Well. I spent so long not quite getting around to posting on my old LJ that the entire site fell to the Russians (no, not in a menstrual sense), and so I migrated its contents here and then never actually posted anything. But 2017 has been a decent enough year for music, if not for much else, so let's get the show back on the road by resurrecting my regular rundown of the Albums of the Year. Usual caveats apply, in that obviously it's wholly subjective, and als it does need to be an album that works as an album. Yes, I realise in the streaming age, that's increasingly kin to compiling a Best Villanelles Of The Year list, but fuck it, these are the lists I compile. And so, without further ado:

20. Sleep Well Beast - The National
After that horrible sparse album which lost everything I love about them, back to being the sound of sinking luxuriously into one's own melancholy bullshit.

19. Rainbow - Kesha
Lately, my love of pop has been sorely tested by a focus-grouped narrowing in on certain sounds and certain themes. Well, turns out the devalued currency of songs about partying and not letting the haters get you down might still have some life in it after all, so long as it's pinned to something a little more substantial than a bullshit Instagram feud or whatever the fuck. Rainbow is a bit long and diffuse, and some of the collaborators don't add much, but fuck it, after everything she can be excused that, and she deserves some appreciation nonetheless.

18. Inter-Domestic - The Melting Ice Caps
Poignant and gentle if you don't listen too closely, but quietly and eloquently furious at Britain's recent decision to do a national Elliott Smith when you do. Spoiler: we'll be returning to the theme of Brexit later.

17. Grow Up - Desperate Journalist
TFW your former flatmates play the bloody Scala and you realise they're kind of a big deal now. Big, lovelorn, goth-tinged indie like I didn't think anyone would be making anymore.

16. Room 29 - Chilly Gonzales & Jarvis Cocker
Two figures who were always faintly ridiculous, their best years now clearly behind them, collaborate on an homage to the most tired-out, coke-fucked cliches of rock culture. Somehow, it's amazing.

15. Shadows and Reflections - Marc Almond
If some tedious rock bloke did an album faithfully covering his tired canon, dropping in two new compositions which effortlessly blend, I'd denounce it as the most ghastly, pointless retromancy. When Almond does something similar with the songs of Bobby Darin, Billy Fury et al, it's gorgeous. What's the difference? Class, darling.

14. I Tell A Fly - Benjamin Clementine
Inevitably it's not quite as strange and new as the first contact of At Least for Now, and nor do the songs seem quite so catchy - and ultimately, wherever I may roam, I'm always on some level faithful to tunes. But bloody Hell, it still feels like an artefact from a better, purer world than ours, where the hurts are deeper and the joys brighter.

13. Juniverbrecher - The Indelicates
Yes, they'd normally be higher, in my list if not the world's. But as they said themselves in the lyric book, they'd been warning Britain about its nasty revanchist tendencies for their whole career, so you could easily have assembled their Brexit album from songs they'd already released. There is a new spine here, true - the notion that British pop culture in its entirety is an incidental side-benefit of paedophiles finding excuses to hang around with the young which didn't involve becoming teachers or priests - but even that was implicit in the odd line as far back as 'We Hate the Kids'. Still, nobody else would get this high with a reprise.

12. Oczy Mlody - The Flaming Lips
I'm not always that into the Flaming Lips, but this sounds like a party in a domed pleasure city on a moon with a really seventies view of the gas giant overhead. And the drugs at that party are some amazing Culture shit which means I end up feeling faintly buzzed even if I'm listening to Oczy Mlody in a slightly too shallow bath on a dreary Tuesday morning.

11. Every Valley - Public Service Broadcasting
The rise and fall of coalmining as an epic for voice and film sample. I wasn't entirely sold on the space album, but this wields the double-edged sword of nostalgia as deftly as their debut, especially on that perfectly ambivalent Tracyanne Campbell line "I believe in progress..."

10. Utopia - Björk
A techno-pastoral song cycle looking forward to the rise of something calmer and saner once capitalism burns itself out. 'Tabula Rasa' in particular is gorgeous, and would probably leave me even more emotionally overwrogught were I a parent. Just a shame that the cover art is utterly hideous.

9. Hippopotamus - Sparks
Like most of their work these past two decades, still two very smart men being extremely silly. Would that we could it all carry it off so well at their age. There's a thought: they're both pretty much the same age as Trump, aren't they? And he has something of the same love of repetition, the qualities of a child...I'd best finish this up, I think there's a thesis on 'Trump as Qliphothic Sparks' needs writing.

8. Masseduction - St Vincent
She was the only gig by a big act I went to this year, and I found the minimal, stripped-down format entirely unengaging, but like a bad film of a book, it couldn't hurt the album. Brittle, human and heartbroken, especially on 'Los Ageless', which is probably my song of the year (yes, I know the consensus seemed to settle on 'Bodak Yellow', but I couldn't get over how unhappy the cheetah looked in the video).

7. Oh, Sealand - Oddfellow's Casino
The last time I encountered eccentric geopolitical anomaly Sealand in a pop song, it was Art Brut's cheery celebration of the ultimate lovers' retreat. Here, it's an uneasy symbol of a newly isolated Britain where the clouds are closing in. A murmuring folk horror build-up of an album, which would probably be higher if it didn't depress me so much.

6. Hopeless Fountain Kingdom - Halsey
Because dreamy SF concept albums about doomed love and determinedly visible bisexuality are very much to be encouraged.

5. American Dream - LCD Soundsystem
For a month or two, this topped the list - but listening again it's very much the album of a particular moment, and parts of it already feel more like a time capsule than something affecting me here and now in itself. Which is surely crazy, but who can keep up with what's crazy anymore? Still far better than coming back after such a short and spurious break has any right to be, and very much the future soundtrack shorthand for films about 2017, assuming of course that there is a future.

4. Fin - Syd
Wooziness seems to be pretty common in R'n'B and hip hop lately, but a lot of it feels more listless than anything else, and leaves me entirely cold, like a stoner explaining why they can't undertake a simple task. This, though, this is the late-night, Julie London sort of woozy I love.

3. The Hero's Journey - The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra
Martin White's grand folly continues; this time, he and the surprisingly large band he's enlisted on his Quixotic adventures do a song for every stage of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. Given how stripmined that structure's been these past few decades, that might not sound too appealing, but Hollywood has seldom been quite this lateral in the application. It may just be because it was one of the first tracks to be released and so I've known it longest, and the video has ghost versions of several mates, but I'm especially fond of the sex-funk 'Supernatural Aid'.

2. Goths - The Mountain Goats
I was drifting away from the Mountain Goats for a while there, until the wrestling album brought me right back. But for all that wrestling is kin to superhero comics and thus the only sport I could ever hypothetically see myself getting into, it's still not a part of me, not like being a kid from a nowhere town hearing something strange and fascinating in weird bands who wear black. Most of Goths isn't goth in any recognisable sense, and even at my most crimped Gene Loves Jezebel were always a bridge too far (though in the current climate, I can see why they avoided mention of Sex Gang Children). But that place deep inside that's always going to be wowed by mirrored walls and dry ice? This album gets me there.

1. 50 Song Memoir - The Magnetic Fields
Ever since 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt has seemed as if he were so scared of being able to live up to it that he wouldn't even try. So he imposed a series of Oulipo-style restrictions on his subsequent work and, with the exception of i, it's generally resulted in frustrating will-this-do? albums where even the few good songs could have been a lot better. Well, turns out he just needed another stupidly maximalist project, like one song for each year of his life. Yes, it wobbles a bit in the nineties, and normally that sort of inconsistency makes me respect an album less qua album. But the rules are different when you operate at this scale (cf: my forgiveness of the clunky bits in Jerusalem, or my readiness to admit yet forgive the fact that my favourite TV show has, across its 54 years, often been fairly terrible). Like 69 Love Songs it's at once monumental and intimate, and so multifaceted that my favourite song changes with every listen. Triple figures next time, Stephin?

And as a bonus, let's have 2016's list, which was too depressing to post at the time, what with mostly being old men meditating on time and death. And no, I've still not heard Beyonce's Lemonade, because fuck premium streaming services and their exclusive wars, and streaming seems really to have done for home taping and all its noughties children:

albums 2016
1. Blackstar - David Bowie
2. Skeleton Tree - Nick Cave
3. You Want It Darker - Leonard Cohen
4. The Last Boy in the Locarno - The Cleaners from Venus
5. Skilled Mechanics - Tricky
6. Take the Slow Train - Philip Jeays
7. The Waiting Room - Tindersticks
8. And All The Ships At Sea - Lightning In A Twilight Hour
9. Pleasure - Medium Wave
10. Coyne Castle - Eugene Coyne

So it looks like entries every other month is now standard. I still have notes in amongst the films and bands about kicking the leaves around, and here we are almost at that point again (though for now it's still altogether too hot for my liking, with the prospect of donning the big coat nowhere near appealing). And I wish I had been better about writing stuff up, because there are names in those notes of bands I know I liked, but about whom I remember nothing - like Tomorrow We Sail. I'm sure they have a page somewhere which would remind me, but that's not the same as a record of how the show felt. At least with Pete Astor I had the sense to offer myself some reminder - "more like Nick Drake than most Nick Drake wannabes; timeless but raw". It's not much, but it's a snapshot, which is the most any diary can be. Him I saw supporting John Moore at a rather undersubscribed evening; subsequently, Moore's novel would be the first project I've tried crowdfunding which did not meet its target, is not (at least in that manner) coming to pass. If a cult act are too popular, get T-shirts in Top Shop, their cultishness comes to seem rather a joke; if they can't even draw a decent crowd to the Lexington, not even with balloon tricks and an impromptu Black Box Recorder reunion, that may be going too far the other way.
(The journey home that evening was one of the times I've had strangers get a bit overfamiliar on account of the beard. I wouldn't mind so much if they weren't always straight men with lesser beards wanting some kind of symbolic contact)
Who else? Sarah Cracknell's new band. Martin Carr's new songs. Martin Newell. You'll notice a theme here; new but not new. Every so often I read a piece about some hot new act who aren't an act I already liked reconfigured, and unlike its kin it doesn't instantly bore me, and I give whoever it is a listen. And at best I think...yeah, that's OK. Last night it was Julia Holter. Magical stuff, I'd been told. But what I heard was perfectly pleasant background music.

That all sounds terribly jaded, doesn't it? But even beyond all those old favourites that still do it for me music-wise, London retains its infinite supply of everything else. A little depleted by the bastards and the oligarchs, perhaps, but not half so much as the dismal opinion pieces might suggest. You can still hear Arthur Machen's 'N' being read in Abney Park, happen upon accidentally private rooms in pubs that haven't been gentrified and gastroed to death, attend celebrations of life's odd contents which have speeches about anything from lifts (Boring) to exorcisms (Nine Worlds). The galleries have Gothic gems and surprise chunks of Grayson Perry. I think the decider for me, at the point where too much stuff was closing down and too many people calling it quits, was rediscovering Bingo Master's Breakout, London's premiere bingo, poetry and karaoke night, where every month a band plays a karaoke set of themselves, and the poets have to sing and the singers have to read poems, and the landlord has a real thing for Half Man Half Biscuit, and someone wins a Werner Herzog film. It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.

Bloody Hell, didn't post at all in February and now March is almost done. Clear up some of the notes, at least; I've got a list of films stretching back to Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, and being a civilised human being, I only watch Christmas films in December.
(I watched it mainly because Aubrey Plaza voices Grumpy Cat, which is a bit of a disconnect given how much I fancy Aubrey Plaza, but in the increasingly crowded ranks of 'films which know they are terrible and run with that', it's a lot more entertaining than the ones with shoddily-realised sharks)
Christmas itself generally seems to be a bit short of Christmas films (maybe it's different in the States, but over here the idea that It's a Wonderful Life is always showing is pure falsehood). And it's not because they don't show oldies; I think last year was the first time I'd ever seen Singin' in the Rain in full, and what a delight it was. But mainly it's the recent-ish family fare; Avengers again (still awesome), The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (much more successful on screen than I'd expected, the verbal games of Defoe's books replaced with equally inventive sight-gags and some excellent plasticine acting.

Beyond that: a higher proportion of horror than usual; maybe it's all those dark nights. Been meaning to see Robert Wise's The Haunting since reading Jeremy Dyson's survey of the supernatural horror film, and it's almost as disorienting as he suggests, all without much in the way of special effects. Whereas the original Thing from Another World just feels like bad sixties Doctor Who, all base-under-siege and central casting characters without the spark provided by a puckish interloper. The Mist gets off to a good start by casting Thomas Jane and Andre Braugher, then running a fairly faithful adaptation of a Stephen King story that, for once, is about the right length to become a film (seriously, a novel needs to be a miniseries at least; a film is a novella at the absolute most). Faithful, of course, except for the ending, which Frank Darabont made even darker, the bastard. The Babadook is not quite the genre-redefining classic some of the initial press suggested, but still an efficient little frightener. And you could probably call Only Lovers Left Alive horror, but that's not because its fabulous, ethereal lead couple are vampires; it's because those poor luminous creatures have to share the world with moronic, destructive 'zombies', also known as the human race.

Ralph Fiennes' Balkan Coriolanus is a good attempt at dealing with one of the Shakespeares on which it's probably hardest to sell a modern audience, but it's all so dour and tensely homoerotic that I was almost hoping the ludicrous chatterbox Nahum Tate added in his clusterfuck reworking of the play would bustle in to lighten it up. That said, Baby Doll leavens the usual Tennessee Williams psychosexual tension with an unusually heaped dollop of farce, and only ends up a bit of a mess, and we all know what an ungainly beast the end of Peter Jackson's Hobbit sprawl became, so maybe clarity of tone can be respected even when it gets a bit one-note. Inherent Vice was for me a very powerful movie precisely because it contained such multitudes - Lebowski-style stoner noir pastice mixed with genuine high stakes and a sense of an era slipping away - but when it apparently caused mass walkouts among audiences who want a film to be either one thing or another, who regard art and ambiguity as a bug rather than a feature, you can see why directors stick to pigeonholes.

Not fitting into any of those vague groupings: Ruling Class. Peter O'Toole is always watchable, and he makes for an incredibly hot Jack the Ripper, but I could really have done without the songs.

Yeah, it's late. But not by much, and just when I was starting to pull it together I saw a brilliant piece by Ian Watson about the perils of doing an Albums of the Year list before the year is done. And after today, I'm quite glad to have a chance to look back to 2014, which often seemed like a pig of a year at the time, but now comes across as almost innocent.

20. Margaret - Jason Webley and Friends
A scrapbook found in a skip inspires a collaborative album celebrating the life of a doomed poetess and heiress. The sort of project which would never have travelled much past its home town before the Internet, and so a timely reminder that the modern world ain't all bad.

19. Puppet Loosely Strung - The Correspondents
Jazz that interests me in the least stopped being made decades ago. But every now and again a band comes along - The Real Tuesday Weld are another - who know that the good stuff is still ripe for a plunder. This itchy pair are another example of that.

18. Popular Problems - Leonard Cohen
Dear Heather was a trial, but the records since then have achieved something astonishing - they almost make old age sound worthwhile.

17. The Bunjies Test - Philip Jeays
Having made worrying hints of retirement, Britain's Jacques Brel made a welcome return in 2014. The ballads were always excellent, but now I even like the political songs; I'm not sure whether he's got a little less polemical, the situation has got more desperate, or most likely both.

16. Urge for Offal - Half Man Half Biscuit
I once tried to explain HMHB to a young American, before rapidly realising the effort was doomed. Long may these contrary bastards thrive, reminding those with ears to hear that the Wirral was always the cool side of the Mersey.

15. The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett - Eels
Not a happy album as such, but E sounds like he's come to some sort of terms with the world, and it makes me glad.

14. The Tyburn Tree - John Harle & Marc Almond
Marc Almond keeps plugging away, generally making albums I vaguely like rather than love, too often drawing on the same somewhat stale signifiers. Whoever Harle is, he's dragged Almond out of that rut, and instead given us a lunatic nursery rhyme of London's dark past. Should be played very quietly in the rooms of the plutocrats devouring the city whenever they try to sleep.

13. Angels & Devils - The Bug
Another London album, this time capturing the sound of the city's present. Which is to say it's tense, claustrophobic, on edge and liable to lash out. I'm not sure I even enjoy listening to it, but it doesnt half capture a mood and a moment.

12. City Air - The Soft Close-Ups
Ultimately I still prefer them in their synth/guitar duo and acoustic modes, but their full band album still has much to delight, not least the tiny, universal tragedy of Housman setting 'Your Likely Years'.

12. Love Letters - Metronomy
These past few years, I've tried to crack down on the inclusion of 'like the last one, but not quite as good' albums. And OK, this isn't quite as good as The English Riviera, but that was one of my favourite albums of recent years. And this is no mere facsimile - where that was precise this is woozy. It's a little later in the evening, and things are getting sloppy.

11. Worse Things - Penny Orchids
Generally, when I see bands with a klezmer or Tom Waits influence, I enjoy them at first and then gradually lose all patience. Early on, Penny Orchids were often a bit too loud for the songs to breathe, but with time they've really got the balance sorted and now they've produced this - largely a rise-and-fall concept album, it's punky and wry and regretful all at once.

10. Return to Bohemia - Cleaners from Venus
Martin Newell is still going, a Dickensian figure who veers between sixties-tinged pop and the sound of Essex meadows as summer fades. Sadly this album also includes one track of his satirical poetry, but hey, it's not like he only releases on cassette anymore so it's easily skipped.

9. Run The Jewels 2
I have more or less entirely lost track of hip hop, bar the odd Nicki Minaj video, and it was seldom a genre which produced consistently good albums even when I liked it most. But these guys are exceptional in so very many ways. As urgent in its filth and silliness as its protest songs, because life isn't neat.

8. Ruled By Dreams - Andrew Montgomery
Andrew Montgomery used to sing in Geneva, who were amazing but hampered by post-Britpop production on their first album and post-post-Britpop dance crossover production on their second. Somehow, his voice has lost none of its purity in the intervening decades (nor does he seem to have aged in any other way), and he's now his own boss, and has made something which feels at once sacred and playful.

7. Floral Tributes - John Moore
The best former Mary Chain drummer in music returns, with all the joie de vivre we'd come to expect from him, ie, none. Music for drinking alone.

6. Company - The Drink
I've known some of The Drink for years, and enjoyed their previous bands, but they were generally variations on the theme of white boy indie. And then they found the quite remarkable voice of Dearbhla Minogue and now they make stuff that sounds like highlife and Krautrock and I don't even know what else, and you can almost see the 'levelled up' graphic flashing.

5. St. Vincent
I'd never disliked Annie Clark, but nor had I quite clicked with her before this. I need to go back to the early stuff, check out whether she was always so twitchy and iconic, like the midpoint of Davids Byrne and Bowie. Kept sneaking its way up the list on account of my forgetting that the rest of it isn't *quite* as good as 'Digital Witness'.

4. LP1 - FKA Twigs
An unusually high placing for a broadsheet darling. I can understand why she gets pissed off at being called 'alt-R&B' - this spooked, sensual stew sounds far more like someone turned the peaks of Zola Jesus into an injectable form.

3. To Be Kind - Swans
Debatable whether this should even be here; I've only been able to listen to the whole album once because it's terrifying. Also incredibly long. Its inclusion here feels a bit like dropping a mass grave in to an architecture awards shortlist, but fuck me, it's some kind of achievement and it needs to be recognised. I've not really listened to Swans since I used to take the piss out of them for songs like 'Raping A Slave' and 'Time Is Money (Bastard)', but I suspect they're finally making the music they always thought they were.

2. The Winter of 88 - Seafieldroad
Wide-open piano songs about Scotland, islands, freedom and cold. It's not a religious album, but it always makes me think of little stone churches on clifftops. I am only slightly biased in its favour on account of it mentioning my name in the title track (the marvels of crowdfunding - I'm not sure I've ever been namechecked on a studio recording before).

1. Blood & Brambles - Mikey Georgeson
I had written "this would be even higher if it had only included 'Moth In The Flame'", and then it went and ended up on top anyhow. Formerly known as Mr Solo, the Vessel and (by the confused) David Devant, I always knew he'd do something under his own name one day, but not that it would be quite so wise and wistful and generally lovely.

Had one of my occasional weekends at places outside the usual orbit - gay pop night Duckie on the Saturday, country at Come Down And Meet The Folks on Sunday. The former would be in my usual orbit if only it were as easy getting back from Vauxhall as it is getting down there; I can't recall the last time I went to a club and they didn't play a single dud song. The same cannot altogether be said of Come Down..., but they did adopt one innovation which would be welcome at other gigs: the opening acts do two songs each. Enough to whet the appetite, not enough to bore anyone. I've seen so many support acts who'd have benefitted from being restricted to that sort of teaser.
I did two numbers myself at Bingo Master's Breakout a couple of weeks back, covering GK Chesterton and Alphaville (and even my apophenia struggles to divine a common thread between those two). Ciccone were there as part of their comeback tour; one of the first bands I ever saw in London, quite by chance, long before I could know I'd end up knowing them, walking the other Parkland Walk with one of the core personnel. It all knits together, one way or another. The other show was at the Windmill, whose gents' is not exactly salubrious, but at least no longer reeks of piss. Likewise, returning to the Rhythm Factory for the first time in a decade or thereabouts, I was pleased to find it no longer full of bad drugs (even if they had been replaced by furries and steampunks; nowhere's perfect). These small tidyings-up, I can forgive; I'm not against all renovation, even all gentrification, but when a once-welcoming boozer like the Noble ends up looking like the departure lounge at a shit airport, something's awry. I try not to worry about London, knowing that every generation is convinced it lives at the end of an era - but sometimes, even knowing that, it's hard to resist.

What else? James Ward, formerly of this parish, seems to be attaining mild celebrity with his Adventures in Stationery; I went to the launch, where he was interviewed by fellow ex-LJ star Rhodri, and it ended up altogether too much fun for a Monday. John Watterson aka Fake Thackray is another for the list of tribute acts I've caught lately, though readier than most to play the hits, in so far as Jake Thackray had hits. The X-Wing habit is proving hard to kick, even if my results remain patchy. tigerpig returned to the other side of the world, her passing marked by events including a noise gig which, perhaps down to the occasion, managed to fit a surprising amount of feeling in amongst those dissonant frequencies. Albeit not quite so emotional a show as Martin Newell's Golden Afternoon; Gershwin's 'Summertime' is one of the first songs I remember, one of the first things to make me feel melancholy, long before I knew the word 'melancholy'. Combine that with Newell's natural affinity for the moment where summer's waving goodbye, turn it into a duet with Lorraine Bowen on that most poignant of days, Sunday...yes. Bless the mad old bastard.

Went to the eerie free-standing church tower in Crouch End last night for an evening of music and ghost stories. They had it done up wonderfully, at once properly uncanny and not too terrifying for such kids as were brought along...and then blew it completely. The first teller seemed to be reading his tale for the first time, and it wasn't like the material was going to save him when it had Mayor Richard Whittington in the 17th century (or, at one point, the 19th) and gargoyles falling where no gargoyle had been. Site-specificity is not a cheap way to add heft, it needs work. We left still disagreeing over whether the subsequent cellist's faux-rap was outright racist, or just really shit. A missed opportunity.

Last weekend, though - that was the first big weekend of the summer. You could even measure it from Wednesday (because normally Thursday is the new Friday, and I had Friday off) when, in a happier use of a normally disregarded space, the funny little community hall on Whittington Park hosted Philip Jeays' comeback show. At first a little uncertain after 18 months away, by the end he looked ten years younger and reminded what a gift he has. The support included two acts who were good if they were character comedy and alarming if they were not, plus - most unusually - a quite good poet, Sophia Blackwell. Don't think I've seen that happen since Murray Lachlan Young.

Then into the long weekend proper, celebrating lovely xandratheblue's birthday. First comedy; Josie Long (whom I'd never seen do a full set before) and Thom Tuck. Thom's show this year didn't make me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe, unlike his last one (and unlike John-Luke Roberts, who with Nat Metcalfe had done the first Edinburgh preview show I caught this year - yay local comedy mafia). But it's lingering with me like few comedy shows I've seen. I'd like him to get famous, at least cultishly Kitson-style (because I somehow can't see him doing arenas). Then on Friday, to East London and its already famous (though oddly, not to other cult East London businesses) cat cafe. Which does indeed have a lot of cats, even if only two of them seemed particularly keen to talk to us. I suppose if you wanted guaranteed friendliness, you'd have a dog cafe instead. Up to the Geffrye Museum, one of the dwindling band of London museums I'd never visited (it has good chairs), and pubwards for the evening. Saturday, picnic; no pinata this year, but my first ever go on Cards Against Humanity, which is every bit as excellent as the Daily Mail's hatred of it suggests. Plus, someone brought a dog! See above re: friendliness thereof.

On Sunday, because it was if anything an even lovelier sunny day, I went to sit in a municipal building to listen to a grumpy man. But it was Jonathan Meades, one of our finest grumpy men, so that's OK. The Stoke Newington Literary Festival is somehow even more North London than I'd expected; you even get given a free atheist periodical on the way in.

It is, as has been widely observed, Spring. Markedly earlier than last year, albeit marred by the loss of several trees which always made my commute a little less of a chore (lost to developers' cupidity, too, rather than the storms). Though I did also get to see some of the more impressive consequences of the storms when I took a trip down to the margin of the English Riviera to see the Dawlish destruction (and peculiar retail complex Trago Mills, which was a scene of carnage in an existential rather than a weather-damage sense).

Back in London, I've been to a model railway show, which apart from its inherent delights (tiny trains!) was a real corrective to any idea that the crowd at the Geeks Inc Doctor Who and comics pub quizzes could be considered particularly male-heavy or poorly-socialised. I've learned that some pubs think a table booking is for a two-hour stretch (yes, that is 'pub', not 'prestigious restaurant'). I attended a late opening at the Wallace Collection and enjoyed the empty rooms more than the performances, especially when we found the armour you could try on. I've taken pointlessly precarious routes across the junction of the Limehouse Cut and Bow Creek, had the first ice creams of the season, marked Purim and encountered the usual run of new pubs, some to be cherished (the North Pole and its range of oddly appropriate ciders) and others less so.

Not very many gigs lately, and two of the ones there were were at Paper Dress, a thoroughly Hoxton boutique/venue hybrid which is a lot less annoying than that description would have guaranteed a few years back. Both Mikey Georgeson and the Soft Close-Ups did pretty well there, which I suppose indicates that they at least pay proper attention to sound &c, rather than treating the juxtaposition of functions as sufficient gimmick in itself. Would that all venues could say the same. The last time I went to Power Lunches, they were steadily running out of drinks through the evening, in the manner of shambolic venues everywhere. This time, they had a solution to that - don't have anyone serving (upstairs) until the first band takes to the stage (downstairs). And, just to make absolutely sure there's a rude cunt talking at the back of gigs at your venue, why not hire him as the sound engineer? Though even he had the sense to shut up during Quimper. As who wouldn't, because while they're lovely folk offstage, during the performance they seem to channel something altogether alien and unfriendly (this is a good thing, obviously). Next up was Pete Um, of whom I've heard much and by whom I've heard a little, but whom I've never seen live. This turns out to have been a major oversight. Somewhere, in a world where the story of pop begins with and is dominated by John Shuttleworth, punk sounded like this.
Had something of a disagreement with the minicab driver after; fortunately, weaponised posh accents won the day for the cause of justice. See, they're not just for destroying the structure of the nation.

So that was Christmas. Wondering whether to take the decorations down today or tomorrow; will Sunday evening or Monday morning have its inherent melancholy more heightened by the task? There were moments when I felt suitably festive - a binge of spooky BBC festive classics and mulled cider, seeing the Covent Garden lights and the miniature (but still pretty enormous) London made from lego in a walk-through snowglobe, the afternoon party with so much booze and so many small people one could barely move - but it always seemed to dissipate again. I suppose the late getaway, with the added stress of the transport Christmapocalypse, was always likely to shred that careful accumulation of misty goodwill.

I don't appear to have updated on my general movements since mid-October, either. Homerton, for instance, turns out to have some OK pubs and bars now, even if they are fuller still of beards than other areas of East London (the Islamic Republic possibly excepted).
The Museum of Childhood - wonderful, if it didn't have so many live children on the loose. Lots of toys one remembers fondly, at least one I used to have and knew even at the time was a bit shit, but the item that transfixed me most was that fabulous mother=-of-pearl Chinese diorama, like blue-and-white porcelain's pattern somehow brought into fragile, solid life.
My year's ticket for the Transport Museum has now expired, but I did manage to get in a visit without the Cthulhuchild who - fond as I am of him - does just tend to want to play on the trams and buses. Whereas solo, I can look at vintage posters and disused typefaces and letters from Victorian commuters, which for some unaccountable reason are things of no interest to toddlers.
The Inns of Court in autumn are fabulously autumnal. And do me the service of saving me a trip to Cambridge, because they feel so much like a college I never quite got around to visiting, and so the nostalgia is less pointed than if I went back now to one of the ones I did.
The Earl Haig Memorial Hall in Crouch End has finally opened up, its imperialist trappings intact, but now host to all manner of entertainments for the slightly-less-manic-than-we-were local. Perfect timing, really, given all the attention its namesake will be getting this year.
Lance Parkin, my favourite Doctor Who writer, launched his very good biography of Alan Moore, my favourite comics writer, with a live interview (and film screening, and so forth). The footage is here, though I've not listened to it myself in case I am too embarrassingly audible as the one person thoroughly amused by the line "What can Brian Lumley teach us?"

The slightly too pat, but still moderately fun, revenge-on-idiots comedy God Bless America appears to be the only film I've seen in ages, until I finally got round to Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa last night. Which was...quite good? Fairly amusing, surprisingly engaged with the very real plight of local radio in the 21st century, but not half so side-splitting as I'd been given to understand. There was also the Doctor Who anniversary, of course, which for all the furious initial back-and-forth on other, more rapid-response sectors of the Internet, seems to have bred a fair degree of consensus. With which I agree: 'The Fiveish Doctors' was amazing, ditto An Adventure in Space and Time bar Reece Shearsmith. The Day of the Doctor was a stunning achievement in making concentrated fanwank a coherent and exciting show for die-hard and casual viewer alike, which made the saggy mess of The Time of the Doctor all the more disappointing. But thank goodness it all came right at the end, and hurrah for Capaldi.

Didn't quite do anything proper for Hallowe'en or November 5th this year, though there was some dressing up and you can hardly fail to see some fireworks over what's now more like Guy Fawkes' Fortnight (Guy Fawtesnight?) - that's the problem with festival creep, where you can't even quite fix on one of the adjacent weekends as the consensus alternative. Dear world, please stop getting festivals wrong, ta.

Accidentally let my Netflix subscription run over after Breaking Bad was done, but regardless of how the US version has a lot more stuff* there was still plenty I'd been vaguely meaning to watch on the UK site. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for instance, with Robert Mitchum exuding the shabby grandeur of a moth-eaten lion, or the gloriously absurd and none-more-eighties Lifeforce, in which a mission to Halley's Comet unwittingly unleashes a zombie plague (complete with Prefab Sprout posters visible in the background as they devastate London). The most notable casting is probably Patrick Stewart, who (SPOILERS) gets possessed by the sexy naked lady space vampire and so proceeds to do some gaying up (although it's shot in a way which would probably disappoing anyone going into the film just for that). Seven Psychopaths is the thoroughly meta and possibly even better follow-up to the delightful In Bruges, and more meta still is A Film With Me In It, which manages a surprising amount of bloodshed for something starring Dylan Moran. The Cabin In The Woods, on the other hand, I'd dismissed as a slasher movie with a twist (and Whedon dialogue), until I heard one recommendation too many to ignore. First surprise: the twist isn't, it's there from the start. And what that enables, and what lies behind it - that's utterly ingenious. Add me to the list of recommendations. Which is not something I can really say about Don Johnson in Harlan Ellison adaptation A Boy and his Dog; post-apocalyptic black comedy it may be, but I found the whole thing just a little too queasy, and not always in a manner that seemed intentional.

Watched elsewere:
Ian Hislop's dramatisation of the story of trench samizdat The Wipers Times. As with Blackadder, the horror of the Great War always hits hardest for me when it's presented with the gallows humour of the Tommies intact.
Doctor Who: The Web of Fear - a story which, this time last year, I would never have expected to see in my lifetime. And it stands up a lot better than most classic Who that runs past four episodes, helped by the claustrophobic, iconic location - running down a corridor feels so much more satisfying when that corridor is part of an identifiable tube station. Victoria is still a dreadful companion, mind.
Idiotic horror White Noise: The Light, which xandratheblue and I watched on the simple grounds that Katee Sackhoff and Nathan Fillion would be suitable casting to play us in any film of our incredibly exciting lives. Sadly, it turned out to be a bad Final Destination riff - but with more dodgy theology! And nonsensical numerology! And lots of RUNNING REALLY FAST.
Repo Man, which remains as profoundly peculiar and entertaining as ever (and I can't believe it never gets mentioned as an influence on Lebowski). The Blu-ray extras are deeply rum, and include Harry Dean Stanton talking about life for 15 minutes before singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat', and Alex Cox showing the deleted scenes to the real-life inventor of the neutron bomb.

And on the big screen - Thor: The Dark World. Certainly not the best of the Marvel films, but I find it oddly reassuring that they can stumble now without falling flat on their faces, and still produce a fairly entertaining picture which will fill up a cinema with casual viewers (you can tell them from the geek hardcore so easily, because they're the ones who don't even stay for the first credits scene, let alone the very end). Also, pleasing show of public right-mindedness in the way that everyone in the auditorium, regardless of class or race, agreed that the family with a screaming baby should take it the fuck out of the cinema - and rather than grumbling passive-aggressively, fetched ushers to enforce that verdict. See! Superhero films encourage viewers to take more responsibility for making the world a better place.

*Such as Bob's Burgers, which I saw round the house of a friend who's hacked the relevant bits of science to watch the US menu. Like its fellow H Jon Benjamin animation Archer, this is allegedly on Freeview channels, but gets thrown away in graveyard slots. Baffling, given how funny both are at their best. NB: do not look for H Jon Benjamin's face online; you'd expect him to be less attractive than Sterling Archer, but I think he may even be less attractive than Bob.

Not only for length, and permanence, but because here, unlike Facebook, there's no risk of a spoiler popping up on someone else's page and causing upset. I was a latecomer - I think I watched the whole thing over almost exactly a year. And maybe it's because I didn't live with the characters for as long as a lot of people, but while I liked it, that widespread temptation to give it The Wire's pedestal? I don't see it. Not least because fundamentally it's one plotline from Babylon 5 with all the aliens removed so as not to trouble the viewing public, who may have been able to handle Battlestar Galactica but that was just humans and robots. ( spoilers follow, obviously )