Frozen Planet

I’m watching Frozen Planet and with no apologies for cliches, I am blown away by the stunning photography and glorious colours. The meltwater is the most amazing blue and the footage of snowflakes forming is beautiful. But the speeded up glacier is a major stand out moment. The power of that river of ice churning [...]

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Sparrowhawk

Introduced my daughter to Earthsea through the Studio Ghibli animation, Tales of Earthsea, this morning. She told me that sparrowhawks deceive their prey by their size – they’re smaller than most birds of prey. This information came from The Bottle-top King by Jonathan Kebbe. I was intrigued. Is a deceptive appearance part of Sparrowhawk’s make [...]

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Panorama: Classroom warriors

I caught some of the Panorama about encouraging fomer armed forces personnel to become teachers (Reporter: Vivian White.) What I picked up on was staff taking the time to build relationships with pupils, lowering their voices, rather than shouting, sharing responsibility with the class but maintaining authority. None of this shrieks armed forces to me, [...]

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Sherlock

Loving Sherlock on BBC. Just managed to watch Episode 1 and really like all of the little references throughout. Can’t wait to see the next one. Can’t wait to reread the stories.

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Ashes to Ashes – the final episode (incl spoilers)

OMG. Gene Hunt. An amazing end to Ashes to Ashes. I’m pretty sure some people will hate it and mock it, but I absolutely adored it. It’s not unique, perhaps, but it was delivered beautifully. So many subtle references. In reply to Alex’s muttered, “Oh, God …”, Gene suddenly bursts out “Don’t call me that!” [...]

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A Few Good Men

Just not been in the mood for fiction lately, whether on screen or in book form, but the last few nights we’ve kind of found ourselves watching old films that we know backwards. Tonight, A Few Good Men. An absolute classic. The writing is spectacular, the actors are having a blast and there’s many classic [...]

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Highlander

There’s something wonderful about this film, but it’s difficult to find. I loved this as a teenager, until one night when it was on in the background while I was working on the computer and I couldn’t only hear it. All movies should be watched this way. The dialogue is absolutely dreadful and I’m not [...]

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Shock Treatment

Created by the same team that made Rocky Horror, this is totally insane making absolutely no sense for most of the time, with some stonking sing at the top of your lungs tunes and any number of throw away lines that with repeated viewing rise to be echoed along with the soundtrack. Plus there’s some [...]

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Tuesday – sleeping

Plan for today was to get out for a wander in the sunshine, except that it didn’t show. Both BBC Weather and Metcheck were claiming blue skies and a big yellowish round thing in the sky, but nobody had bothered to tell the clouds not to bother showing up. It’s been overcast all day. So [...]

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Missed opportunities

Can’t believe that all the times at school that I had access to a xylophone, I never tried playing the Mr Benn theme tune! A great chance lost, never likely to be experienced again. Never mind, there’s always the good ol’ air xylophone. There’s a Mr Benn official website, and I spent ages trying to [...]

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