls each, which was nice. I've taken tomorrow and Thursday off work for no real reason, but I think it'll be nice.

It's my Dad's birthday today and he phoned me up before I left for work this morning to thank me for his present, so I'm glad that he liked it.

Birthday and Christmas

It has been a really busy few days! On Wednesday the 23rd it was my 31st birthday and my Dad came around to take me to my parent's house. For my birthday presents I got the Blu-Ray DVD of True Blood season one, the DVD of Peep Show season six, the graphic novel of The Sandman Volume Ten: The Wake written by Neil Gaiman, a New England tee-shirt, a portable Trivial Pursuit pack with all the questions focussing on Entertainment (i.e. film, music, books and sport), a magnetic dart board and some gift vouchers. My brother and his girlfriend, Katherine, were due to come up the day before to spend Christmas at my parents but, due to the really bad weather, they weren't able to come up then, and they came on my brithday so instead of going to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch as we had planned, we decided to have a Chinese take-away meal instead.

On Christmas Eve I stayed in and watched Peep Show. In the afternoon I played a few games of darts and Trivial Pursuit with the family. In the evening I was watching a horror movie from 1974 on TV called Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark, in which a mysterious killer stalks a group of college students who are staying in a sorority house over Christmas.

On Christmas Day itself We all opened up our presents together. I got a DVD of Doctor Who: The War Games, the graphic novel of The Sandman Volume Nine: The Kindly Ones written by Neil Gaiman, a video game called Bioshock for the PlayStation 3, a book called The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, a book called Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar, a 2010 diary, a Doctor Who calendar, and some chocolate. We had a great Christmas lunch with the usual turkey, miniature sausages, stuffing, rolls of bacon, roast potatoes, peas and gravy with crackers that all had musical instruments in them and basically one person acted as conducter and the rest of us had to try to play a tune with the instruments. In the evening I watched the Christmas special of Doctor Who, which was the first of a two part story which marks the final story that David Tennant plays the role of the Doctor.

Yesterday I went back home and watched the TV broadcast of Hamlet, which is probably the most famous of the plays by William Shakespeare. The story revolves around Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who is extremely upset by his mother marrying his uncle, Claudius, less than two months after the mysterious death of his father. One night, Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father who informs Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, and orders Hamlet to avenge his death. The TV broadcast was a version of the very highly acclaimed recent Royal Shakespeare Company production and starred David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.

Today I stayed in and listened to a radio show called On the Outside it Looked like an Old-Fashioned Police Box, which was a documentary, hosted by Mark Gatiss, about the Target Books novelisations of Doctor Who stories which were very popular in the 1970s and 80s. I remember those books really well, because I read loads of them when I was a kid. They were really good and they were pretty much the first novels that I ever really read kind of on my own. In my High School they had a wide selection of them in the school library and they used to let us spend two lunchtimes a week in the library, if we wanted to, and every time I got the chance I used to go over there and read a Doctor Who book. Only the Doctor Who books for about five years. So even today if I watch an old episode of the show on DVD that I have never seen before I still have a weird sense of deja vu, and I remember it was because I read the novelisation of the show about twenty times when I was thirteen. Later on I watched a 1966 Doctor Who story on DVD called "The War Machines" in which a powerful new supercomputer has been installed in the then-newly constructed Post Office Tower in London. Of course the computer then decides to take over the world by brainwashing people to build robot "War Machines" (which kind of look like miniature tanks). It was pretty good.

It has been a really good few days.

The Mist

I had another quiet night last night, which was nice.

Today I stayed in, because it was pretty cold outside. I watched a movie on TV in the afternoon called The Mist, directed by Frank Darabont, and based on a novella by Stephen King which was first published in his collection of short stories Skeleton Crew. The movie is set in a small town in Maine where a group of people are trapped in the local supermarket after a violent storm when a strange mist descends. In the mist are lurking an assortment of bizarre blood-thirsty monsters ready and waiting to make off with anyone who ventures outside. It's a pretty effective movie, the main thrust of which is not so much the monsters in the mist but more how ordinary people would react in the strange and terrifying circumstances. The movie is not very scary, but it is pretty supenseful.

I might not be on-line much if at all for the next couple of days because I am going to be very busy what with Christmas, and also it's my birthday tomorrow (23rd December)! I'll be 31 years old which is a depressing thought.

Anyway, if I don't get the chance to go on-line, Happy Holidays to everyone!