Five Things That Made Me Smile

Oh it was all going so well, three blogs in three days and then I hit the buffers.

In my defence I've been a tad busy mucking about with paint, catching up on backed up housework and even chucking the odd job application out into the ether. I did start writing a piece inspired by a Bruce Hood lecture I went to last week, but I kept tying myself up in conceptual knots trying to work out quite where I was going with it. In the end decided that the most useful strategy was to read Bruce's book and hope that the internal contradictions I was juggling would resolve themselves. Well I'm about a quarter of the way through the book, so watch this space.

Of course coming up with lengthy creative excuses for not writing anything since last week pretty much defeats the object of doing this in the first place, which was to discipline myself to write something, anything every day, so since I have nothing earth-shattering interesting or insightful to say today, here's a list of five things that have enriched my life over the last few days.

1) Remembering Easyworld - lovely little band from Eastbourne who released a couple of albums in the early 2000's and then disappeared. Real teenage bedsit heartbreak stuff. Their albums sit unnoticed for months at an end then I get one of their tracks on a shuffle play and off I go playing 'em to death and singing along, scaring the neighbours. Here's Til The Day.

2) Discovering Bristol looks incredibly beautiful at night - especially if you're listening to Jim Moray's Nightvisiting while walking through the floating harbour as the light starts to fade.(And if you're visiting the links you'd probably be under the impression that I'm addicted to slightly fey boys with pianos and you'd probably be right.)

3) Reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - Ideal reading for winter bedtimes - I've been rationing myself to a chapter a day - have a feeling I will probably bawl my eyes out at the end.

4) News that Waters of Mars - is less than two weeks away. Can't wait.

5) Wednesday night's Horizon - Love all that complicated physics stuff, even though I understand less than 1% of it. I just enjoy the mental workout. Particularly warmed to the physicist who commented that for all the info we've got there might as well be pink elephants at the centre of Black Holes. Also it had the very wonderful Michio Kaku on it and he always makes me smile.

So there we go, waifish boys singing, cities in the dusk, childrens' ghost stories, Doctor Who and quantum physics - I'm a man of simple pleasures. You'd never have guessed I used to be a goth would you?