As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.

I’ve done a few of these posts where I connect one film to another through either the actors or directors or other random things. This week I’m going to talk about two groups of four films and see if you the reader can guess what links them together. I'm hoping this might be a bit of a challenge, even for the most ardent film fans but anyway, here we go.

Today marks my 700th blog post, and I reckon it’s probably the perfect time to take a look back and perhaps even re-evaluate exactly what I’ve been doing over the past 12 or so years. 700 is quite a milestone, certainly for me anyway. I started writing my blog posts back in 2014 and I’m quite pleased to have got to this point.

By the time you are reading this, Christmas and New Year will all be over. We’ll be fed up of turkey and sprouts and thinking about taking down the Christmas decorations. So before Christmas becomes a distant memory here’s a quick look at 6 Christmas films that were all shown, with perhaps just one exception, over the last few weeks.

So here we are fast approaching the end of 2025 and I think it’s time to look back over my year and the blog posts I have published over the past 12 months. It’s almost unbelievable but this is my 699th Blog post. All the links to the posts mentioned below open up in another window. January Back in January Liz and I had jetted off as usual to Lanzarote but sadly, a fabulous villa we had found the previous year was fully booked and so we had to settle for another property.

John Lennon shot dead in New York December 8th 1980 One day in December 1980 I was working as a bus driver and I was driving one of our old half cab buses into Manchester. My conductor, Bob, was kept pretty busy as we took a bus load of passengers into Manchester city centre for their jobs in shops, offices and other places.

I do find it really strange that the F1 season should still be going on in December. Still, the F1 season these days is a long one. It starts off in March and winds its way around the world until it ends up in Abu Dhabi at what is essentially a twisty turny mickey mouse sort of track in the middle east.

It’s only the end of November as I write this but in January, Liz and I will be off to Lanzarote once again to escape the cold and wintry UK. I do love the laid back (and warm) atmosphere in Lanzarote and as usual I’ll be taking a stack of books to keep me occupied while I laze about on my sun lounger in-between dips in the pool.

It’s always good to pick up my iPad and see that my scheduled post has been successfully posted but the next task is to start thinking about a new one for next week. What can I write about? Has anything interesting happened to me? Have I read a great book or watched something good on TV? No? Well, that’s me up the creek without a paddle then.

This week I’ve noticed quite a few items about Richard Burton on the BBC iPlayer. I wasn’t sure why at first but it turns out that this year, 2025, is the centenary of Burton’s birth. He was born Richard Jenkins on November 10th 1925. Why did he change his name to Burton? Well one answer on the iPlayer was given in a wonderful film called…

I can’t remember when I first discovered Noël Coward. I had known about him for a very long time of course but perhaps I really only discovered him after picking up a paperback copy of Blithe Spirit. Included in that slim volume were two other plays, Hay Fever and Private Lives. Together they are a lively, witty and hugely enjoyable read.

A long time ago I wrote a post called Blogging by Numbers in which I wrote about various numbers that linked to the world of writing and blogging. This week I thought I’d try and do a similar thing with Formula One racing. I haven’t written much about the sport this year even though it has been quite an interesting season.

Ridley Scott was born in South Shields, England, in 1937. He studied at West Hartlepool College of Art and later at London’s Royal College of Art, where he first began experimenting with film. While there, he contributed to the school’s magazine ARK and made a short film, Boy and Bicycle (1962), featuring his younger brother, Tony Scott. After graduating, Scott joined the BBC as a set designer and director, working on popular series such as…

Here I am, raring to go. Laptop at the ready, focussed, ready to write this week’s blog. The thing is after 688 posts I’m not that sure what to write about. OK, so what about . .  things that happened in October? Let’s dive in. One thing that happened in October was me! I was born on October the 3rd, quite a considerable time ago which is annoying on a number of levels.

My original title for this post was Watching the Box in France. That however seemed to give the impression that this post was about French TV which it isn’t. Liz and I don’t normally watch much television on holiday, we are far more interested in swimming, going out for meals and barbecuing. On this holiday however, the weather was a little mixed and on quite a few evenings we settled down in the lounge of our rented house and decided to pop the TV on.

This has been a busy week for Liz and me. We had to say goodbye to our rented gite in France with its lovely relaxing gardens, patio and heated pool and make our way back to what will probably be cold and wet England. What then could I write about this weekend? Well, as I spend a lot of time making images with AI I thought I could give you a quick account of my experiences, good and bad, with AI imaging.

One of the great things about having a lazy relaxing time in France is that I have plenty of time to settle down after a meal or a swim and have a long relaxing read. Here are a few more of my holiday reads. The Eagle has Landed by Jack Higgins I’ve seen the film of this numerous times and although it isn’t a particular favourite I’ve always enjoyed it.

I thought for this week’s post I’d do a combination post, a little of my book bag mixed with some sun lounger thoughts. Let’s see how it all pans out. Just now we have finished our touring part of the holiday and we have come to our rented gîte where we have parked the van and are spending time in this wonderful house that we regularly rent just outside the small village of Parçay-les-Pins.

Once again Liz and I are in France in our small motorhome. This week I thought I’d talk about our journey and also about my personal journey as a writer. We came over on the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen after spending the night in a small pub called the Jolly Boatman somewhere in the south of England, actually Kidlington, I think.

One of my favourite stories about Billy Wilder goes like this. One day, late in his career, he arrived at a Hollywood studio to pitch a new idea to a producer. The producer turned out to be a young man who clearly didn’t know much about classic cinema. He told Billy that he wasn’t familiar with his work and could he perhaps run through a few of his films for him.

I first read My Early Life by Winston Churchill many years ago. I picked up a paperback copy which tied in with the release of the film version and also along the way I got hold of the soundtrack album and later a VHS copy of the film. In this week's blog I thought I’d take a closer look at all three.

I started off this post with the title food memories, not meaning memories of food but more the memories that are conjured up by eating food. What I’m really talking about is comfort food and the way food can comfort you by bringing back old and comfortable memories. I’m going to start with ham sandwiches. To begin with I love bread and I love sandwiches.

A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester.

My book, Floating in Space, is set in the Manchester of the late seventies. There were no smartphones, no internet and no wireless networks. In fact, 'wireless' was an old fashioned word for the radio. I'm tempted to say that things moved at a slower pace then but that's not true. Things just moved at a different pace. In 2025 you hear a lot about pubs closing down but back in 1977, pubs were far from closing down; at the weekend they were the place to be!

This week in the UK we have been subject to a heatwave. Well, the media have told us it’s a heatwave although it’s not a heatwave in the sense that I understand, which is weeks and perhaps months of intense heat, drought and hosepipe bans. The media also tends to link the heatwave to things like climate change and the melting of the ice cap and lots of other stuff but to be honest, this heatwave has just been what we used to call summer.