So last month, we switched our broadband to Vodafone, which also meant that our internet speeds increased from about 30-40 Mbps to around 70-80 Mbps (as per the above Speedtest.net result).
80 Mbps is sadly the fastest speed that we can probably get here. I live in Sowerby Bridge, a small town in the Calder Valley and our options for internet access are limited. In some respects, we’re lucky to have access to Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC). This means that the cables providing fixed line broadband internet are fibre optic as far as a metal box a couple of streets away. But the cables from that box to our house are a series of thin, copper cables, and current VDSL2 technology means that much higher speeds are unlikely to be possible.
Over Christmas, we stayed with my parents in York. Being a bigger and more affluent city, there are more options available for broadband internet. In addition to the FTTC service provided by BT Openreach, there’s also:
Cable broadband from Virgin Media. These cables were laid in the 1990s by Bell CableMedia, which became Cable & Wireless, then NTL, and finally Virgin Media. Whilst they’re also an FTTC solution, the cables from the cabinet to the home include a much larger coaxial cable.
Full fibre broadband from Sky and TalkTalk. York’s streets and pavements were dug up again in the late 2010s to install a FTTH (Fibre to the Home) network, which takes fibre optic cables all the way into people’s homes.
My parents have had cable broadband since this became available in the early 2000s. Initially this was just 512 Kbps, but speeds have increased over the years, and this was the test result whilst I was there at Christmas:
So my parents get broadband speeds that are six times faster for downloads, and nearly three times faster for uploads. And if they wanted to, they could switch to a FTTC broadband solution that could easily double those speeds.
Here in Sowerby Bridge, our best hope for faster broadband is that CityFibre bring their FTTC network in a few years time. So far they’ve installed fibre optic cables in Pye Nest, which is the community between Halifax and Sowerby Bridge, but their web site says there are currently no plans to reach us. Virgin Media did install some cables nearby a few years ago, but they seemed to bypass our street unfortunately.
There is wireless broadband to consider, but we get a weak 4G signal as we’re in a steep valley. 5G is available up the hill in Halifax and may make it down here in future. But, for now, I think 80 Mbps on a fixed line is the best that I can expect.
Today I want to share with you an app called SoundPrint, which is an app for finding quiet spaces to eat and socialise.
You can install the app on your phone (iPhone and Android), and it’ll pop up a list of places nearby where other SoundPrint users have done a brief sound test. The venue database is from Foursquare, a site where I’m a superuser and still an active user of its Swarm app.
Incidentally, Swarm came in very useful when writing my review of 2023 and 2023, quantified, as I could see exactly where I had been all year.
Using the SoundPrint app
You don’t have to register an account if you’re just browsing to find a venue. However, if you want to contribute your own sound checks, then you can register an account. A sound check is as simple as holding your phone up for 15 seconds to measure the noise levels, and then telling SoundPrint where you are. You can also specifically recommend places for SoundPrint’s ‘Quiet List’ if they are particularly quiet, and submit noise complaints for very loud venues. SoundPrint will try to reach out to such venues with suggestions for how they can become quieter.
That being said, SoundPrint isn’t just for people who have hearing loss. If you are autistic, then you may benefit if you find noisy places overwhelming. I can see my wife using this app as well, as though she has good hearing, she struggles in noisy environments.
As Roald Dahl passed away in 1990, the film has been made with the involvement of his estate, but was written by Simon Farnaby and Paul King. Farnaby has written for and starred in Horrible Histories, Yonderland and Ghosts, and King directed both of the recent critically acclaimed Paddington films. Their talent shows through, as does their respect for Dahl’s work; I imagine if Dahl himself had been involved in writing the screenplay for Wonka, it would be similar to this.
So it’s a good film. My only major criticism would be that it’s a bit twee in places. There’s also been some controversy over the casting of Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa, rather than someone like Peter Drinklage who would probably also do well in the role. However, I think Grant is excellent, and like with his role in the recent Dungeons and Dragons film, it’s good to see him playing roles that aren’t variations of a confused English gentlemen.
It’s not bad, but we’ve seen better from Disney. To sum it up, it’s as if an AI was asked to generate a Disney film in a certain style. All the ingredients that would make a good film are there, but they just don’t seem to work together. As someone who generates AI artwork for my blog posts, I’m aware of their limitations and their tendency to not understand how things fit together. I’m not saying Disney used an AI here, but it feels like they’re trying too hard to imitate something without understanding what makes them great.
The soundtrack, for example, seems to be trying too hard to imitate films like The Greatest Showman. A case in point is the song “This Is the Thanks I Get?!”, sung by Chris Pine’s character. It’s supposed to be an angry song, but comes across as rather upbeat.
Wish came out in the UK in November so probably won’t be in cinemas much longer. However, given the choice, I would recommend Wonka over Wish.
Recently, I’ve started using the above image as my ‘avatar’ – the photo of me that I use online when prompted to upload a profile photo. It’s a photo of me from a recent Sci Fi Weekender, wearing a Steampunk-style top hat with goggles.
Over the years, I’ve used a variety of different avatars to represent myself, and I’ve generally kept these in one Dropbox folder. So it offers an opportunity to look back at the different images I have used, going all the way back to the days of MSN Messenger.
2003
The oldest one I can find is this one, taken in my first year of university (2003) and before I had sideburns. I probably think I looked really cool wearing sunglasses indoors. Teenagers, eh.
There was also a Flash applet on the South Park web site which allowed you to create your likeness, as if you appeared in the TV show. Again, I used this quite a bit at the time. Sadly, the image generator seems to have disappeared, and no-one uses Adobe Flash nowadays anyway.
2009
The next oldest one I can find that is actually a photo of me (and not, for example, a jar of Chicken Tonight or a hamster) was taken in May 2009, around the time of my 25th birthday. I was on a trip to Wales with the university hiking club, and this was taken outside the camping barn that we were staying in. I was also newly single.
2010
I used this photo, taken by my then-girlfriend, now-wife Christine on the beach at Morecambe, as my ‘work’ profile picture, and on LinkedIn, right up until 2010. I still wear the shirt and jacket regularly, even though Christine informs me that the jacket doesn’t really fit me any-more. I’ve had it since 1998 as it has my year 10 form number on the label.
2013
This one was taken at Leeds Central Library, which had a small Steampunk exhibition, and a dressing up box from their archives for people to try on. This was also about the time when fezzes were cool, so of course I had to have a photo.
2014
The next image that I used a lot was this one of me holding a barn owl, taken in the summer of 2014. Christine and I were visiting Blackpool Zoo, and we paid a little extra to have an owl experience. We got to fly the owls for a little bit, and, of course, pose for photos.
2020
Finally, a new work profile photo, taken in early 2020 and before the pandemic meant that we spent most of the rest of the year working at home. This was taken by a colleague at work, and we all had similar photos taken to use on our web site. Before you start searching for it, I’m afraid the page has been taken down. This is still the profile picture I use at work and on LinkedIn.
2021
And finally to the image I used most recently, before the one at the top of the page, taken in summer 2021 a few days after I started wearing glasses. This was taken in our front garden using a selfie stick. The shirt and glasses are the same in my newest ‘Steampunk’ avatar; Christine and I have a whole thing about pineapples which will make sense if you’re familiar with John Robertson‘s show The Dark Room.
You may have heard of Matt Mullenweg – he co-founded WordPress, and is now the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and contributes to WordPress.org (the downloadable version that you install on your own server, like I do).
Matt, like me, is turning 40 this year. And, as a ‘birthday gift’, he has asked people to blog. About anything.
Having only recently returned to blogging regularly, I’m starting to enjoy it again. With the rise of the Fediverse, the web is starting to feel like it did again in blogging’s heyday in the mid-2000s. Whilst some people used centralised sites like Blogger and TypePad back then, you could use tools like WordPress and Movable Type to run your own blog on your own server, and still interact with everyone else. And then the closed gardens of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like came along, and you had to be on those platforms to interact with other users.
Anil Dash has written a piece for Rolling Stone magazine called ‘The Internet is About to Get Weird Again’. And I think he’s right; there’s growing dissatisfaction with these big centralised services and how they hoover up so much personal data to sell to advertisers. Meta’s Threads is dipping its toes into the Fediverse, which would mean that Threads and Mastodon users can follow and interact with each other in a way that hasn’t been possible before. And if it works for Threads, could we see Instagram joining the Fediverse, to connect with PixelFed and maybe even Flickr?
Anil has some further reflections on his own blog. I’m hesitant to say that ‘blogging is back’; after all, there are so many other places that we can share short thoughts where there are audiences. But I feel like it’s having a bit of a renaissance, and in an age where there’s so much AI generated waffle filling up our search engine results, being able to interact with other humans has never been more important. It was what the web was designed for, after all.
So, happy birthday to Matt – and here is your gift from me. I hope that many others will do the same.
Now that the year has started, I’m going to make some predictions for the rest of 2024. If only because it’ll be interesting to look back in a year’s time to see what actually happens.
Twitter/X won’t become an ‘everything app’
When the overly impulsive billionaire took over Twitter, he announced that it would become an ‘everything app’, like WeChat is in China. Essentially, he’s using his Twitter acquisition to realise his late 1990s dream for x.com, which would offer a huge variety of financial services.
I expect the core social media aspect of X/Twitter to continue to whither away over the year, thanks to declining user interest and lower advertising revenue. However, I still expect it to be around by the end of 2024 – I don’t think Musk is ready to throw in the towel and shut it down, or sell it at a massive loss.
Labour will win the 2024 General Election
We know that there will be a General Election in the UK this year, although not precisely when it’ll happen. Labour consistently leads in the polls, and has had some unprecedented by-election victories. I don’t think we’re looking at a repeat of 1997, when Labour won by a landslide, but I would expect a comfortable majority. How much change a new Labour government would be able to make partly depends on when the election is, but I’m not expecting the state of the country to massively improve by the end of the year.
Oh, and Sadiq Khan will win a third term as Mayor of London.
There will be a ceasefire in Palestine
Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on the 8th October has to be condemned, but Israel’s response has been despicable with thousands of innocent civilians losing their lives. I expect Israel to find itself increasingly isolated on the world stage and a ceasefire will be inevitable by the spring of 2024. Unfortunately, I can’t see it being a route to lasting peace in the region, but any reduction in hostilities has to be better than this.
But the war in Ukraine will continue
I’m less optimistic about the war in Ukraine, which has been largely at a stalemate for the whole of 2023. Russia still intends to hang on to the territory that it has seized, including Crimea, whilst Ukraine hasn’t been able to make major advances. Meanwhile political issues in the USA mean that funding for Ukraine to carry on fighting isn’t guaranteed.
Energy prices in the UK will start to fall again
It will be a few days before we get official confirmation from the National Grid, but I’m calling it now: 2023 was the year renewables overtook fossil fuels as the largest contributor to British electricity generation. In the 12 years I’ve been running National Grid: Live at https://grid.iamkate.com electricity generation from fossil fuels has fallen from an average of 25.1GW to 10.2GW, while renewables have risen from 2.5GW to 10.8GW.
That being said, there’s an imbalance in the UK as most wind power is generated in the north of England and Scotland, but the highest demand is in the south of England. And our energy grid doesn’t have capacity to move this, which means that some northern wind turbines have to be turned off and gas-fired power stations turned on – costing money and contributing to climate change. However, there’s been a big up-tick in home solar installations like ours which may help, albeit on a small scale.
For 2024, Olly Alexander is representing the UK. As lead singer of Years & Years, I have some high expectations. I doubt we’ll win, but I would disappointed if we’re not mid-table. Of course, we haven’t actually heard the song yet.
Trump won’t win the US Presidential Election
Trump will almost certainly become the Republican Party’s candidate for president, but with two states banning him from their ballots, his campaign isn’t going well. I know Biden isn’t terribly popular, and wish he had stepped aside for someone younger like Kamala Harris, but Trump has made it pretty clear that if he wins (and manages to get a decent Republican Senate and House majority) then he will take the US down a path of authoritarianism that will take a lot of time to unpick. And whilst millions of Americans seem to be okay with this, I doubt it’s the majority.
We also don’t yet know what impact Trump’s legal issues will have, or whether the Federal Supreme Court will overrule Colorado and Maine’s bans. I didn’t think Trump would get elected in 2016, and so I have been wrong about this before, but I hope people’s experiences of 2017-2021 will guide them to vote against him again.
So these are my predictions for 2024. We’ll see at the end of the year whether they happen or not. Meanwhile, have a look at some other predictions from Terence Eden and Diamond Geezer.
Okay, so we’re in 2024 now, but I’m taking inspiration from Diamond Geezer‘s Summing Up 2023 blog post to post some statistics on things that I’ve done during 2023.
Countries and counties visited
In 2023, I’ve visited two countries: England, obviously, and France.
Over the course of the year, I have spent at least some time in the following English counties:
West Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
South Yorkshire
Lincolnshire
Greater Manchester
Lancashire
Cheshire
Leicestershire
Northamptonshire
Norfolk
Hertfordshire
Surrey
Hampshire
This doesn’t include any counties that I have passed through without stopping.
Most distant points
The furthest compass points I have been to are:
Furthest North: RHS Harlow Carr, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Furthest South: Futuroscope, near Poitiers, France
Furthest East: Great Yarmouth, Norfolk
Furthest West: Chester Zoo, Cheshire
I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t go very far north in 2023. We will be going further north this year, but are unlikely to go as far south as we don’t have an international holiday planned.
Methods of transport used
I have driven quite a bit this year. As my car’s MOT is due each autumn, I can only estimate the mileage, but I reckon it’s around 10,000 miles over the course of the year. Quite a bit of that was in France.
Train travel has been almost exclusively to and from work – indeed, I’ve only visited four railway stations this year, and every train has been a diesel-powered train. This includes the one heritage railway that I’ve been on, which was the short remaining section of the Derwent Valley Light Railway at Murton Park, near York.
I’ve been on two trams in Manchester, and a few buses, both locally and in Leeds and York. Plus, ferries for getting to and from France. I have not been on an aeroplane since 2015.
Music listened to
My full 2023 last.fm stats are not yet available, but over the year I have scrobbled 13,194 tracks – just 254 less than in 2022. That’s an average of 36 songs per day. Assuming each song is an average of 3 minutes, that’s 39,582 minutes over the year, or 659.7 hours or around 27.5 days. In other words, I spent almost a month listening to music last year.
Whilst I don’t exclusively listen to music on Spotify, on there, pop was my top genre, following by trance, rock, pop dance and Europop this year, according to my Spotify Wrapped. My most-listened to song was ‘Shut Up and Dance’ by Walk The Moon, which I listened to 12 times. To be fair, it is a good song.
Unsurprisingly, Within Temptation was my top artist – I own six of their albums and I’ve seen them live twice.
I log the beers and ciders that I drink using Untappd, and this year I consumed 35 such drinks (a decrease from 58 in 2022). Of those, 13 were from Brewdog, which may have something to do with what I got for Christmas in 2021. Several of these were non-alcoholic beers and ciders.
Steps taken
I’ve had my Fitbit Versa 3 on my wrist almost all of the time this year, and have taken a total of 3,695,427 steps – an average of just over 10,000 per day. It also estimates that I have climbed 11347 floors, walked 2,717.1 km and burned 1,079,223 calories through exercise.
Time spent learning French
I started Duolingo’s French course on the 1st January 2022 (so I have a two year streak now), and in 2023, I spent 4,947 minutes learning – that’s 82 hours or an average of 13.5 minutes per day. I also learned 4657 new words in French last year. I’m aiming to complete the French course, which will probably see me well into 2025.
So that’s 2023 quantified. I’m sure I could offer more stats, like photos taken, podcasts listened to etc. if I tracked these throughout the year. As it is, I’m relying on various web services that track data for me that I can refer back to. I wonder how 2024 will compare?
Welcome to 2024! I hope you had a good new year’s eve if you chose to celebrate – we didn’t stay up, as my wife Christine is working today. As very few places are open on New Year’s Day, I’ll be having a quiet day with our eight-year-old.
I’m hoping 2024 will be a good year for us. It’ll be a longer year if nothing else, as it’s a leap year. The 29th February falls midweek, so I’ll most likely be working that day.
I’m off work this week, as our eight-year-old isn’t back at school until next week. I have a few tentative plans for things to do. This month will also mark 22 years since I started blogging. Later in January, we’re planning another friends-from-university meet-up, although we haven’t quite worked out where it’ll be.
In the spring, we’re looking to have a weekend in London. We normally visit London at least once each year, but didn’t manage to do so in 2023. There’s a teaching training day that would allow a long weekend for all three of us so we’re hoping to take advantage of that. At present, we can’t book train travel on LNER at weekends, presumably due to upcoming engineering work, but as soon as the tickets become available we’ll get something booked. Tentative plans include the newly-reopened Young V&A and the Cartoon Museum.
In March, we’ll be at Sci-Fi Weekender XV in Great Yarmouth again. It’s the 15th anniversary year, and we’ve been going since 2018. The numbering is a bit out due to, well, the event.
In May, I turn 40. I’m not sure yet how I want to mark this occasion.
As usual, we will be going on a summer holiday with my parents, although with my Dad still recovering, we won’t be going to France this year. Instead, we’ve booked a week in Northumberland – a part of England that I’ve not visited much. Hopefully, we’ll have an opportunity to visit Beamish as well.
Towards the end of the year, my Dad will turn 80, so depending on his health, we’ll look to organise something nice for him.
I still have at least 20 potential blog post ideas to write, and so I’ll aim to carry on posting something new every other day throughout the year.
I hope 2024 is a good year for you too, and wish you all a happy new year.
So, it’s the last day of 2023, and so it’s time for a review of the year. Here’s my review of 2022.
January
The main event to happen for us in January was getting our solar panels installed. Nearly a year later, and they have saved us around £850 so far, both by reducing our energy usage from the grid, and income from selling our excess electricity back to our energy supplier. This means that it’ll take about 11 years to get a return on our investment, although we’re on track to pay off the cost sooner than that – hopefully late in 2024.
January isn’t very conducive to days out, being a cold month with short days, but we did fit in a visit to one of the large Chinese supermarkets in Manchester. Except it was the week before Chinese New Year and it was packed. January is also my blogiversary month and so my blog turned 21-ish years old.
February
We had a day out at Dunham Massey, one of the National Trust properties within an hour’s drive of home. It’s actually a good place to go to at this time of year, as it has a Winter Garden with plenty of flowering irises and snowdrops.
On a different weekend, but in a similar part of the country, we went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Quite a bit of the museum is currently shut for renovations, but we enjoyed the Turn It Up exhibition (which is now at the Science Museum in London). One tip – if you’re driving from the east of Manchester, you can park for free at Hollinwood tram stop, and then take the Metrolink direct to Deansgate-Castlefield. Our (then) seven-year-old was fascinated by the tram, as it leaves the old railway line formation to travel across Manchester’s city centre streets like a bus – we don’t yet have anything like that here in West Yorkshire.
We made yet another trip across the Pennines to Manchester, to visit the newly-reopened Manchester Museum, at the University of Manchester. It’s expanded a bit since our last visit, with new temporary and permanent exhibitions. However, the previously-excellent café now only serves vegetarian food (or it did when we went) which is a shame when you have a child who only wants to eat a ham sandwich. Thankfully, there are other eateries nearby – I recommend the Navarro Lounge.
Somewhere that we’d been meaning to visit for some time was Martin Mere, and we finally got around to visiting in March this year. It’s primarily a sanctuary for wild wetland birds, but they also have some Asian small-clawed otters, flamingoes and other birds that live there. Part of the site was closed due to avian flu when we visited so we’ll aim to go back sometime soon.
Closer to home, we went to Hardcastle Crags, a National Trust property overlooking Hebden Bridge. As well as the woodland walk, there’s a mill which is now a café and visitor centre. It’s off-grid, so all its electricity is generated from solar panels and a hydroelectric turbine, and it has composting toilets as it’s not connected to the sewerage system. There’s also a lot of information about how they are incorporating natural flood defences like leaky dams to prevent the sorts of flooding the area experienced on Boxing Day in 2015.
We spent the Easter weekend in York with my parents, and so we fitted in visits to Murton Park (incorporating the Yorkshire Museum of Farming and the Derwent Valley Light Railway) and the York Castle Museum. Later in the month, we had a get-together with friends from university to go to Tropical World, and we ended the month with an afternoon at Thwaite Watermill.
I also re-started regular blood donations. My last successful donation had been before the pandemic; I’ve since been back a couple of times and will be going again some time in January.
My wife also started swimming lessons, with the same company that teaches our child. At present, she has a half hour one-to-one session each week and is making good progress. Unfortunately, she never had the opportunity to learn properly as a child.
May
May the 4th is our wedding anniversary (yes, we know – Christine came down the aisle to the Imperial March). And the 4th May 2023 marked our tenth wedding anniversary. We’re still very much in love with each other and we celebrated with a quiet lunchtime meal at the Engine Social in Sowerby Bridge. May is also my birthday month, and I turned 39 this year.
We also had a trip to Cannon Hall Farm at the start of the month – it’s somewhere we go to at least once a year as there’s plenty for young kids to do. New for 2023 was the nocturnal animal house.
We made the first of three trips in 2023 to RHS Garden Bridgewater, north of Manchester, having bought an annual RHS membership with Tesco Clubcard points. It’s a lovely place to visit, with some formal gardens mixed with woodland and an excellent play area.
It was also around this time that Christine got a diagnosis of sleep apnea, and started using a CPAP machine. Her health and wellbeing has improved massively as a result. If you, or someone you know, is a heavy snorer, it may be worth you/them speaking to a GP to get a referral for a sleep assessment.
June
Across the Pennines again for a trip to Heaton Park, one of the largest public parks in northern England. There’s a lake, some excellent playgrounds, some animals and gardens, and often a visiting funfair.
We also made a brief visit to RHS Harlow Carr, near Harrogate, including a meal at Betty’s. Indeed, we’ve visited all but one of the Betty’s locations now – we just need to go to the one in Northallerton next.
I last visited Jodrell Bank with my parents, probably in the 1990s, so it was nice to go back again. Much has changed since, but it’s still a working observatory and as such it’s a ‘radio quiet’ zone where you must switch off your mobile phone.
July
July is when we usually set off on holiday, and this year we stayed at a campsite to the south of Tours in France, in the Loire valley. On the way down, we called at RHS Wisley, the first and largest of the RHS gardens, and stayed a night at the Brooklands Hotel at the historic racetrack in Surrey.
Some of the places we visited included:
Parc des Mini Chateaux – like a model village, but all of the models are of castles (châteaux) in the Loire valley.
Château du Clos Lucé – Leonardo da Vinci spent some time here and several of his inventions have been recreated in the castle and the gardens, both of which are great.
Château d’Ussé – allegedly the inspiration for the story of Sleeping Beauty, and includes a walk with rooms set up to tell each part of the story.
Château du Riveau – a castle and gardens which has only (relatively) recently opened to the public. It’s very whimsical, with some amusing sculptures in the garden and bizarre taxidermy.
We also had two bigger days out. Another place that I haven’t visited since the 1990s was Futuroscope, a theme park full of futuristic architecture and lots of different cinemas showing 3D and 4D films where the seating moves. As we went in late July, we didn’t stay for the evening show as dusk was way after our bedtimes, but we thoroughly enjoyed our day.
The second big day out was to Zooparc Beauval, one of the world’s biggest and best zoos. We’ve been before, in 2018, so we focussed on the new areas that weren’t open last time, and then our favourites. It’s one of the few zoos in the world to have Giant Pandas, and has had some success with breeding them too with a couple of youngsters there when we visited.
August
We started the month in France, but only just as we arrived back in the UK on the 3rd. We called in at the Hotel Chocolat Factory Shop near Northampton on the way back.
One of our friends from university turned 30 (yes, there’s a bit of an age gap between us and some of our friends) and so we had an afternoon at the Leeds City Museum. Yes, the above photo of boomboxes is a museum exhibit, because you’re old.
August is always a super busy month for me, as I work in university admissions, but we briefly called in at the Piece Hall in Halifax for Calderdale Pride 2023. And over the bank holiday weekend, we went to Chatsworth. We didn’t go inside the house, but we explored some parts of the gardens that we hadn’t been to before, and the farm is always worth a visit.
September
Back at Christmas 2021, we received some gift vouchers for Chester Zoo, and with the validity running we found a free weekend to go. A large part of the zoo is being redeveloped at present, but we got to see the new flamingo enclosure, and my favourite red pandas were awake for once.
We also had a morning at the Askham Bryan Wildlife Park near York, although this was partly to kill time whilst we waited for hospital visiting times to start. My dad ended up spending over two months in hospital this year with a number of health issues, probably brought on by Weil’s Disease. He’s on the mend, although he’s still building up strength in his legs having been off his feet for so long.
Due to Dad’s health issues, we had a subdued celebration for my wife’s 40th birthday, but we did have a lovely meal at Tattu in Leeds.
In November, I rolled out the new theme (current at time of writing) and wrote several more blog posts about Home Assistant. Maybe home automation is going to be my mid-life crisis?
And so to this month. As my family is a little spread out, with some of us in Yorkshire and others in Oxfordshire, my cousin normally hosts a pre-Christmas meal in mid-December. However, it’s her turn to get a new kitchen and it wasn’t ready in time, so ended up hosting a meal for nine people at short notice. We managed it; Christine cooked cassoulet with some duck legs that were cooked using the sous-vide method for 36 hours in our Instant Pot.
There’s only 32 hours of 2023 remaining in my timezone, so it’s time to review the things I’ve consumed this year and pick out my favourite content.
Note: all links below marked with a * are Amazon referral links, and so I receive a small amount of commission from any purchases. But please feel free to buy these from a local, independent tax-paying shop, or borrow them from your local library, as I did with several of these recommendations.
Favourite book of 2023
So far I’ve read 95 books this year, although to be fair, quite a few of these were bedtime stories for our eight-year-old. Those aside, my favourite book was ‘These Impossible Things’ by Salma El-Wardany*. It tells the story of three young British Asian women, who are navigating the divide between family and cultural expectations, and life as a young person in the UK in the 21st century. It’s very well-written, with very relatable characters. This is El-Wardany’s debut novel and so I’m interested to see what comes next.
Honourable mentions: There were a few books that I awarded five stars to on Goodreads this year:
What If? 2* is a sequel to Randall Munroe’s first book about absurd hypothetical questions – you’ll know him as the creator of xkcd. The first book* is good as well.
We haven’t been able to watch many films this year, and those that we have seen at the cinema have tended to be child-friendly films. We’re also behind on Marvel films and haven’t seen any in a couple of years. Of those that we have seen, probably my favourite was the Barbie movie, which was just hilarious all the way through. We saw it a few weeks after it came out and there were several of us laughing out loud in the cinema.
Honourable mentions:Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves* was fun, and it was good to see Hugh Grant playing an antagonist for once. And it was nice to finally see a sequel to Chicken Run – I had the first film on VHS, which gives you an idea of how long ago since that came out, and meant I’ve had to explain to our eight-year-old what a ‘VHS’ is.
It’s also worth noting that we are planning to see Wonka tomorrow.
Favourite TV show of the year
Again, we’ve not had much time to watch TV this year. When you work full-time in a different city to where you live, and have a child who has school and homework and weekend activities, there’s not a lot of time to keep up with TV. Of the shows that I have seen bits of, The Repair Shop has filled that niche of being interesting, comforting and educational.
Favourite audio series of the year
Okay, so I basically created this category so that I could tell you about Felicia Day’s ‘Third Eye’*. It’s an Audible exclusive, and is more akin to a radio play rather than an audiobook. But, it has a narrator in the form of Neil Gaiman and is split into chapters. Felicia Day wrote the script for TV several years ago, and although no TV channels picked it up, it’s become a very good audio series with Day playing the lead character. London Hughes, Alan Tudyk and Wil Wheaton provide some of the other voices.
So – these are the things that I have watched, read and listened to in 2023. Next year, I’m hoping to catch up with the Marvel films we’ve missed (especially now that the pace of release has slowed down) and continue to read more things. Maybe I’ll manage 100 books across the year this time?
