1. The Expendables 2 (Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Van Damm, Norris et al.) Not as good as No 1 but worth watching just so you can spend an hour afterwards plastering eye-liner on your own features trying to figure out what the hell Sly has done to his face. Some acceptable gratuitous violence suitable for Friday night viewing after a bottle of cheap plonk when you no longer care care if there’s a hole in the plot so big you land a jumbo jet in it. Not enough of Bruce Willis who despite the hair loss is the only older action hero in the film who remotely resembles himself. 2. Sherlock Holmes, Game of Shadows (Robert Downey Junior, Jude Law) Unacceptably dull. However this was primarily because the disc wouldn’t load. 3. Tower Heist (Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller.)  Two great comedy talents but one dull script equates to a very average film. Disappointing. 4. Rampart (Woody Harrelson) Very slow start creating little empathy or

Apparently, Justin Bieber beat up his bodyguard and the bodyguard is now suing Justin for compensation. I haven’t laughed so much since that episode of The Family Guy when Stewie and Brian get locked in a bank vault and Stewie persuades Brian to eat the contents of his nappy. Absolute genius. So Justin beat up his bodyguard. Yeah, right. I can just see Justin, his hair flopping up and down and flapping his wrists like an overwrought primadonna and yet somehow managing to beat up a muscular bodyguard who probably trains at the gym and eats cockroaches for breakfast. I mean that’s totally feasible isn’t it? Now if someone had said Justin had persecuted the bodyguard with hours of high pitch singing I could have quite understood a claim for tinnitus and mental distress. But a claim of being beaten up? No man in his right mind would admit to being beaten up by Justin Bieber. Hmm… I strongly suspect there’s a

Do odd things happen to you? They seem to happen to me a lot. Take for example the following incident… If you remember I bought the good Mr T a special carpet cleaner for Christmas as his penchant for cleaning is one I am eager to encourage (so long as it doesn’t involve my participation). It was a special carpet cleaner that could get into all the nooks and crannies and being a sucker diligent husband the good Mr T duly cleaned the stair carpet and landing over the vacations. The result was I had a lovely clean carpet without so much as lifting a finger except for having to press the Add to Basket on Amazon. What could be better for a woman as dedicated to housework as I am? So on Monday morning I made a nice hot cup of  steaming coffee and I went upstairs to see Master Benedict who had a

New Year is often a time to reflect on the past and look forward to the possibilities of what lies ahead. Normally, I write about what barking mad diet I intend to follow but this year I’ve decided to reflect on my writing journey and if you read my last post The Journalist you will discover how it came to be written. Many moons ago, at the outset of this blog, I posted the opening chapter to my first attempt at a novel. I wrote it sometime before I started this blog and long before I had gained any other writing experience. In fact, it was the first piece of fiction I’d written since I was at school. The novel was called Capital Crusader and my initial intention was to write a literary-style thriller which had been my preferred choice of reading material since a teenager. In the course of time, I duly sent three opening chapters and a synopsis to a critique agency. The

I go to get the eggs out of the chickens’ nesting boxes. There are three eggs. As I pick them out my reading glasses fall off my head and down in between the nesting box and the lid of the hutch onto the floor of the cage.  So I balance the eggs on the plastic corrugated cover under the blue exterior sheeting and reach down: but there’s no way I can reach my glasses. Humph. I go inside and get the barbecue tongs. I come back out, remove the bricks and wood that are weighing down the blue plastic exterior sheeting and roll it back up over the nesting boxes. Then I remove the plastic corrugated cover underneath the blue exterior sheeting. The eggs which I’d forgotten about fall off the corrugated sheeting down alongside my glasses and then blue plastic sheeting unfolds and drops down covering my glasses with snow. Humph. I finally lift up