It seems like this was yet another month of not getting round to watching as much TV as I had intended to this year. It was just the normal regular shows like HIGNFY, House of Games, The Late Show, QI and so on, plus the end of the Taskmaster series and the start of a new series of Return to Paradise. The only real TV event for me was watching the last ever series of Brassic.

It really is criminal that this show is not more popular or well-known, because it often has me exploding with laughter. It manages to be rooted in reality but with absolutely bizarre and surreal events and characters. Mind you, with a liberal use of the C-word, the odd violent death, and a plotline for one episode that features bukkake as main plot point, I guess it was never going to be mainstream, but I will miss it.

I did manage to watch a couple of films though.

First of all I watched Absolutely Anything, a 2015 British film I had never heard of, despite a cast that stars Simon Pegg and also features Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Eddie Izzard, Kate Beckinsale, Joanna Lumley, all the surviving Pythons at the time (Cleese, Jones, Idle, Gilliam, and Palin) and Robin Williams – although Williams and the Pythons were only voices. Unfortunately it is rather less than the sum of it’s parts and not a fitting last film for Robin Williams and Terry Jones. On the plus side, it meets one of my criteria for a good film as it is less than 90 minutes

The other film was a whole lot less funny – House of Dynamite – a 2025 film by Kathryn Bigelow, starring Idris Elba as the US President. Its a fascinating film. Confusing at first as it is in three sections that overlap but show the same events from different perspectives, but ultimately it is just scary because there is no resolution. SPOILERS… we never find out who launched a nuke at the US which looks like it is going to detonate in Chicago (is it Russia? Is it North Korea?) We don’t even get confirmation that it detonates. We don’t know whether the President decides to order retaliatory strikes etc. etc. I have got to the point where I prefer the loose ends tied up, but even so this was a very thought=provoking and terrifying film.

I really don’t know what I was doing that prevented me from watching much TV, though I suspect that it might be the amount that I have been playing the ancient game Age of Empires II. When I play a game of that it is almost guaranteed to take me 2 or 3 hours.

I did read a few books. Eight of them, all fiction, including the latest from Jonathan Coe, which is always a treat. I did get out on the motorbike, but only a few times, and mostly just short local runs to keep the battery charged up. The only (slightly) longer ride was to go to the East Grinstead record fair. Really the weather was not compatible with enjoying a motorbike apart from days when I was working/

There was one long journey, but that was by car. We went up the Norwich for the day for a 7th birthday party. It was good to see the grandkids, even if it did mean going into a soft play centre for the party. We also managed to stop off in Essex on the way home to see my mum. The main take-away from the day was that there must be a lot of idiots out there. I lost count of the number of road closures and lane closures we came across because of crashes.

Despite a visit to a record fair, I was very restrained with buying vinyl. I only came home with four LPs from East Grinstead and also bought one new LP – a 2020 re-issue of the 1993 Toyah LP Take the Leap.

So. Another month where I look back and wonder what on Earth I did with all my time.