Hashtag Still Smug

At the half way point of the year I thought this was going to be my bloggiest year on this blog but since moving back from India I seem to have slowed down a bit. Almost like going to Aldi on a Monday night just isn't something I want to write about.

Anyway 2017. That's over. The world hasn't ended - although international politics has largely looked like a particularly tasteless joke - and there hasn't been the ridiculous level of celebrity deaths that 2016 saw. So that's a good thing.

So what were my highlights? In a year where I could have joined the Century Club, when I spent more time out of the UK than in it, it only seems right to start with the travels. 

Fave country? It doesn't have the glamour of Sri Lanka or the exclusivity of Bhutan but Kyrgyzstan eases this one. It gave me exactly what I needed - a clean, green dose of sanity in the mixed-metaphor swamp of craziness that was India.

Fave new city? Well it also begins with a K - a good year for the Ks at the Pete awards. So was it the spiritual, mysticism of Kandi? The topsy-turvy, colonial hotchpotch of Kolkata? The tropical weirdness of dolphins-before-breakfast Kochi? Nah. Kingston-upon-Hull. (And linked to this my fave music of the year was Chiedu Oraka, keeping it local. Keeping it N.H.E. 0148 tooooooo.)

Fave traveller cliche? Trying to compare the Musee d'Orsay with Sigiruya is just daft, so they can share the best sight award. Did I mention I swam with manta rays? And saw Everest?

What else? Watched a fair few box sets in Pig City - the silliest was GLOW. Saw a fair few films on the large amount of flights - Hacksaw Ridge and Hidden Figures are the only two that stick out. Didn't see all that much theatre but Ferryman was the best thing I saw, although I enjoyed Labour of Love a lot and I think that last week's supercheesey crowdpleaser of A Christmas Carol may just be symbolic of the new normal...

Anyway 2017. Another rubbish year for humanity. Another pretty good year for me. Hashtag still smug.

God Bless Us, Everyone

A tale of three plays:

Let's start with The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was a big ol' daft Shakespeare farce. Pretty silly, pretty fun. Nice idea making it a sixties juke box musical but ultimately that was... Who am I kidding? It was a terrible idea making it a sixties juke box musical. There isn't very much intersection on the rocknroll-Shakespeare Venn diagram, especially not if you throw a suburban am-dram circle into the graph.

I also saw Glengarry Glen Ross. When you see one of the big, shiny London shows with a big, shiny Hollywood star in the centre it does make you realise how spoilt you are. It also emphasises how bad the idea of staging an amateur, rocknroll shakespeare in a provincial market town is.

And then there's a Christmas Carol. Yeah, you know the story. No, it's not even a real play. But gee whizz was it feelgood. Snow, satsumas, sprouts, clapping, turkeys on ziplines - all the festive main ones. It even got my sleighbells jingling, and they don't jingle easy. I feel like it's limbered me right up for Christmas. Bring it.

Brum, They Told Me

Had to check up on the Second City last weekend. Don't worry, it's still there (which is a tenuous description for the train service - although "still there" might be apt for the train we were due to get) and it's got its Christmas on. The Birmingham Christmas markets are insane. Peoples and Christmases everywhere.

I'm finding it a bit weird that bands I like are doing twentieth anniversary sets as standard nowadays. It means that you have a crowd of tired looking 40-somethings punctuated by grinning idiots thinking they can hit the high notes of Lava. I was one of those. Silversun were ace. Sleeper were ace. And that's me sucked into a Britpop sinkhole.

Oh and as I'm feeling strangely festive and it's the season of goodwill, let's celebrate people trying to do something nice. Go and visit Counter Culture it's above Dark Side comics under Chelmsford Viaduct. Go and get your geek on. You know you want to.