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August, a month I largely remember as being depressingly grey and miserable. I once again find myself between jobs (or 'practising for retirement' as someone described it. My contract came to an end at Espresso Education after almost a year, which given I was only supposed to be there 2 months, isn't bad going! So I'm having a bit of a break and ( Read more... )

For once I've had a relatively busy month! Aided by having the last week and a half off work I've done a bit of a tour of the southern counties visiting the Whitfield's and their increasingly adorable offspring in Cambridge (twice actually) and the Moore clan in Wiltshire. Both visits involved cream teas and sitting in the sunshine, which I ( Read more... )

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Unemployment may be bad for the bank account, but it's certainly good for the film watching, with nearly 7 months off work, 2013 was my most unemployed year ever and correspondingly a record breaker for number of films watched, with an unlikely total of 187, more than a film every other day. (See bottom of page for full list and links to individual ( Read more... )

It's been a really pretty miserable failure of a year for me as far as reading went. In 2012, in a drive to increase my reading I set myself a 50 page a day target, which drove my book tally up from round about 20 a year to 49. I decided against continuing that for 2013 and have correspondingly seen my reading drop not just back to the 20odd, but ( Read more... )

Last year I said "I doubt I'll ever top 2010's total of 130 (and given that it took a broken arm to do that, I rather hope I never do)". Well I beat it this year without any major injuries, but I suspect a few months of sabbatical from work helped me along to my total of 138 films. 126 of those films were new to me. There's a full list at the ( Read more... )

I'm now habitually late with these monthly summaries, I guess I could justify that as wanting to leave the month to marinade a bit before looking back on it, really though it's just because January got off to a pretty busy start ( Read more... )

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