grumpyf1

You've got the idea now, right? By June, I was doing a few days of work here and there, but mostly still furloughed. As the lockdown started to unlock a bit, there was more opportunity to get out and about so... I mostly didn't. Sure, it was nice to be able to do so when I wanted to, but on my own? Yawwwwwwn. I'm not great company for myself. I did get a few long, solo, walks but being in a valley everything is up and I'm broadly exertion-averse, even though I really enjoy it when I'm out there. It's that initial motivation that's tricky. But you didn't come here to read about my intrinsic inability to go and do exercise did you? (Even if the prospect of getting a glimpse into the strange inner workings of my mind and understanding how I can enjoy something but not want to do it can simultaneously exist without my mind exploding is tantalizing.) So sit back, relax, and prepare to be mildly puzzle by what I read, watched and listened to in the month they...

Hilarious. Yours for 99p. RIP DVD? It’s been a bad week for the shiny 120mm discs, with retailer John Lewis announcing that they are no longer going to sell the players in their stores. As far as the UK goes, the format has only managed to drag itself to it’s 20th birthday, although tech-wizards the Japanese have been spinning the video format since 1995. It was always going to have a troubled existence, with no-one ever really agreeing if it was a Digital Video Disc or a Digital Versatile Disc right from it’s earliest days, when it successfully killed off VHS tapes, in the same way it’s kid brother the CD bumped off audio cassettes. Once found nestling under virtually every TV in the country, the continuing rise of streaming video on demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, along with free-to-air catch-up, mean they’ve been gathering dust for a few years now. I can vouch for that – I moved house six months ago, plugged the DVD player in... and haven’t switched i...