Watch

 For my birthday this year, I of course received some books, and some tokens to be applied to more books. And I am extremely grateful for these gifts, because as everyone knows, I have a bit of a thing about books, and will enjoy both the reading and the choosing. I could happily do another post about forthcoming publications I've got my eye on (the new Stephen King hard case crime paperback is out next week ...).

However, Nicky bought me a couple of rather good gifts.

The first is an electric masher. Yes - weird I know, but I am in charge of mashing, and I like my mash creamy. Enough said.

The second is an Apple Watch, and I am wearing it right now. It seems to think my name is Nicky (a combination of Nicky previously having one and us sharing an Apple account), but that's fine, I don't mind. It's brilliant. It keeps pinging and telling me that I need to stand up, or breathe, or move around a bit. It takes phone calls, it delivers messages. It has all sorts of clever health-related apps, like checking my heart rate, or oxygen levels, or even doing an ECG (particularly useful). It has loads of other apps I haven't figured out and look forward to playing with.

Best of all - every time I look at it to check the time, it shows me a different Toy Story character. I just had Jessie, and right now it's Buzz Lightyear!

Accident

 What is it with Tiger Woods and cars? As I mentioned in a blog post a month ago, I'd watched the documentary about him, and cars seem to feature at key moments - crashing the car yards from home when all hell was about to let loose about his philandering, being pulled over by the police for being in no fit state to drive a few years back at another low point.

And here we are again, rolled his car, had to be cut out of it by the fire department, have emergency surgery and have pins inserted to repair his feet/legs.

What next for Tiger?

Flying?

 By some happy chance, we have some holiday flights booked on 24 June, and according the the Prime Minister as of yesterday, if all goes well between now and then, all of the remaining lockdown restrictions will be lifted on 21 June.

Now, we need to take all of this news with (phrase of the moment) an abundance of caution, as much can happen over the next four months. Who knows whether the country, and indeed the rest of the world, will continue on the hoped-for pathway, and closer to home, whether vaccines will have been distributed to all those who want/need them before they can travel.

But hey, let's take this as a step in the right direction.

Marvel

 At the start of lockdown number one, which seems like a very long time ago, Nicky made the wise decision of signing us up for a year's subscription to Disney+. I was sceptical about the whole thing, but have most definitely been proved wrong, and will be very happy to pay the renewal when it comes around next month.

It turns out that we are not alone. According to Disney's latest quarterly earnings announcement, which was out a couple of weeks ago, we are one of over 90 million subscribers to the service, providing a bright light in what is otherwise a tough time for a company that relies rather heavily on people being able to gather together (to go to the movies, to go to a theme park, to go to a sports game, or even to put on/make most of these entertainments). And yes, we keep an eye on these things these days because, as of a few weeks back, we are officially Disney shareholders. Well, Nicky is a shareholder - to the princely sum of 16 of them to be exact! And what's more we are up almost 10% since buying them - would be more but for the strength of sterling!

Anyway, we got Disney+ mainly for Disney reasons with a fair amount of Pixar thrown in. But our favourite show in recent weeks has been WandaVision, which is all about Marvel characters. To my even greater surprise, it has turned Nicky into a fan of Marvel superhero films, and under Jake's guidance, we watched the first two Avengers films over the weekend - one each on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and there's every chance we'll be watching some more next weekend (once we've watched the next instalment of WandaVision, just as soon as it 'drops' later this week)!

499

 This year has been a very slow start on the reading front. By this time last year I was storming ahead and had read 16 books, thanks in the main to a combination of work travel and holiday. This year my pathetic total is three, having read Holy Island by LJ Ross in January (Christmas gift from Auntie Frances), and finishing two more in the last couple of days.

Fever Pitch was a good one to have on the go on my Libby library app, and easy to dip in and out of, thanks to the way Hornby organised his thoughts game by game. An excellent choice for a struggling reader at the moment (looking back I'd read 'Just like you' and 'High fidelity' pretty recently), and I must make a point of picking some more of his off the shelves soon.

Surprisingly Bond #5 took longer to get through. Previously I'd zipped through Bond books in a couple of days, but not this one. Might have been me, might have been the book. Clearly Fleming thought that he was well set by book five and could experiment a little, and so Bond doesn't actually show up until half way through the book, having spent the first 100 pages or so learning about the dastardly Russian plot against him. We discovered that Tiffany Case had left him and gone back to America, and that he was office-bound and living what was described as 'the soft life'. The action, such as it was, involved Bond going to Istanbul, waiting to rendezvous with the girl who was going to entrap him, and taking the Orient Express back towards Paris. That's about it. Oh, and he appeared to have been poisoned at the end!

Anyway, my reading slowdown took hold towards the end of 2020. I'd set myself an ambitious target last year, and the slowdown meant that I just missed it. Having started to record progress on Goodreads at the start of 2011, I'd reached a decade at the end of last year, and wanted to have reached 500 books. My slowdown resulted in me missing by an annoying four. Therefore, having read three so far this year, I am on 499.

Looking back at the start of Goodreads, my first book was 'One Day' by David Nicholls (see also this blog post which refers to me waking Nicky up in the middle of the night to talk about it!), so I think it might be fitting if book 500 was also a David Nicholls one ...

Moon

 It is remarkable to me to think that despite all of the amazing technological strides forward we have made as a civilization over the last 40+ years, no-one has stepped foot on the moon (or indeed further afield) in my lifetime. Despite the great promise of the Apollo programme, it feels as though proper manned space exploration has come to a shuddering halt for almost half a century. I really hope that I get to see it all happen again.

I wonder what it would be like to be old enough to have been alive for every single one of the moon landings?

Whilst I am too young, if only I could think of someone who was significantly older than me, who'd actually been born early enough to be able to say they'd seen it all!

Hmm ... ! :)

Other

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Visa

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Tom

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16p

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