Review: Five give up the booze

Vincent has reimagined the Famous Five as a group of twenty(?) something adults whose adventures have become rather more prosaic exercises in navigating modern life. Coupled with cunningly repurposed illustrations from the original books, the result varies in success from pillow bitingly funny to merely amusing.

Five give up the booze deals with their realisation that at least one of them is a borderline alcoholic and the new year offers the chance to try a dry January. But with a stag do and wedding in the offing, will they succeed?

The author has captured what are plausible adult extrapolations of the original characters really well.

Verdict: Enough fun to make me seek out others in the series. 

A review of 2018

2018 saw a lot of changes in my life and mostly for the better.

Still nursing my recovering broken ankle, I started the year with one resolution (actually made in early December of the previous year). Always have something to look forward in the calendar.   That's an adaptation of what I think I read in Happy Money ie you can increase the happiness value of an experience by introducing some anticipation.

That started with trying out circus skills - and it developed into a hobby proper as I quickly found it was the right balance of encouraging mind-body connection, building upper body strength, flexibility of body and mind and finding a new community. I started attending a weekly class in aerial hoop and slowly progressed to advanced level, participated in a workshop with a world champion and took part in a group performance as part of the studio's Xmas showcase.  Gymnastics had always appealed as a kid, but lacking the upper body strength to climb a rope as well as coordination more generally meant my teachers lost interest very quickly.

Speaking of world champions, I also hassled Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy at a conference where he was speaking and came away with a signed copy of his autobiography for a colleague's secret Santa.

Writing wise, I managed to blog a review about every book and film I'd read/watched in 2018. I didn't manage to write too many inspirational blog posts.

On the work front, I changed jobs and departments while remaining at the same organisation. The new role - focussing on innovation - is a good fit for my skillset and experience. I also went part-time and did less work-related travel.  Sadly, I didn't spend as much time in the Fab Lab. Hopefully, I'll come up with a project for 2019.

More sadly, I lost a good friend in Jeff.  Jeff was an inspirational yoga teacher and while I was a pretty terrible pupil (only occasionally attending his classes on the lawn at the local castle), I always admired his gentle self-deprecating approach to life.  I was grateful to work with him on his last building project - what I teasingly called his yoga shed in his back garden. I learned a lot about facing death and wood working in those months.

There was a trip abroad to the Netherlands to catch up with an old friend as well as take the missus to see the tulip fields.

Community was another strong theme in 2018. Having become distinctly middle aged, I felt like I needed a wider variety of acquaintances and friends to bring differing perspectives and challenges. I took up mountain biking with a local group of middle aged plus mostly chaps and have slowly got better at downhills and enjoyed many evenings in various North Wales pub talking shit. I also joined a newly formed book group. They are a great bunch with a diverse range of perspectives of what makes a good read.  Lastly special mention to the women of my aerial hoop classes who've advanced my understanding of modern feminism and social justice considerably.

Insomnia remained a problem, but having acquired many tools, seems to be slowly fixing itself.  Perhaps related to this, I tweaked my diet to improve the amounts of fresh fruit and veg being consumed as well focussed on a couple of key supplements.

I bought a woodland. Admittedly, it is a tiny one but it should provide lots of opportunities. Not least to wield my new battery powered chainsaw.

Wrapping up, I tried learning Welsh via Duolingo but lost momentum about midway through the year. Something to return to in 2019. Similarly, my project to read a children's classic a week somewhat slowed too as I got bogged down in the still unfinished Robinson Crusoe.  Ditto the non-fiction book a day project and learning to build a mind palace.

 Mediation via Headspace continued to help maintain my mental health as did continuing to reduce my news diet, culling various websites and apps from my phone.

Looking back, 2018 seems to have been a good year with plenty of interesting experiments.

Review: A Handful of Dust

This 1998 film version of the Waugh novel is peculiarly grim on a number of levels. There's hardly a likeable character in this bunch of social climbers and those they look up to.  On a more prosaic level, the copy on Amazon Prime has dreadful picture quality.

On the plus side, the acting and story perfectly captures a particular kind of Englishman/woman which seems to have largely disappeared. I also enjoyed spotting actors in their much more youthful incarnations. Guinness, in what is one of his last parts, gets to play an extremely odd character - a biracial illiterate king of a south American tribe with a fondness for Dickens. It's the kind of part which would likely attract considerable debate nowadays.

Verdict: Well made but uninvolving adaptation of what was probably a biting satire once upon a time. 

Review: Pollyanna

I recently came across a mention of Pollyanna on the podcast By the Book and was intrigued enough by the Glad game to read the original source.   The glad game is very simple to play - you simply list all of the things you are glad for and ideally play it with another. What you are glad for can vary from the obvious to the ludicrous.

Like Anna of Green Gables before it, you really get a sense of Pollyanna's character almost wholly through her dialogue and using a child's voice to deliver the lesson is a canny way of reducing resistance. No Pollyanna adult would be so easily welcomed in either the village or onto our bookshelves.

It has a few sentimental moments, but overall I really enjoyed this book. Pollyanna's optimistic outlook on life is something of a joy to read.

Verdict: Pollyanna is a breath of fresh summer air for cold dark January mornings. 

Review: Be More Pirate or How to Take on the World and Win

Bit of an oddity this book. By rights it should be the kind of book I love - but it has taken me months of dipping into it to complete it. I suspect it's because I don't really like breathlessly written manifesto books anymore.

On the plus side, this did change my mind about the impact of pirates on the world. It seems they really were game changers and very socially progressive for the times including rights for women, equal voting rights, a limited form of welfare state for injured pirates etc.

There are some good points made about how modern technology can and should result in better working practices.

Where it falls down is giving you yet another template to workshop your life - although it did give me plenty of food for thought on how to further adapt my working life to maximise productivity and happiness.

Verdict: Wanted to love this, but somehow it was a struggle.

Review: Get Santa

Broadbent is well cast as the titular character in this enjoyably daft festive fare. The rest of the characters feel peculiarly British and kitchen sink like in their dysfunction and concerns making this a good antidote to the US domination of Christmas films.  It also forgoes almost any attempt to make it a white snowbound Christmas or otherwise stretch our sense of disbelief too much.

Verdict: You'll believe a reindeer can "communicate". 

Review: Company of Liars

Maitland's debut novel owes more than nod or two to Agatha Christie as a diverse cast of characters - all with secrets to hide - are gradually assembled, and then equally slowly bumped off again.  What makes it unusual though is the setting - a gruesome grind through the English countryside of 1348 (which just happens to be a particularly bad summer and heralding the Black Death).

Having previously read The Time traveller's guide to Medieval England, I felt Maitland did an excellent job of capturing the medieval mind with its leaning towards the supernatural, fear of the dark and open countryside.  The brutal reality of everyday life as well as a sense of the world collapsing feels authentic too.

It's a good read although the final twists had me slapping my forehead and felt out of character with the rest of the book.  I'd also felt some of the group felt too modern in their outlook and even that some of the slang felt out of place (eg Molly is 17th/18th century rather than 14th). Lastly, the author clearly has her favourite characters, and they are mostly male with the women of the group getting little in the way of dialogue or depth. Given the first person point of view - you may decide this is deliberate and reflects the bias of the narrator.

The unreliable narrator element leaves the book's closing chapters open to multiple interpretations meaning I can imagine continue to mull it over.

Verdict: Grimly compelling medieval road trip