What a year 2011 has been. It was as if the world had suddenly noticed the proliferation of rolling news channels and social media, noticed how much waffle was on them all and decided it had better come up with stuff to fill them all. And so we had tsunamis, floods, a royal wedding, phone hacking scandals, riots, superinjunctions, uprisings, more floods, deposed despots, Osama getting taken out, economic armageddon, Kim Jog-Il pegging out and to top it all Katy Perry and Russell Brand announce their divorce.

But I wasn’t really paying much attention.I don’t know why, but I just never really got going this year. Life was a bit of a soap opera, with Frankie living here for most of it, Jayne going into hospital for a couple of weeks amongst other things. I have felt like I was treading water for the whole year, but I’ve decided to not just regroup over the holidays but to re-boot. With any luck 2012 will be better.

I’d love to list my favourite films of the year like everybody else, but I only saw a few 2011 films – Green Hornet, Thor, Adjustment Bureau and Paul – plus my favourite, and the only one I saw in the cinema, Horrible Bosses.

Its the same with TV. Most of what I watched was ongoing stuff like Only Connect, University Challenge, QI, Buzzcocks and similar. I did enjoy Death in Paradise and Black Mirror, but the biggest laughs I got all year were while watching Mongrels. Had a lot of fun watching Terra Nova with Jayne and ridiculing it.

As far as music is concerned, I enjoyed quite a lot of new stuff but what I enjoyed most were new releases by old favourites like Yes, Gang of Four, Human League, Paul Simon and Primus. A few newer (to me) artists did catch my ear though: Metronomy, Lykke Li, Beardyman, Emmy the Great and Mastodon who I had managed to avoid hearing previously. I don’t think I could name a single from 2011 except for Friday of course. The charts don’t seem to matter any more.

Not like 1976. One of this year’s pleasures was watching all the 1976 TOTP re-runs. Even some of the terrible stuff brough back great memories.

I have read quite a few books, courtesy of Amazon’s Vine programme. Some were proof copies and won’t be published until 2012. The ones I enjoyed most were Employee No. 59 (the one about Google), The Map of Time by Felix Palma, Michael Moore’s sort of autobiography and Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles. I would heartily recommend them to anybody. Having said that, the book I enjoyed reading most this year was Oliver Twist, which isn’t especially new.

With any luck the Kindle will encourage me to read more in 2012.