→ Happy new year! We got away for a few days over New Year’s Eve, to a little cottage in Suffolk. It was for the dog’s benefit as well as ours - South East London is a fireworks war zone for days on end at this time of year, and Buster hates loud bangs. Suffolk was rainy and windy and peaceful, and pretty much just what we all needed.
→ I want to use this blog more in 2023. Just for this kind of thing. Nothing too adventurous or taxing. Just consistent. I’m big on consistency. At some point I will explain how it’s set up (i.e. how it takes Obsidian notes and turns them into html posts via Jekyll) and I also want to write something about London in Bits and how that’s all going.
→ Other things I’ll be focusing on a bit more this year: Getting out the home office. As a lot of my work is focused on writing and editing right now, I spend a lot of time in my own head in the home office (aka ‘ The Bunker’) and that is not good for my mental wellbeing. I need to be around other people every now and again, swapping ideas and having conversations. I have to figure out a way of doing that.
→ Watched over the Christmas break:
- Meet me in the Bathroom - the documentary about NYC bands in the early 2000s. A good, fun watch, but doesn’t really go anywhere.
- Navalny - the doc about Alexei Navalny, Putin’s nemesis who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning with a lethal nerve agent in 2020. Has some of the most incredible scenes I’ve seen in a documentary all year, but is (as you might have guessed) quite frustrating and sad.
- She Said - Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. I love a good journalism film, and this is a good journalism film with great performances.
- The latest series of Slow Horses. Really enjoy this series, especially Oldman’s performance. My wife bought me the full set of books for Christmas, so I’m going to dig into those while I wait for series 3.