Next year will be the perfect year

Well there greetings hello and welcome to this my bloggerific world, I trust you all had a pleasant and bountiful Christmas, well if you didn’t at least you’ll now have a full 12 months of bitching about Auntie Ethel stealing the last mince pie or Granny ending up comatose on the fumes from the cooking sherry. Anywho it is customary at this time of year to be looking back over the past 12 months and what exactly you’ve learned, has the past year made us a wiser individual or just more depressed and determined to get out of our rut and try something new. Well whatever it may be I have decided to use this weeks blogging space to review what happened to me in 2010, the highs, the lows, the wibbly bits in the middle, and what were my personal highlights. So without further ado I introduce to you….. 2010:

Book of the year

Well I thought I’d start with the biggy, as you may well know I do spend a rather disproportionate amount of my time reading various books and that’s what makes this category in particular so difficult. I have read a number of brilliant books this year (Honourable mention must go to the wonderful Norwegian author Jo Nesbo and his hard drinking detective Harry Hole which has brought me innumerable hours of pleasure this year) but I would say without doubt the best book of this year has to be “The Slap” by Christos Tsiolkas. The premise is a very interesting one – at a suburban Australian barbeque a bratty child is dismissed at cricket and refuses to leave and starts waving the bat around, a father steps in to protect his son from this bat-wielding brat and slaps the child, is it ever morally justifiable to slap somebody else’s child? Now while this initial brilliant idea is never fully explored it does offer a quite brilliant insight into modern suburban Australian life and the quite horrific institutional racism that prevails. It never, like Lionel Shriver’s superb “We need to talk about Kevin”, leads an ambiguous situation for the reader to decide for themselves, the characters one on side of the divide are so utterly repellent you are left in no doubt on which side you are supposed to be, but as a character study it is very moving, if a little too sexually graphic in places than I felt it needed to be. Well worth reading though.

Movie of the year (Mainstream)

Anyone who has ever been to the cinema with me will know that I am very difficult to please when it comes to movies, if it doesn’t have subtitles chances are I won’t be enjoying it. There have, however, been a few movies this year that I really have enjoyed and worth my hard earned time and money. The one that everyone has raved about and will (In my opinion) quite rightly take the best picture Oscar is “Inception” but for me the film of the year was actually Leonardo Di Caprio’s other offering “Shutter Island”. While Inception had all the graphics and the clever plot twists and whatnot it was Shutter Island that, for me at least, lived longer in the memory. Those who have read the book all say that the ending is far less ambiguous than the film version but I enjoyed the ambiguity of the film and it was one of those rare things a film where you genuinely afterwards wanted to sit down and discuss it rather than just admire the pretty explosions.

Movie of the year (Arthouse)

Again as those who know me well will be aware I spend a lot more of my time watching independent foreign or arthouse films than I do the major blockbusters, generally I just tend to feel that if they’ve made it to another country in a foreign language there must be something special about them, and that is certainly true of the quite brilliant “Of Gods And Men”. It’s a French film set in Algeria in the mid 90’s and tells the true story of 10 French monks living in an Algerian community during the conflict there and how eventually they are taking hostage by Islamic militants who demand a hostage trade for the monks and the monks are eventually found beheaded (Though there is some debate still about who actually murdered them). The film is quite frankly an incredible piece of cinema and makes you question the entire basis of organised religion, how can any truly loving god allow ten people who have spent their lives praising him and helping others die in such horrific circumstances. For an atheist like myself it was an incredible vindication of my own beliefs but also just an incredibly emotional two-hours because you see these peaceful monks helping others but you know how it has to end. Well worth seeing if you do enjoy a good think.

Play of the year

I was expecting this category to be filled with one line “Kim Cattrall in Anthony & Cleopatra” but I’m sorry I just can’t do it. While she was superb and if there were a “Performance of the year” category she’d win it hands down but her supporting cast let her down (Also I spent the night with a large red wine stain across my shirt due to the fidgeting of my companions, you know who you are! Which dampened it a bit for me). No the play of the year has got to be Alan Bennett’s wonderful new play “The habit of art” which I caught in April. Not as sentimental as his masterpiece “The History Boys” nor as bittersweet as some of his brilliant talking heads but frankly brilliant. It tells the story of a fictional meeting between Benjamin Britten and W H Auden where Britten is writing a new opera “Death in Venice” and wants his old friend Auden to write the libretto, but the clever part of it is that the whole thing is a play within a play because what the audience is actually watching are two actors rehearsing for the play we’re about to see so as well as being an examination of two very interesting historical characters it also becomes a chance for Bennett himself to exorcise some of his own acting demons and it actually does become a very moving portrait of an actor “Fitz” played superbly by Richard Griffiths which while containing many moments of genuinely laugh-out-loud humour (One brilliant scene comes to mind where Auden meets his future biographer and mistakes him for a rent-boy) it also has scenes of great drama and hubris, an absolute triumph from our finest living playright.

Comedy performance of the year

I have seen an awful lot of comedy over the past year and have seen some truly talented comedians but the one that really stands out was Dara O’Briain at the Southport Theatre. Whether it was just because the whole night was so much fun exclusive of the gig (A genuine highlight being a restaurant owner taking our coats as collateral in case we ran off – not sure what kind of people he thought we were) or whether it was because it was a genuinely brilliant gig I’m not sure but it was one of the best nights of my year, tremendously good fun.

Gig of the year

I actually have been to see shockingly few bands live this past 12 months, though not so few that this category isn’t a bit difficult. I so want to say that the best gig was the wonderful “Kerfuffle” doing their last ever performance at a stiflingly hot tent in Shrewsbury in which I almost passed out from the heat but sadly they have been beaten by a band who must surely be one of the best live acts on the planet at this moment in time, “Bellowhead”. I’d heard a few of their tracks and hadn’t been all that impressed but I saw them live closing the Shrewsbury Folk Festival and they were impressive and then I saw them again towards the end of the year and they just blew me away, so few bands with a full brass section and they really can just get a room moving like no other band, if you get the opportunity to see them live get there, there is absolutely nothing like it, tremendous.

Moment of the year

Those who know me well (or indeed just read this blog) will know that I do tend to complain an awful lot about how terrible my life is sometimes but when I came to think about the one moment of the year I truly was at my happiest I actually was stuck for a long time thinking on it, and that is mainly thanks to all of you lot. So to anyone I have seen, spoken to or in any way communicated with this year my thanks to you, I am really privileged to have so many amazing friends, I don’t really deserve you but thanks for sticking with me. As for the moment of the year well a few come to mind, one was sat on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury just lazing around on the August Bank Holiday weekend watching a red kite in the sky and really relaxing, another was the weekend I spent away in Newcastle with work, walking across the Tyne Bridge was the culmination of a lifetimes ambition. However, without doubt the moment of the year came in April when we were sat looking over the racecourse at Aintree just after the Grand National. We had just watched Tony McCoy finally win the race and I had won a fair bit of cash and it was just in that moment we were sat there with the sun setting and a bottle of champagne shared amongst us that I actually realised that at that moment life was pretty prefect for me. Thanks so much to those who were with me that day making it so perfect and thanks again to you all for your continued support through the year. I love you all dearly and here’s to a brilliant next 12 months!

Plugging the leaks

Well guten tag mein lielinsblogees and welcome back to my too long inactive blogging world, sincere apologies for my u nforgivable absence from the world of righteous indignation but rest assured I’m back after my rest and have a whole variety of things to grouse about (People in restaurants taking large tables for two people, why????).

Anyway the idea of todays capsule rant has been fermenting away for a little while now and it regards one of our most major news stories that of the wikileaks scandal. Now those who festoon our newspapers and other optical and audio media with these scandalous things would claim to us that they are exercising their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press and that society as a whole has a right to expect such important things to be brought to light and those responsible taken to task. I suppose though what sits uncomfortably with me is whether or not this genuinely should class as “In the public interest” or not? The defenders of the wikileaks scandals would certainly claim so, they would presumably claim that we have a right to know about the relationships between the major heads of state and what each thinks about the other but I would exercise caution with this.

Okay if they have a wikileak that shows George W Bush and Tony Bliar Blair sitting at Camp David in canvas campaign chairs smoking massive cigars with a relief map of Afghanistan pushing crowds of soldiers of cliffs to their deaths that might be a story but I’m afraid that the fact that Kim Jong Il is not a pleasant man or that Silvio Berlusconi might have a slightly overactive libidio is not, in this minor bloggers view, news.

I suppose what it smacks of, to me at least, is the descent in “X-Factor politics” the idea that regardless of who is best for the job the media friendly star will always win out. Now this is not always a bad thing, David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s superior media image did, at least, spare us five more years of Gordon Brown steadily trundling our economy into the Irish Sea but is it a healthy precedent? These wikileaks are almost the sort of thing one might expect to see on the pages of a political version of Closer or Chat magazine, you can almost see the glossy news-stands declaring in garish colours “Angela: “What I really thinks about tiny Nick Sarkozy”” or “More Silvio!: nubile Italian temptress Yelena tells us all about Berlusconi’s infamous Bunga-Bunga parties!”

Now we may as a public have the right to know about certain decisions that impact upon us and have changed the world but that is not what these wikileaks are. These leaks are almost the equivalent of one of the tech guys in an office IT dept choosing somebody’s inbox at random and printing the sent items list and passing it around the office on the flimsy pretext that it is in the interests of the office to know what this person has said. Now I would say that anyone who has ever worked in an office can feel something of an affinity with those caught up in this wikileaks scandal because their private thoughts are now being made public, I would hazard a guess that most people at some point in their personal or professional career will have been invited to a meeting or other gathering and had a sly look at who else has been CC’d into the e-mail and seen a name and just sighed or maybe even sent a reply to another of the group saying maybe “Ogh god that awful sweaty bloke from human resources will be there” or “Christ they must be desperate they’ve invited that woman from IT who spends the day crocheting cats out of rubber bands” or some such thing. Now what right does anyone have to know what you have said in a private message? Much less what right do they have to start forming judgments and pillorying you for saying these things? Quite simply the answer is none. While it might be fun to find out what political leaders think of each other behind their backs it certainly isn’t in “the public interest” as Julian Assange and his wikileaking cronies would have us believe. By all means read the wikileaks and enjoy them but while you’re doing so just imagine what could happen if that bitchy text you’re about to send were made public and you’ll realise just why these private conversations really should have the right to remain just that.

This week Matt:

· Realised that he still hasn’t done a quite ridiculous amount of Christmas shopping.

· Tried in vain to locate his recipe for egg-nog, this may have to be a nog-less yuletide!

· Watched “Rare-Exports” a quite brilliantly subtitled Finnish film with such gems as the main characters saying “Fiddlesticks” as they stared death by naked octogenarian santa in the face!