Review 2014: One Thing: Stuart Ian Burns.

Beverages I don't drink.

Well, I mean obviously I drink, just don't drink alcohol.

 Much.

 Regularly, if ever.

Tonight, supping through a bottles of red grape flavoured Shloer, I've been trying to remember the last time my stomach welcomed in a tipple.  There was a mouthful of whiskey (or was it whisky?) a month ago because which my Dad wanted me to try, but before that? Don't know.  Was it the quarter glass of champagne on Christmas morning two years ago?  Did I have a beer in between?

On all occasions it went straight to my head.  Which is why I don't drink.  I can't drink.

There are all kinds of reasons for this, just as there always are.

Even though my parents had the French approach of giving me some wine with lemonade in my mid-teens, this wasn't the entrance that it is for many people.  Even during school when all of my friends were already becoming heavy drinkers to some degree, a lot of coca-cola was consumed.

This led on to my first year of university when I can remember with clarity the lengthy conversations had with "friends" about why I didn't drink.  I didn't like the taste, I'd say.  They didn't understand.  I can't really afford it, I'd continue.  Generally coming from financially comfortable family background they didn't understand that either.

My first actual beer, a Budweiser, was eventually bought at a Jazz Festival.  I didn't enjoy it, but I was with a friend I trusted and was paying and it seemed ok.  I kept that bottle for years.

From there I did drink.  Within limits.  Three somethings.  Always three somethings.  But after three somethings, I was drunk as a skunk.

Three wines.  Three Buds.  Three lagers.  Three ciders.  Never shorts, because of the burning sensation that led to in the throat even in mixers.  But if it was watery and had volume ...

I drank with friends.  I drank with work colleagues.  I drank with work colleagues who were friends.  It didn't interfere with my studies, studious, me, and even at university itself I don't remember waking up with a hangover.

I do vividly remember when going for a meal with my third year housemates to celebrate my twenty-first birthday and after having consumed large amounts of white cider beforehand ordering a fish based pizza even though I don't eat fish either (taste, texture) and asking one of them why the room was spinning.

You won't hear any exciting drinking stories about that time.  Not about me anyway.

University ended, and back in Liverpool I continued trying different things.  Three Guinesses.  Three Newkie Browns.  Three Budvars.  Three Woodpeckers.

I tried to stretch my limits.  Tried the mythic four, which tended to happen at the Krazy House thanks to the two for one offers on bottles.  Tried to extend the process with halfs.  Even mixed my drinks.

All of which was essentially disastrous.  Without studies to keep me from tipping over, I'd be shit faced within a couple of hours and would stay that way and the hangovers began.  I chundered, a lot.  Sometimes over my bed clothes.

But the thing I noticed was that I was a horrible drunk, or more specifically a horrible person whilst drunk.  Apart from the verbal diarrhea, I was often sarcastic and if not that, embarrassing, and because I was drunk without having blackouts, I remembered every horrific moment.

Apologies were made.  A lot.

As I've been writing this I've been trying to remember when it was I finally decided to stop.  I think it was gradual, beginning after an especially terrible evening during a work leaving drinks when my legs gave way in a pub on the way to the bar and I puked outside a takeaway and I decided I wasn't going to ever be drunk again.  After that I decided I'd only ever drink with people I trusted.  Then, I think, I just stopped anyway.

I never have liked the taste of most of it.  I never have liked the person I become when I drink, mostly because if drinking is supposed to make you more of the person you already are, I'd hate to think what that actually means otherwise.

Now that I'm out of practice too, it takes even less for me to get drunk or at least tipsy.  Shocking.  Really.

Thank goodness for the trend towards bars in which caffeinated beverages are on a somewhat equal footing to the alcoholic kind.

There's still a stigma to not drinking apparently.  Every now and then I'll have a conversational flashback to those undergraduate conversations.

It's actually a decent bellwether for whether I'll be friends with a person or even like them.  If the not drinking is a thing, well ... it's also surprising how unwelcome it is when you turn the conversation around and ask them why they do drink.

Which is a bit defensive probably.  But you should hear how defensive some people get when they meet someone who doesn't drink.

Not that I judge anyone for it, as I shouldn't.  In fact the whole thing is one of life's disappointment.

I'm also fascinated by wines and love visiting wine cellars, longingly glancing along the labels.  Sideways is one of my favourite films.  But I've little to no sense of what they're drinking, my main experience of the stuff being whatever's been dished out at private views.  Whiskey (or whisky) too.  Swig and spit seems pointless and sad, and I'd probably still get drunk all too quickly on the vapours from the bucket.

But as I sit and write this on New Year's Eve considering a second bottle of Shloer to see in the new year, I'm fine.

I like Shloer.  I like water or fizzy water if I'm treating myself.  I like tea, especially Lady Grey.  I like coffee.  I like that the most it does is keep me awake or, oddly, with some kinds of coffee, usually instant, make me sleepy.

I'm fine.

You can follow Stuart on Twitter @feelinglistless.

Review 2014: One Thing: Sarah Hughes.

This was the year I finally felt as though I’d come home. My family actually moved back from New York after five years in 2012 but it’s taken me two years to really feel as though I belong. The reason? TV.

If that sounds odd, bear with me a second. When we moved to the US in 2007 it was television that felt most alien to me. Yes, I’d watched a lot of US programmes prior to moving – I could bore along with the best about The Sopranos v The Wire and whether Oz was the greatest prison drama of them all (quick answer, yes, even now, although Orange is the New Black does make it a close run thing) – but watching at odd hours on BBC2 or C4 was very different from being able to watch all the American television I’d ever dreamed of, whenever I pleased.

And initially I really missed the programmes back home. I wanted Peep Show and The Thick of It, Life on Mars and The Line of Beauty. A great deal of American television, particularly the network shows, seemed over-produced and bland, filled with interchangeable actors with big hair and nice smiles.

Then, within a couple of months, two very different programmes changed my mind: the first, filling a Sopranos-shaped hole, was the slick, superior first series of Mad Men, the second (don’t laugh) was Gossip Girl. Somehow these two shows – the classy, clever drama and the campy teen soap filled the final days of my first pregnancy, helping me to feel at ease in my new home. Other programmes followed – comedies such as 30 Rock and Community, dramas from The Good Wife to Game of Thrones – until those five years passed and it was time to return.

And therein lay the problem: I returned to Britain and felt completely out of touch. There were whole swathes of British culture I’d completely missed out on – comedies and dramas people would mention that had completely passed me by. Eager to catch up, I series-linked endlessly but nothing grabbed my interest from much-praised Scandi dramas to the latest sitcoms and thrillers. Five years in America had turned me into the sort of person who only watched US shows. My TV was constantly tuned to Sky Atlantic while I raved to everyone about how much better things were now, in 2012, where you could basically ignore the UK and spend your time watching quality cable TV.

So what changed this year (apart from fed-up friends wishing I’d stop praising every US drama to limp on to these shores)? Partially, as had happened in America, I gradually readjusted to UK viewing but partially too this was a stellar year for British shows. While some (cough, The Fall, cough) left me completely cold, others (Happy Valley, Line of Duty, The Missing) grabbed hold and would not let me go.

I stopped caring so much about production values, about the fact that US shows will always seem that little bit slicker, and concentrated instead on the way in which Happy Valley gave us a crime show that was as much about the aftershocks felt in a community as the crime itself. I retuned my brain to the rhythms of British comedy, the gently offbeat pace of The Detectorists and the wilfully downbeat tone of shows like Rev.

Most of all I fell in love with Peaky Blinders, a drama which can at times be clunky, which walks a constant line between melodrama and outright soap, and yet which also has ambition, style and, crucially, chutzpah to spare. This was TV as it should be, occasionally over-reaching itself, but at least daring to take risks.

And as the camera panned over Cillian Murphy’s face in the brutal, beautifully paced concluding episode, I realised that the reason I enjoyed it so much was because British TV finally made sense for me again. I moved back to the UK in 2012 but 2014 was the year I came home.

You can follow Sarah on Twitter @sarahjphughes. She writes for The Guardian.

Review 2014: One Thing: Lis Murray.

Spoiler Alert: You’re rooting for the villain

All these years, we’ve had heroes. Think Christopher Reeve in Superman, or think Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill in Working Girl or any number of other ‘new classics’. The films of our youth and years past, restored our faith in human kind, and had heroes that were the type of people that we looked up to and wanted to be.

These heroes were everywhere. Slightly flawed enough that we believed in their inherent perfection, in their strong desire to what is good and right, and with a moral compass steadily pointing north. The idealism of Hollywood films made us believe that ‘happily ever after’ was actually a thing, and that we would ride off into the sunset and instantly know that happiness was there and would always be, and that perfection was just at the tip of our fingertips if we’re good enough.

But now we’ve grown up, and Hollywood with us, and discovered that life isn’t actually like that. Life isn’t crammed into 2-2.5 hours with sweeping music and witty dialogue. Sex never happens in front of a roaring fire, with fireworks exploding outside in a timely manner. The bad guy doesn’t always see the error of his ways and repent. And our own real life character arc isn’t an arc at all, but a waveform of ups and downs.

Oh, and we don’t have our own soundtrack. Bummer.

What this shift in our own discovery of ‘real life’ has brought to us, is the realism of films where the hero isn’t always 100% good. He or she is more than just flawed, they are philanderers, murderers, conmen, and worse. But the audience has been duped. We’re rooting for these people. In any film of the 80s, this person would be the bad guy, but here we are cheering for this person to do their worst.

A great example, that most will agree with, is House of Cards, where we simply cannot believe what is happening OMG, and yet find ourselves waiting anxiously to see what Francis Underwood will do or what he won’t do, to get what he wants. His wife is even worse. In fact, there’s not a typical ‘hero’ in the entire thing. Everyone has a secret, or a weakness or something that makes them slightly more than flawed. But why ‘more than’? Why not just flawed? Because they know it’s wrong, and they do it anyway. It’s premeditation. They are aware of their own selfishness, but being aware doesn’t mean that they care. It’s sociopathic to an unknown degree.

Recently, I’ve been aware of this type of new genre; the uber-flawed hero. Think back to The Departed, there’s not a flawless character in the entire thing. Arguably, some are trying to do right, but they do so much wrong trying to get there, that they’re nowhere near squeaky clean.

I listed The Departed because it breaks just about every norm for a ‘typical’ gangster movie, but if we look at even more recent examples, you’ll see what I mean. American Hustle was basically made up of villains as heroes, trying to escape from the clutches of the big, bad, lawman.

Wait a minute, I thought the lawman is supposed to be the good guy? I thought all that play-acting of ‘cops and robbers’ when we were kids was supposed to teach us about morality, and put us on the right side of the ‘good vs evil’ struggle. What is this now that we’re rooting for the typical bad guys and rooting against the typical good guys?

A heap of films and tv shows have been gliding toward us which is turning this ‘good vs evil’ perfectionism on its end. But why? What has changed in our society that this is what we as an audience are demanding?

If in doubt, blame the internet. Society has never been closer than we are right now and we’re feeding each other the news rather than waiting to be fed whatever the media chooses to show us. The truth comes out though sometimes it’s exaggerated and grotesquely near unrecognisable, but we have the ability to find these things out ourselves. We know about our politicians, we know about our leaders, we have the ability to find out about every injustice in the world. The time of blindly trusting those who make the laws we follow has come to an end.

Rather than traipse down the road of politics, let me just veer off into the overgrown verge of ‘awakening’. We, as audience members, having had the curtain whipped back sharply and revealed that our leaders are not the Great and Wonderful Oz, have realised that omigosh, no one is perfect, this guy is just like me! And there is where the attachment begins.

In realising that the ‘Hollywood ending’ isn’t real and, let’s face it, is never going to happen in real life, we are nursing this desire to relate to a hero who is imperfect. No longer are we wanting someone we can look up to, or to strive to achieve goodness and perfection. We know what we’re like, and we want someone like us.

Not that any of us are committing murder, blackmail or any other complicated schemes to get into the White House. But Frank Underwood’s ‘White House’ is my ‘Head of the Department’, so, go get ‘em, Frank, let me live vicariously and shamelessly through your amoral selfishness.

You can follow Lis on Twitter @missamerica_.

Review 2014: One Thing: Pete Carr.

The Christmas card

Every year I forget to send a Christmas card to my mate in Canada. Why? Well I don't see him on a day today basis so it's easy to forget to add him to my Xmas card list. But more importantly is the fact that I don't have a Christmas card list.

Do I disagree with them? No. I simply find them a conundrum in 21st century times.

I haven't written a letter to someone in years. Like an actual letter with a pen. I don't do that. I email. I tweet. I have no reason to write someone. Which is a real shame because the Christmas card should be that one time of the year when I get out a good pen and craft a warming letter to someone across the globe who would like to hear how my year has been. But yeah, Facebook removed the need for that.

So what is a modern card? A year ago I specifically set out to make my own. I made a landscape photograph and printed the cards on decent paper. I didn't like the idea of generic Clinton cards with Happy Xmas in. Unfortunately I've been too busy this year to do the same so out came the Clinton cards. I'm sorry if you got one. I wish it could have been more personal.

Now what I could have done is dug into my snowy photo archives and made a webpage with a digital card on. It would still be hand crafted, unique and personal but not a real tangible card. As humans we do love a tangible card. Sending a jpg just seems cheap or impersonal despite all the time and effort put into it.

I'm stuck. I wish my Xmas card was a finely crafted catchup letter or a beautifully designed Xmas website. Modern society is stuck between these two times. So I send "Happy Xmas" or forget to send and ultimately feel like I'm socially irresponsible for not putting more thought into my card.

What's the one thing you should know? Maybe it’s that I overthink things. Maybe it’s that the Christmas card is the poster child in the war of analogue vs digital. My parents would send a card. If I had kids I would imagine they would send a link to Tumblr.

Happy Xmas and a Merry New Year.

You can follow Pete on Twitter @petecarr.  You can view his photography portfolio here and here is his blog.

Review 2014: One Thing: Alison Gow.

Life  Christmas Day will mark my first full year of living, if not totally off the grid, at least several degrees west of it, so when Stuart asked if I’d like to contribute a piece for his blog, I figured it was an opportunity to reflect on 12 months of lifestyle readjustment.

I grew up in in Wales, in the countryside, with fields, woods and the beach. But work took me away and for 20 years I’ve never lived more than 10 minute’s walk from an all-night convenience store or 24 hour supermarket. Coming home to a warm house was a given; if I was thirsty I turned on a tap. Skype was a way of life, I had internet in my home and my pocket, and downloading apps took seconds.

Then, In Summer 2013 my husband and I found ourselves in possession of a lovely but somewhat neglected house on a Welsh hillside, several miles drive from a village of any substance (ie with a Spar-sized food shop).

Several things we knew from the vendor:

• The house was off-mains; water was gravity-fed via underground pipes from a fast-flowing stream. There was a filtration system but no (we later discovered) UV filter which would make it safe for drinking.
• The house had a wood-fired central heating system, fuelled by its’ several acres of woodland, plus the woodshed was stacked for the coming winter.
• There was wifi and BT was ebullient about the coverage, but there was no mobile signal (3 solved by sending us a free Home Signal box).

None of these things seemed insurmountable at the time of purchase, compared to the amount of work required to make the house liveable. They have, however, come to occupy most of our waking discussions.

We had several months worth of knocking down, ripping out and rebuilding - working on the house weeknights and weekends, and living in a modern rented bungalow.

Then we moved in (the work wasn’t finished but we had Had Enough) and reality kicked us in the pants.

Wood fired central heating means sweat, splinters and backbreaking work - all year. Right now we’re felling, chopping, carting and splitting logs for winter 2015/16.

There’s no handy switch to start the heating - you fetch the logs, light the fire, wait (about an hour) for the boiler to warm and keep your coat on until it does. The house will finally be warm several hoursafter you first coax flames to life, but in the meantime you hover over it like an over-anxious parent and if you turn your back for more than an hour the fire dies and you have to start over.

Last New Year’s Eve, at around 10.30pm, we were up to our knees in the raging torrent formerly known as a stream, investigating why the house had no water.

It was pitch black, sleeting, and freezing cold. Just days earlier a woman in the next valley had drowned doing exactly what we were doing, and we beat an eventual retreat without solving the problem.

New Year’s Day saw us giving a colonic irrigation to our silt-clogged underground water pipes, in the sleet. It only took an hour in daylight, but checking the stream feed is now an obsession. So is warning visitors not to drink the tap water. Some of them even listen to us.

Having land isn’t a lark - it’s a responsibility. The property includes some ancient woodland and it’s important to care for that properly, because it will be here long after we’re gone.

We’re responsible for making sure our fences are strong enough that neighbouring farmers’ livestock don’t break out of theirs and into ours, that we control (ie pull up by hand) invasive weeds such as Himalayan Balsam, and thistles, and that our trees don’t drop branches to block the no-through lane we live on. Some days, between pulling weeds, moving lengths of tree trunks and chainsawing logs, I feel like a contestant in The Biggest Loser.

And wifi? Ah, lol. Some days it reaches the dizzy heights of 0.02MB; some there’s not enough strength to return a speed test reading, let alone Skype. Updating an app can literally take all night.

All this makes me question BT’s original airy promises but BT is, alas, the only show in town; rural living tends to mean less choice of provider. After months of struggling we received a grant from the Welsh Government for satellite broadband, because of our location and lack of connectivity. Work on that side project continues.

Other adjustments: Living up a hill means you get Proper Weather; we spent a week in February without electricity, courtesy of gales, and when a tree comes down across the road, you get the chainsaw out - if we waited for the authorities, we’d be permanently stuck.

We have no pretentions to a Good Life-style homestead and that’s good because it’s practically impossible; feral sheep are adept at breaking in to strip the gardens, and the foxes, mink and owls would smack their chops at the idea of poultry.

So, is it a nightmare? No, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. We know all our neighbours, and everyone pitches in when there are problems. I’ve driven an injured sheepdog to the vet because my low-slung sportscar could squeeze under a felled tree when the farmer’s Land Rover couldn’t, and our postman, who discovered I was a Welsh-learner, tells other locals “siarad Cymraeg gyda Alison, ond siarad yn araf”*.

I can now operate a chainsaw, run a log splitter, string sheepwire Like A Boss, and reverse at speed along narrow lanes because Stupid Tourists Can’t Back Up.

Despite the steep learning curve, I miss very little about city life. The night skies are unbelievable, we have a family of badgers that comes up to the house for their evening peanuts and we know our neighbours for the first time in years. The compromises of living somewhere pretty remote are sometimes testing, but they are worth it.

And if I need cafe culture, there’s are a few pretentious coffee shops only, ooh, 30 minutes drive away.

*”Speak Welsh with Alison but speak slowly”

You can follow Alison on Twitter @alisongow.

Review 2014: One Thing: Gary Bainbridge.

Life I grew up near Penny Lane. I lived around there between the ages of three and 23, and then I got married and moved away.

That marriage broke down at the end of last year. It has been extremely difficult for all concerned, and that's all I'm going to say about it.

After a short stay with my brother and his wife and their menagerie of pets I moved into lodgings off Penny Lane in January. It was a good spot for some practical reasons, but also because I wanted somewhere familiar, a cocoon to which I could retreat and rebuild myself.

About a week after I moved in, my live-in landlord joined me in the kitchen, clutching a piece of paper. The previous evening he had been at his regular quiz night, and the paper contained the questions from this session. “Did you know any of these?” he asked me, and he rattled through them. I answered roughly 20 out of 28 correctly, including, crucially, a couple his team had answered incorrectly.

Apparently I'd passed his super-secret audition, and he invited me to go along to the next quiz night, at Peter Kavanagh's pub on the outskirts of Liverpool city centre. I joined a team comprising most weeks a playwright, a swimming accountant, a motorcycling IT consultant, an expat American scientist with a limitless supply of geeky T-shirts, and her husband, a one-legged, home-brewing, Burnley-supporting, repository of general knowledge.

And our team won. I kept going back every Thursday. We didn't win every week, but we did more often than not.

It changed my life. Outside work - the only part of my life which hadn't altered - I was rootless. Now I had a rhythm to my week, a pub where the barmaid knew my order, and the first friends I'd met in years outside Twitter.

When I moved out of my Penny Lane cocoon and into my flat, living alone for the first time in my life, I stayed in touch with my new friends, still going to the quiz as often as I could.

Because what I know now is you have to put in the effort to maintain friendships. I'd coasted before then, letting friends slip out of my life. And that left me alone when my world imploded. I learnt my lesson.

I grew up near Penny Lane.

Review 2014: One Thing: Francis Irving.

Science  The slightly Doctor Who sounding Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is a telescope high up in the mountains of Chile.

It has the clearest night skies in the world.

They look like this.



Last month it took the best photograph of the year.

The fact that is hasn't been on the front page of even one newspaper could only be explained by turning to fictional conspiracies.

Imagine the birth of a brand new solar system.

It looks like this:



You can see the baby yellow star in the centre (its light takes 450 years to get to us).

The star was made from a great cloud of dust called a nebula, whose remnants have been swirled around the star into a red flat disk.

The remarkable thing about the photo is that you can see planets.

The planets slowly formed where the dust happened to be extra thick. They sucked more dust to them using gravity, and then began to orbit around the star.

The planets have swept up matter in their orbits, forming the black rings you can see around the sun.

(It was taken using a new seemingly magical trick, where several telescopes spread out are exactly synchronised together, and then the light they receive processed as if it had hit one giant telescope the size of their distance apart)

If you waited a while, you'd see the planets gather up all the remaining dust, leaving a solar system much like ours. Just a star, planets and a few scattered asteroids.

This is how our friendly sun and our blue planet were made, a few billion years ago.

The one thing that hardly anyone knows is that we can see it. Happening now, to a Sun-like star called HL Tau, in the constellation Taurus.

Want more? There's a press release with more about the ALMA picture. And on my blog, six other surprising recent things about space.

You can follow Francis on Twitter @frabcus.

Review 2014: One Thing: Lis Ferla.

Life  I'd hesitate to write off 2014 as some kind of annus horribilus: like most years, it has had its share of ups and downs. Among the good: last week the first of my close friends had a baby, and he is perfect. I put my name down for a house which, all being well, we'll be moving into in the first few months of next year. I saw Beyoncé, Neutral Milk Hotel and Weakerthans frontman John K Samson live for the first time. I volunteered at the 20th Commonwealth Games, and voted for my country's independence (the less said about the morning after, the better). I discovered eyebrow threading. My husband got another book deal, and I made enough money writing about the music I love (something which I've never allowed myself to view as a career choice) to pay a substantial amount of tax for the first time. With the exception of a few colds, a particularly serious bout of anxiety/depression and a tendency to fall over in public while completely sober at the age of 32, I was relatively healthy.

As you get older, you think you learn to accept the inevitability of death, but (HA! you thought this was a #humblebrag) it turns out you never learn to accept tragedy. And most of the deaths that have affected those closest to me this year have been tragedies. My best friend's stepdad; my husband's uncle's partner. The younger brother of another of my closest friends, over thanksgiving weekend; and, this weekend just gone, one of my mother's best friends from college.

Cameron didn't die, although it's not breaking any confidences (he has admitted as much on his blog) to say that there have been times that he wished that he had. It's barely been three months since I got the call: his girlfriend, my incredible sister, telling me that there had been an accident. He had been driving to work on a Friday morning when he came off the road, between Montrose and Stonehaven in the north-East of Scotland, and went into a house. He had 37 broken bones and severe spinal cord damage, and would be paralysed from the chest down.

Last weekend, my sister put on a surprise birthday party she had organised for Cameron in the Scottish National Spinal Injuries Unit here in Glasgow, where he's been since the day after the accident. And it was pretty much perfect. Friends came from as far afield as Aberdeen and Stranraer - some of whom hadn't seen Cameron since it happened - and we ordered in pizza and wore Christmas jumpers. I went through his Facebook music likes and made a playlist, and then sneaked on Kelly Clarkson's Christmas single and "Birthday" by Katy Perry so my sister wouldn't get bored. I say "pretty much" perfect because nobody plans to spend his 32nd birthday in a back-brace getting used to an NHS-issue wheelchair, but as the new normal goes it was a really good day.

I would guess that, from reading the above, you're now expecting my "one thing" to be some heartfelt message of peace and joy, about being thankful for what you have and making the most of every day (Cam has, after all, raised about £5,000 now for Spinal Injuries Scotland following a joke about "going sober for October" in an alcohol-free hospital ward). But the truth is it's still too raw, and it doesn't make any of us terrible people if we can't perpetually conform to the "good cripple" narrative or allow ourselves some time to seethe with bitterness about how unfair it all is. Instead, I'd like to give you something practical I learned at a recent "family information day" hosted by the Spinal Injuries Unit:

The human body is, as Fiona Apple put it, an extraordinary machine, and it has ways of communicating to those with spinal cord injuries when something is wrong and needs attention: a blocked catheter, for example, or a burn or severe sore. Autonomic hyperreflexia is a potentially life-threatening reaction to this sort of crisis: symptoms can include high blood pressure at the point above the spinal cord injury, pounding headaches, profuse sweating and flushing. If it occurs, it is a medical emergency and must immediately be treated. And it's something I had never heard of until about four weeks ago.

Despite how terrifying the condition sounds, I find a strange comfort in the fact that the nervous system is still looking after you even when it's no longer functioning - of course, it helps that all being well it's something I'll never have to suffer from. Perhaps that is a way of being grateful for what you have.

You can follow Lis on Twitter @lastyearsgirl_.  This is her blog.

Review 2014: One Thing: Una McCormack.

Reading (out loud) like a writer

It was our Christmas Reading Party last night. (Reading as in books, not Reading as in gateway to Didcot.) Students taking our Master’s degree in creative writing meet up for a couple of hours at the end of semester to drink wine, chat, and read their work out to each other. We the tutors – with our last classes more or less over and the marking not yet quite on the horizon – get to kick back and listen. Last night was, as ever, a very enjoyable occasion with some great pieces by some very talented people. There was prose and poetry; humour and horror; fishing, reindeer, and cowboys. They are a smashing bunch and I have loved teaching them this semester.

The idea that I would have to read my work out loud never really occurred to me when I started this writing business. I did read my work out loud – but to myself, as I was writing. I’m muttering along as I write this post, to make sure that the rhythm and the flow is how I want it. I’m doing it quietly because I’m in a café and I don’t want people to think I’m odd. Also, I’m eavesdropping on the conversation happening opposite me.

But then I accidentally got published, and people who had done me the courtesy of putting my words into print asked me to go and do public events so that my books would sell and they would perhaps be in a position to pay me to write another one. It seemed rude to say ‘no’, so I said ‘yes’. I’ve done a few readings now, and I know it’s something that makes people very anxious. I quite enjoy it now (although I am something of a show-off), so here are my suggestions to make this less stressful for you, should a reading be on the cards.

Have a party piece. I almost always do the same scene from my Doctor Who novel, The Way through the Woods. It’s short, amusing, and I get to do Matt Smith’s voice, which usually gets a laugh. I’m comfortable and confident reading it, which means that people listening feel comfortable and confident that they’ll enjoy it.

Practice. Read through many times beforehand, out loud. Know the rhythm and the flow, where you need to take breath. Mark up the piece, if that helps. Red-pen the breathing points (there should be a comma or a full stop there already). Put the words that should be stressed in bold. Other people may make this look easy – but they’re not improvising. They’ve rehearsed.

Forget yourself. You’re not there as your usual introverted self, who prefers on the whole to be at home alone in jim-jams and bedsocks. You’re there as someone else – the communicator of this piece. Don’t put your gentle and sensitive self out there. Let her stay at home in her jim-jams.

Believe in what you’re reading. Easier said than done, I know. But if you’re telling the world that your work is forgettable and unimportant, they’ll take their cue from you. So do your work some justice. Cut it some slack. For the whole time that you are reading, you should love your work, and communicate that love.

I’m pleased to note that my students last night seemed to have done all of this. I said they were a smashing bunch.

You can follow Una on Twitter @unamccormack. Her Blake's 7 play, Ministry of Peace is just out from Big Finish and her Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, The Missing, is out at the very end of December.

Review 2014: One Thing: Sarah Wilson.

The Law  Streetwise Law is a community based educational project that I set up in June 2014. It involves conducting workshops in schools and youth clubs teaching young people about various aspects of criminal law, such as stop and search, advice on communicating with the police, the powers of the police and the rights of the individual, joint enterprise and the implications of obtaining a criminal record.

I decided I wanted to become a lawyer after watching a Nelson Mandela documentary in 2003. I learned that Mandela had studied law in order to teach the township people their rights. That seemed to me to be an excellent reason for being a lawyer so that’s what I set out to do.

By the time I had qualified as a lawyer, some years later, and was busy representing multiple clients in court every day, I had almost forgotten the reason I decided to study law in the first place. But one day, when representing a number of clients in the youth court, the plan came back to me.

The youth court can be a depressing place. For most young people, the drudgery of waiting for hours to be seen in court, not improved by daytime TV blaring in the background, is a punishment itself. I always thought, what a waste; they should be somewhere else, doing something better than this. As a criminal defence lawyer although the job is fundamental in protecting the rights of an accused against the power of the state, when dealing with young offenders I often questioned whether there was not something more that could be done to prevent young people entering the criminal justice system in the first place.

It struck me that these young people, who were, due to a variety of reasons, susceptible to being drawn into interactions with the police and criminal activity, would benefit from having some criminal law education. Perhaps if they knew the law relating to some of the criminal offences, the risks and consequences of certain activities, what powers the police have, and what rights they have as individuals, this could help them make better decisions. It could prevent interactions with the police escalating, and for some of them, it might prevent them ending up in court at all. This is when the idea for Streetwise Law was born.

This summer, I contacted a number of youth organisations and started conducting workshops. In relation to stop and search I inform the young people that they don’t have to tell the police their name or other personal details if they are stopped and searched. On the contrary, the officer is obliged to tell you their name and the station where they are from. Although an officer does have the power to stop and search anyone, this power can only be exercised if they have a good reason to suspect that the person something has on them they shouldn’t. Wearing a hoodie for example, is not a good reason, nor is knowing that the person has been arrested before, or has previous convictions. The officer must tell the person they are stopping the grounds for searching them, what power they are using and that they are detaining them in order to search them. If they do not comply with these rules, it could be an unlawful search.

I also teach the young people that if they are in a group and some members of that group become involved in criminal activity, like robbery or fighting, they could also be implicated in those offences, under the ‘joint enterprise’ principle; a principle that disproportionately affects young males, who tend more than any other group, to hang around in large, disorderly groups. Simply being at the scene of a crime, without any active participation, is not enough to render someone guilty of that crime, but it could certainly be enough lead to an arrest and even being charged.

It’s also important to inform young people about the implications of having a criminal record. There is also a common misconception among young people that once you turn 18 your criminal record is wiped clean or that any convictions you get as a youth will not come up on a criminal record check. While it is true that ‘spent’ convictions should not come up on a standard criminal record check, an enhanced criminal record check, required by increasingly more employers, will lead to disclosure of all convictions, spent or otherwise, for ever.

All the schools and youth clubs I have contacted so far have been very keen to engage with the project and consider it very important for the young people to be informed about these issues. I am currently running the project alone but hope to expand the project in the future to include more people and more subject areas. I also hope to make some short films for the project with the assistance of the young people. Overall, the young people seem to benefit from learning the law and having the opportunity to speak to a lawyer about the profession and the criminal justice system, and I get to do what I set out to do – teach people their rights.

You can follow Sarah on Twitter @coolvibes77. Streetwise Law is @Streetwiselaw1.

Review 2014: One Thing: Liz Lockhart.

From Write-Off to Writer: How 2014 Changed My Life

Life  Several years ago, when I was a penniless student (as opposed to a penniless graduate with a mountain of student debt), I took part in an English Lit class led by none other than Germaine Greer. Memories work in mysterious ways – I’m afraid I can’t for the life of me recall now what the class was about, but what I do remember vividly is an off-the-cuff remark Greer made. She argued that the adjective “life-changing” has completely lost its power because it’s so overused in popular culture.

She certainly has a point. The media harps on about “life-changing” events that are anything but. Similarly, advertisers are quick to promise us that everything from toasters to anti-aging creams are “revolutionary” products that we can’t do without. And perhaps you, like me, reach for the mute button when reality TV show contestants bang on about their “dreams” and “journeys”. We’ve heard it all before. It’s clichéd.

But then again, a cliché wouldn’t be a cliché if it wasn’t sometimes true. I’ve come to the conclusion that this year, more than any other, has in fact changed my life. Heck, why not take a couple of clichéd phrases, throw in the adverb we all love to hate and say, “At the end of the day, 2014 has literally been life-changing”? In 12 months I’ve turned my world upside down (another phrase we hear too often) to become a writer.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write for a living. We didn’t have a computer when I was a kid, just a temperamental electronic typewriter (Let’s just say that Dad’s never wholeheartedly embraced technology. He only agreed to buy a colour telly about twenty years after everyone else, when I was three and Mum was complaining that I’d never learn about the different colours the Play School presenters kept talking about if everything on the screen looked greyish. Even then Dad couldn’t be persuaded to buy a TV with that new-fangled invention, the remote control.) I used to type scripts for EastEnders (as a hobby – I was neither a child prodigy nor on the soap’s payroll, sadly). My Gran and I would do kitchen table read-throughs of each script (I’d play Angie, she’d play Pat). I took it all a bit too seriously, even asking Gran to time the scenes so that we’d know whether I’d written enough for an episode.

A few years later (in the days when people still sent letters instead of squeezing everything into 140 characters), I wrote to an EastEnders scriptwriter, Christopher Reason. He kindly sent me a very helpful, thoughtful reply full of good advice. He also gently pointed out that twelve was too young to launch a scriptwriting career, no matter how keen I was… Hopes of writing a Hollywood blockbuster would have to wait.

Funnily enough, all the big ideas I had back then didn’t take into account the need to keep a roof over my head and put food on the table. By the time I was all grown-up, I found I didn’t have much spare time for creative writing anymore. I took a series of office jobs to pay the bills and, after a few years, became pretty depressed. At the back of my mind was a niggling worry that I’d ended up on the wrong track somehow and was in danger of letting my ambitions be written-off. I started to lose hope that I’d ever be able to make a career out of scriptwriting.

That was my frame of mind in January this year. I desperately wanted to make a go of scriptwriting, but didn’t know where to start. How could I balance a demanding full-time job with learning about the art of creating a decent script? I didn’t have the time, money or energy to take a scriptwriting MA, so surely the life of a writer was not open to me.

Little did I know that 2014’s life-changing superpowers would soon kick-in.

When my family suggested that I look for a part-time scriptwriting course, I was adamant that there would be nothing suitable out there. I consulted Google in an effort to prove to them that no such thing existed.

Me: Look, these search results prove it: there are NO scriptwriting courses that don’t involve studying full-time and racking up humungous fees!

Mum: Well, what about that one there?

I squinted at the screen.

Mum: Evening classes, designed to fit around the demands of your day job. That’s what it says.

My jaw dropped.

To cut a long story short (which is kind of what scriptwriting is about), I’d soon signed up to City Academy’s scriptwriting evening classes for beginners. And what fantabulous (yes, I thought I’d made it up too, but it’s actually a proper word) classes they turned out to be. In short, they made it clear that you don’t need to lock yourself away in a garret and wait for your muse in order to write for a living.

To ease everyone’s nerves during the first class, the tutor asked us to scribble down the most toe-curlingly awful dialogue we could think of. Stilted pleasantries, meandering conversations and heated debates about cheese sandwiches were the order of the day. When we read those scenes aloud to each other, though, something funny happened – literally. What we’d initially thought of as awful made us all laugh. Not award-winning comedy material, of course, but not completely without merit either.

The golden rule, the tutor pointed out, is that there’s no such thing as “bad” writing – just don’t expect perfection first time round. This gave everyone in the class a real sense of creative freedom – something that I’d previously assumed could only be gained from several months spent backpacking far, far away in order to “find yourself”.

That’s not to say that the classes were plain-sailing. I often worked late in my office and so would usually miss the first part of each class, and it was difficult to concentrate or keep my eyes open after a day of admin and meetings. What’s more, it wasn’t love at first sight between me and this proper, grown-up scriptwriting malarkey, with all its rules and strict format. If your dialogue isn’t positioned in exactly the right spot on the page, for example, your script won’t be taken seriously by the industry. I had (and still have) doubts about whether I’ve got what it takes to write a compelling script – the process of creating convincing plots, characters and dialogue is undoubtedly lengthy and challenging.

But by the third or fourth class, something in my head clicked into place. I started to understand what makes scriptwriting addictive and satisfying for many professional writers.

The Eureka moment came when we were each asked to read aloud some short scenes we’d written and the tutor suggested minor adjustments to them. I discovered that something as small as changing a word or adding a full stop can alter the whole meaning of a scene, giving your script greater depth and clarity. Writing a script is rather like writing a poem, in that respect – economical use of language is essential. You have to keep pushing yourself to say more with less and always show, never tell.

By the middle of my second scriptwriting course (more evening classes, held at Sadler’s Wells, no less), I knew that not only was scriptwriting a passion, I was starting to think of it seriously as a career option. Was I brave enough to take the plunge and try to make a living as Writer of Scripts and Random Stuff (ooh, elegant job title)?

By my 29th birthday in April, I’d made up my mind. I was going to take a risk and go for it: I resigned from my office job. It wasn’t a decision made lightly, and it was with regret that I said goodbye to a lively, warm-hearted group of colleagues – not to mention a regular income. There were other drawbacks too: over the next few months, I had to give up my flat, the ability to meet up with some of my closest friends regularly, and the pleasure of living close to all of the art and culture that London has to offer. By the end of the summer, I’d cleared my desk, packed my bags and disappeared off to the middle of nowhere (where the air is cleaner and the rent cheaper!).

I also changed my name, choosing to call myself Liz Lockhart, having decided that alliteration is where it’s at if I want a memorable pen name. I now share my Gran’s name – as a tribute to the person who helped me to take my first steps in scriptwriting.

Looking ahead to 2015 and (shock, horror!) the start of my thirties, I know two things for sure:

1. I will start lying shamelessly about my age;

2. I will try my hardest to produce good scripts for good people, even if I don’t end up with a shelf full of awards or my own production company.

If you’re reading this article on New Year’s Day 2015, worrying that what you want most in life will forever be out of your reach, don’t give up hope. What’s happened to me this year shows that you don’t have to write-off your ambitions – you just need to be brave enough to step out of your comfort zone in order to fulfil them.

You can follow Liz on Twitter @LizLockhart1985.

Review 2014: One Thing: Kevin Anderson.

Life I have friends whose identity is tied up in the fact that they live on the bleeding edge of technology. They always have the latest gadget. Their lives are one continuous upgrade cycle.

While I have plenty of very modern technology lying around the house, my relationship with technology is quite different than these upgrade addicts. I savour the challenge of getting the most out of tech well past its due by date. I keep technology long after most people relegate it to the back of their cable cupboard or flog them on eBay, and because I end up using this kit for years, I develop a relationship with my most beloved bits of tech. Besides, sufficiently old tech develops a kind of personality, certain quirks or, let’s be honest, faults that feed the human compulsion to anthropomorphise.

In August, I opened a personal time capsule full of things I hadn't seen it in nearly a decade, since I moved from the US to the UK. Scattered amongst the books, CDs, bookcases and my bicycle were aged and obsolete tech bits and bobs, including one of my most beloved antiques - a vintage Mac SE/30, and I very much hoped that it had survived its long period of hibernation.

In 2005, I moved to London on what I thought would be a year long attachment from my job as the Washington correspondent for what was then called BBC News Online. I put all of my worldly belongings - not much to be honest - in a five by ten foot storage locker in suburban Maryland. That was more than nine years ago, and it was only this August that I finally liberated everything I had stored there.

In it, I found an old TV monitor, a six-head Toshiba VCR, an Onkyo turntable and my Mac SE/30. The TV monitor is in the garage waiting to be recycled. Neither the turntable nor the VCR work, but I didn't even wait until I got to my new home to see if the Mac was still with us. On a stopover at my parents, I took it out from the moving van. After nearly a decade in storage, it fired up without a hitch. It did take a little more effort to keep it working reliably, but now it's back in fine fettle.

The story of my Mac begins in the student computer labs at the University of Illinois. I first got onto the internet on a Mac SE/30 and wrote many of my college papers on it. But I never owned one. They sold for thousands of dollars then, and while the stars in media make hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars, and that was well beyond the budget of a journeyman journalist.

Six or seven years later, I had moved to Washington DC to work for the BBC. For some reason, someone left an orphaned Mac on my back porch, a Mac SE. It started up, but flashed the missing disk drive sign. After a little research online, I found that that the recommended repair for the Sony hard drive in it was to remove it from the computer, hold it about three or four feet off the ground and drop it. I am not kidding. The logic of this repair was that the drive would seize up, something called stiction, and the drop was just enough force to free up the drive mechanism. It was good advice, and once I put the drive back in the Mac, it started up much to my surprise although it didn’t generate a lot of faith in its longevity.

I gave that computer – with a new hard drive – to a friend, but then I wanted one of my own, and for my 30th birthday, I found a Mac SE/30 on eBay not for thousands of dollars but for about $30, not including shipping. This one came in a lovely carrying bag. It was a luggable and had been used by someone who worked for an insurance company who schlepped it from client to client. It's hard to believe that this is what passed for a portable computer back in the day. It weighs something like 8.8 kg.

You might wonder why I have such affection for a computer that has hopelessly out-of-date versions of modern software – Photoshop, Word and even WordPerfect. For one, I love writing on it. The keyboard is one of the old mechanical types that gives off a solid thunk when you hit the keys. The old word processing apps - Microsoft Word 5 for the Mac and WordPerfect 3.5 - are a joy to use. They do just about everything you'd want without a lot of the useless features that have crept in over the years.

More than that, I love writing on my Mac because there are far fewer distractions. I don't have message, email or Twitter notifications popping up to break my flow as I do on my MacBook Pro, and the nine-inch black and white screen draws me in. There isn’t enough screen real estate or enough computing power to have six or seven apps open that I can obsessively tab through. It is online, but opening a modern web page is glacial so there isn’t much temptation to nip off and check my email or do some online Christmas shopping.

But it’s more than that. From the first time I used one more than two decades ago up until now, I find something incredibly intimate about this little computer. From the moment the old smiling Mac icon pops up on the screen, it really does feel like a personal computer. Long before Siri was on the scene, Steve Jobs and his team could trick you into feeling that technology had a personality bordering on humanity.

That is a real achievement. Most technology is utilitarian. They are tools we use, but even amongst all of my devices, I never developed the kind of relationship I have with this old Mac, and it has been great to rekindle my friendship with this tiny, luggable, huggable computer.

You can follow Kevin in Twitter @kevglobal.

Review 2014: One Thing: Annette Arrigucci.

Life The one thing everyone else should know about: Don’t worry so much.

And I know there is no shortage of things to worry about in the age of anxiety. 24-7 access to work email, text messages and an endless stream of tweets and Facebook posts form a slithering reptile of information that threatens to strangle me like a boa constrictor.

And this year I got engaged, which in theory should be joyous, but instead my inner worry demon has come out to play, with questions, such as: What if no one really *wants* to come to the wedding? How can a photographer possibly cost $3,000? Will I look fat in my dress? Why do roses have to cost double on Valentine’s Day? Pile onto that an impending cross-country move with my future husband and you can see why I’m a nervous wreck.

But at year’s end I have come to realize (again) that worrying is utterly useless. There is no use spending valuable mental energy worrying about things you have no real control over. And trying to live up to what you think other people expect is a losing game. Plan, yes, worry, no. The wedding is, in all likelihood, going to turn out OK. I know a few details will probably go wrong, but it will be a happy day because I and my fiancé make it so, no matter what my relatives, caterer, florist, cake baker, DJ or anyone else does. The same can be said for so much else in life – it’s time to live in the moment and enjoy it and deal with problems as they come, not stay up nights pondering nightmare scenarios that will probably never happen.

Anyway, here are the top 10 things that help me calm down when life has turned into an anxiety-filled mess:

• Spend time with people. Face-to-face, not on Facebook. Most of the time I realize others have problems that are much greater than my own.

• Write down at least three things I’m grateful for.

• Read a book. Something about books encourages getting lost in them and forgetting yourself.

• Find a charity to donate to. Here’s a worthy one: http://www.fthar.org/

• Turn off the technology, even if it’s just for an hour or two. Cut off the text messages and stop checking email.

• Get enough sleep. Lack of sleep makes everything seem worse the next day.

• Cook something easy to make but healthy and delicious.

• Pray and acknowledge your powerlessness to control things.

• Go outside and look at something beautiful – a tree, a sunset, a mountain or a full moon. Do NOT post a picture on Instagram.

• Take 10 deep breaths. Yes, 10. One is not enough.

Annette can be followed on Twitter @elpasoanne.

Review 2014: One Thing: Karina Westermann.

Life I live in the UK, but I was born in Denmark. This makes me an immigrant – an EU immigrant, to be precise. I settled permanently in the UK because I fell in love with a Scotsman. Luckily, I also fell in love with Scotland and this is my home now. My Bella Caledonia. Nine years ago Dave & I were talking about wanting to live together and we had to decide where that should be. We decided the UK would be the best option because Denmark has huge problems with racism and xenophobia. Did we want to live somewhere where Dave’s accent would always set him apart and he’d never really be considered welcome? No. Did we want to live somewhere where his name and lack of Danish language skills would affect his job opportunities severely? No. I’ve now lived in Glasgow for eight years and I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I was worried about racism before I moved across, but it has been manageable so far. I’ve had a few drunks shouting things about foreigners, but that’s easy to shrug off. The drunks also recant as soon as I point out I’m a foreigner: Eh, I didnae mean you, hen!

In recent years the UK has seen the rise of anti-immigration rhetoric. From British Jobs For British People slogans to blaming foreigners for a National Health System struggling to cope with budget cuts. Britain even has its own anti-immigration party now which enjoys disproportional media coverage. I have a strong feeling of deja-vu as sentiments I recognise from Denmark have spread to the UK. Encouraged by certain corners of UK media, it has become more and more acceptable to say things that are overtly racist. Being one of those pesky EU immigrants blamed for everything from how sandwiches are made to pot holes in the roads, it is rather worrying.

Recently I was travelling from Glasgow to Edinburgh when I found myself next to a nice fifty-something lady with lovely hair, sensible shoes, a jolly yellow rain jacket and a posh accent. Without any prompting she began to inform everyone around us that Polish drivers were to blame for British road accidents, that Europeans had a different driving culture (“if you can call it culture“), that she once went to Germany and was shocked by how drivers did not stop for her when she crossed the street, and how foreigners coming to Britain needed to sit a driving exam before being allowed to drive on good British roads filled with decent Britons (although when challenged, she allowed that tourists may have a fortnightly exemption if they pledged to be law-abiding). This was the start of an hour-long monologue directed at different people around her. EU immigrants were welfare benefit cheats, killing people on the streets, stealing jobs from honest Britons, invading Britain under the cover of EU laws, intent on destroying Britain &c. The solution was clear, according to the nice lady. All foreigners should be thrown out of Britain! “What we need is a revolution!”

At first I was tempted to interject. I wanted to challenge her on what she was saying but I didn’t. Instead I started shaking. She noticed – oh, she noticed – as did a nice gentleman across from me who started talking to me about the sock I was knitting. Eventually I began laughing every time she said something particularly outrageous. It was a choice between laughter and tears – and I did not want to show her any tears. My laughter shut her up, finally, and she spent the rest of the journey reading a certain right-wing newspaper.

I have made so many speeches in my head since that experience. I have worked out all the things I should have said: “I am one of those EU immigrants you fear so much. Look at me. I hold two university degrees. I’ve never claimed any benefits. I run my own business. In my own country, people are saying all those things about my Scottish partner. What do you want us to do?”. I know nothing I could have said would have changed her mind, but I wish I could have tried. I have had racial abuse hurled at me before – including in my native Denmark! - but it has always been by people I could dismiss as either drunk or incredibly stupid. It is less easy to dismiss a a nice 50-something lady with a posh accent. It is scary because she is the type of woman who is recognisably, reassuringly an upstanding member of society. Her sort goes on BBC's Question Time or writes long letters to her newspaper. She legitimises scary sentiments.

I have decided the best way forward is to write about my experiences as an EU-immigrant. All those scare stories in the media work best if EU immigrants are portrayed as a faceless mass. Well, here I am. Hello.

You can follow Karie on Twitter @kariebookish.  Her blog is Fourth Edition.

Review 2014: One Thing: Tim Worthington.

Music If you haven't been following the 'Saint Etienne Presents...' series of compilations, then you really have been missing out on something special. Put together by Bob, Pete and Sarah from their massive collective collection of forgotten popular beat waxings, with assistance from their longtime associate and genre-inventing crate-digger extraordinaire Martin Green, each one aims to evoke a specific time and place, from Central Park to a Lyons Corner House, using nothing but the sort of little-remembered pop discs you might have expected to hear in the designated venue. What's more, they're mostly drawn from pop's formative years, pulling in hits that have been hiding in plain sight since the late fifties and waving a jazzy two fingers at the tedious insistence by the mainstream rock press that everything started with Love Me Do.

This time, they've turned their attention to Christmas, which will hardly surprise anyone familiar with Saint Etienne's back catalogue; after all, they've released a Christmas EP every year since 1993 (kicking off, of course, with the glorious I Was Born On Christmas Day), and even released a full album of Christmas Songs. But being Saint Etienne, and indeed being their 'Presents...' series, this isn't just any old 'Christmas'. It's Christmas in London in the long-lost days of black and white TV, when festive shop window displays were a dazzling new thing, home entertainment barely existed, and people were as likely to pile into the local carol service as they were the office party. This of course involves rifling through the surprisingly large volume of Yuletide-themed chart contenders in the days before we came to associate the Festive season even with Glam Rock Santa-hattage and Phil Spector emulation, let alone X Factor winners and, erm, Rage Against The Machine. So there's some familiar names, some not so familiar names, and some rescued from well-worn nigh-on-sixty-year-old discs in the absence of master tapes, which occasionally makes listening on headphones a bit haphazard but let's face it, who cares when this stuff actually is on CD, in many cases for the first time ever?

Songs For A London Winter, it turns out, are a mixture of rinky-dink singalongs, politely furious instrumentals, skiffled-up carolling, cheapo cash-in supermarket own brand covers, and the odd bit of Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth thrown in for good measure. Johnny Keating turns in a ramble through We Three Kings in the style of his more familiar Z Cars theme, John Barry rattles through a Shadows-aping rewrite of When The Saints Go Marching In that bizarrely threatens to turn into incidental music from Mr. Benn at one point, and brother-and-sister singing child sensations Elaine and Derek - 'Derek' of course growing up to become Charlie in Casualty - try their hardest not to sound like they're trying to sound like Anthony Newley while listing the sights and sounds of advent. Meanwhile, Zack Laurence, who would go on to become both Mr Bloe (as in Groovin' With) and the theme composer for Treasure Hunt and Interceptor, engages in a bit of piano tinkling in honour of the humble snowman. There's even what sounds like it could be an early electronic instrument on the aptly-titled Sounds Like Winter by Dusty Springfield's backing band The Echoes.

Where the the real surprises lie, though, are with the songs and artists that you sort of half-knew at the back of your mind. Even aside from Billy Fury's original of My Christmas Prayer, as later of course covered by Saint Etienne, you'll find The Beverley Sisters getting a touch funky on Little Donkey, and Ted Heath doing quite nicely on Swinging Shepherd Blues, even if his definition of 'Swinging' might pose some problems under laboratory conditions, while the piano-rattling of Russ Conway - so often the target of 'naff' jokes, sometimes even in person, in latterday comedy shows - turns out to be very pleasantly produced and arranged, Lionel Bart being Lionel Bart - oh what a surprise, he's asking for a 'kiss' - is never not welcome, and Adam Faith's Lonely Pup (In A Christmas Shop) isn't quite as annoying as you'd assumed it was on the very fringes of your consciousness. Alma Cogan can still keep that laugh-in-her-voice to herself, mind.

This is more than just a look at a prehistoric age of pop music, though - it's literally a glimpse of a lost world. This is the sound of the sort of Christmas you see in ancient Pathe News films, where massive crowds turned up to watch trees being unveiled on the high street, where queues for department store Santas snaked around the block and the youngsters only left with a cheap plastic doll where the hair came off when you washed it, and indeed where The Beatles put together their very first Christmas Fan Club records, and, believe it or not, even appeared in panto. See, it didn't quite all change with Love Me Do.

You can follow Tim on Twitter @outonbluesix. He's the author of Higher Than The Sun, the story of four albums released by Creation Records late in 1991, available at Hulu here.

Review 2014: One Thing: @asta.

Coming of Age.

Life Go to the mall, the grocery store, or just stand on a busy street corner and look around at the people swirling about you. Are you younger than most of them? Perhaps you fit comfortably in the middle? Or do you notice that it is only the ones who look as if they might be collecting a pension that appear older?

2014 is the year I started to feel old. This came as a bit of shock, because as much as I flatter myself that I am a self-aware and a discerning observer of life around me, I swallowed more than a few glasses of youth culture kool-aid over the years.

Combine the decades-long bombardment of media messages exhorting us all to buy this cream, eat this super-food, join this gym program and follow these Six Steps to A Better You with the underlying premise that with enough money and effort you can reverse time, and you get a seriously messed-up culture.

Age is just a number.

You are only as old as you feel.

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

Only the sentence by Robert Frost is correct.

I and just about everyone else of my generation grew up in expectation. Life was ahead. It was going to happen. Out there. When. When we finished school. When we moved into our own apartment. When we got that job. When we met the right someone. And it was all going to be champagne wishes and caviar dreams minus the braying Robin Leach soundtrack.

Our whole lives have been aspirational. Nations’ economies depend on it.

My parents’ generation grew up in the still lingering shadows of the Depression and World War II rations. They strove to contribute to rebuilding a better world. They still wanted the house and the car and the summer vacations. But they talked about being comfortable. They could see how their lives were easier and more secure than their parents’ and that was success.

My generation grew up with the message that it was all waiting for us Out There and television showed us just how much Out There existed in the world. Greedy doesn't begin to describe the rapacious insatiable appetite for the good life we all came to expect as our due.

We had a road map too. Hard work, good looks, and a winning personality and the world would fall at our feet.

Hard work was a matter of will. Good looks used to be a roll of genetic dice but by the end of the Seventies you could buy a new face for not much more than the cost of a car.

The winning personality depended on what collection of self-help aphorisms was hogging the best-seller list. It started with I’m OK-You’re OK which propelled us down the path to magical thinking and all its other delusional siblings. It was quickly followed by The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People which promised to teach us how to win at life while at the same time reducing it to a series of lists. Lists are great. Lists are manageable. Lists have no time for ambiguous, or intangible, nuanced messiness of living. Lists reduce everything into easy bite-sized Happy Meals. (The internet loves lists—but that’s another issue.) We kept chasing after the mirage of more, because to settle for less is to fail.

And so we continued living life as possibility. It can all happen. Still. Until the day it can’t. We wake up and suddenly, with even the most basic grasp of mathematics we know there is more behind us than in front of us and what lies ahead looks grim no matter how fat the wallet.

It happens in small increments, mistakes, accidents. The first bumps are the sort of hip check that takes you away from childhood dreams of professional sport or celebrity. You shrug it off as silliness and set you sights on a new passion. The thing is time is against us. We all know this and I have yet to meet anyone who accepts it on a personal level.

Live each day as if it were your last.

That’s crazy talk.

If I did that, right now I’d be on a beach in Hawaii (it’s December and I hate the cold) with a plane ticket to Europe in my purse and nothing in the bank.

We are all going to die. It’s the when and how that eludes us.

I have been told I can expect to live longer than previous generations did. I am not guaranteed that the quality of those days will be any better. Already, if I make a list of all the people I have known, the list of the quick is smaller than that of the dead. I am at the age where I understand why my grandparents spent so much time discussing the past—it’s where they did their best living.

What nobody told me about aging is that the outward signs are nothing compared to the interior collapse and decay and that it begins long before the end. Bones, muscles, sinews, synapses, hormones—it all starts to break down; if I was a car I’d be trading myself in.

This is where, if this were a magazine piece, I’d be expected to impart a piece of warm hopeful wisdom. The wonderful thing I’ve learned this year.

No

I’m still in the middle of this. More people have left my life than entered it this year, so I can tell you to cultivate young friends. I’m not being flippant.

Most of my friends used to be older than me, because they were more interesting. They had seen and done things, while my peers were as clueless about life as I was. Most of them are gone. I am cultivating younger friends because now they are the more interesting.

I can also tell you that anyone who says that they have no regrets in life is either trying to sell you something, or is too stupid to know better. I regret plenty of things, and most of them are things I didn't do. What I regret is of no use to anyone but me, with perhaps one exception- I regret any time I had a chance to be kind and didn't take it. Except with politicians. And bankers. And bureaucrats. Oh hell.

You can follow @asta on Twitter here. Kitchen Bits is her Tumblr.

Review 2014: One Thing: Essie Fox.

Film My One Thing relates to a film that I’ve never forgotten – because it scared it me half to death, and the terror of that memory remains just as vivid as it did when I was the schoolgirl who crept out of bed to watch the late night TV films. Since then I’ve often thought about the nightmare tension of that film – all the melodramatic darkness that burrowed its way into my mind, and from which it has never re-emerged.

The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise in 1963 (since when it has obtained a certain cult status, with Martin Scorsese calling it one of the all-time scariest films that he has ever seen) is based on a novel by Shirley Jackson; herself the undoubted mistress of compelling psychological horror. And this is how her novel begins, with an atmosphere of implicit threat contained within these few short lines that is then more than fulfilled in Robert Wise’s visual adaptation –

“Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Even today, that opening – the threat of the madness that haunts the house – still fills me with a sense of dread. I can almost relive the scene in which the vulnerable protagonist awakes from sleep to hear some monstrous banging sounds … like the beating of the giant heart of some animalistic, unseen ‘thing’ that is lurking outside in the corridor, trying to force its way on through the bulging bulk of the bedroom door.

There is also a cast iron staircase which swings and creaks as if alive, which seems on the verge of collapsing, just as the victim’s tortured mind is spiraling ever downwards into a private mental hell, while filled with the sense that she is cursed – her doom to be found within Hill House.

So – if there’s one scary film that I can recommend to you – the one film that I hope to watch again over this Christmas period, then it has to be The Haunting.

You can follow Essie on Twitter @essiefox.  She's the writer of Victorian gothic novels. The Goddess and the Thief, her latest book, contains many ghostly elements. www.essiefox.com

Review 2014: One Thing: Simon A. Forward.

Life What has a hazelnut in every bite? Topic. I didn’t really have one in mind when Ian kindly invited me to write a guest post for his 2014 review, then I remembered I have a new book due for release this December.

And what better respite from the deluge of carols and Christmas pop tunes in the cafes and shopping centres of the world than the sound of an author blowing his own trumpet?

On the other hand, I didn’t really want to make this a commercial.

Now, in fairness, my Evil UnLtd books aren’t all about self self self, since if you put them on your shelf shelf shelf all royalties will go to Cancer Research UK so a purchase (of ebook or paperback) is all in a good cause. And in looking back on this year it’s impossible for me not to think on this, the fourth volume in this increasingly epic sci-fi series of mine.

It’s about time, as the tagline said of the Doctor Who TV Movie. Which is to say, this instalment is about time (my DW novel Emotional Chemistry featured four different modes of time travel and I think I may have outdone that with this one). And it’s also an admission that I took my own sweet time writing it.

You can put that down to my meticulousness and exacting standards. And if you’ve scribbled as many Doctor Who reviews as I have, complaining how many of the episodes don’t make sense, you’re under some additional obligation to take care over your own writings and make sure the dots all join up sensibly. Even more important, I suppose, when those writings are a fiendishly fangled Evil time-travel adventure. And if it turns out the tangled web of time is riddled with mistakes, well, readers are invited to make omelettes out of all the egg on my face.

Time allegedly flies when you’re having fun and it’s true to say I always have great fun writing these books. They’re supposed to be funny, after all, so it’s a good sign if I’m having a laugh or several along the way. Hopefully folks will have nearly as much fun reading them.

But time only flew occasionally. Sometimes it crawled, sometimes it got completely away from me, sometimes it had trouble dragging itself out of bed in the mornings, sometimes it crashed altogether. Because, at the risk of a brief moment of sobriety ahead of the impending festive season, there was one other major feature to characterise my 2014 and definitely played its part in slowing up the creativity.

Depression, to give it a name. The black dog, to give it another.

It’s hounded me (haha) for years, but this last year was particularly tough, turning at times into an obstacle course of deep troughs and huge mountains to climb. I mention this not to cast a downer on everyone’s Christmas, but because depression is far from uncommon and none of us should be afraid to fess up to it. Also because one other 2014 memory that springs too readily to mind is Robin Williams, a warm and very funny guy now who inherited RIP after his name in August. A sad loss, for him and us.

It’s particularly easy to fall prey to the black dog at this time of year and I wish I was brimming with wisdom and bright advice for other sufferers out there, but even if we are not alone but we do face it largely alone. What works for me may not work for you.

What worked for me this year is that I made it to December with a finished book to show for it. And a comedy at that. Depression’s not entirely useless in that it does fuel some measure of the cynical humour that colours much of the Evil UnLtd series. I guess that’s key: for one, it helps to laugh, even at the crappiest things in life, for two, it’s a matter of turning even the darker emotions to some sort of advantage.

It’s like turning fat into muscle. And as anyone with a lapsed gym membership will tell you, that’s hard work. But just as we needn’t be afraid to talk about it and should never be afraid to get help, we really need to not be afraid of the hard work it takes to negotiate that daily assault course and stay ahead of that damned black dog snapping at your heels.
So, I guess ultimately what I (finally) wanted to say here is this:

Happy Christmas. But in case it’s not, don’t be afraid of the big black dog. It may pee all over your Christmas tree, but it can be trained.

I can’t claim to have mastered it but at least for this year I can count my achievements as well as my blessings. A fourth book in a series is no mean feat, plus I’ve continued to produce short fantasy fiction in my Tortenschloss Chronicles at the rate of an episode a week and managed various other bits of creativity in the face of adversity. And knowing that feels like an encouraging pat on the back. So if you’re looking back on your 2014 and it’s been a rough one, I recommend counting anything and everything you’ve achieved, no matter how small. And if it was a struggle to get this far, well, d’you know what? That makes those achievements all the more notable and valuable. Count em twice.
There. That’s me done with being sober for the year.

Here’s to 2015, in which I’m planning, amongst other things, a fifth Evil book. That one is not going to be about time. In theory it should be about politics. So if nothing else depresses me next year, that certainly ought to do it.

Slainte!

You can follow Simon on Twitter @perfect4d.  He's the author of several Doctor Who novels, audio dramas and short stories as well as the writer of three novelisations for the BBC’s Merlin series. He also self-publishes his own sci-fi comedy series, Evil UnLtd (see www.evilunltd.co.uk) and you can find some of his fantasy fiction at The Tortenschloss Chronicles: www.tortenschloss.co.uk.

Review 2014: One Thing: Jacqueline Rayner.

Books Guest blog goal: to bring something obscure to a wider audience. Well, 2014 marked the end of a quest of mine, a quest to find all that could be known about a character called Reginald Fortune. Obscure? Well, I’m obviously not going to be the only person in the world to have heard of him. But back in the early 1980s it felt like I was...

When I was about 11 or 12 I was exploring my Nan’s house when I came across an old, very tatty cloth-bound book called Clue for Mr Fortune by H C Bailey. The (foxed) imprint page told me it was the third impression ‘(first cheap edition)’ and that it had been published in September 1937. No one knew where it had come from or who owned it, so I was allowed to take it home to read. Clue for Mr Fortune contained six stories, each dealing with a different ‘clue’ that spoke volumes to the eponymous Reginald Fortune, a gp who advised Scotland Yard. The book’s language was occasionally archaic in both construction and word use (the first story has a girl who steals a flapjack, which turned out to be a powder compact and not, as I confusingly thought at the time, an oaty treat), the cherubic Reggie was not the most sympathetic of lead characters and the action was often gruesome (the flapjack story not only had dead humans – perfectly acceptable in detective stories – but also a cat with its head bashed in, which was fairly traumatic). Nevertheless, I adored the book and wanted to read more.

I turned first to my library, but the Essex Library Network had only one H C Bailey volume – and that was in its reserve collection, not even on the shelves – a reprint of the first book, Call Mr Fortune. As far as I could tell with my limited resources (no internet!), only two books had ever been reprinted, the rest had been out of print for decades and the chances of any library having a 50 or 60 year old edition on their shelves seemed slim. So for the next few decades I scoured second-hand bookshops, flicked through every mystery anthology I could find hoping to see the magical words ‘by H C Bailey’ in the contents list, and even regularly picked up ‘Book and Magazine Collector’ to search through its classifieds (growing to loathe Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr Fortune’s Maggot along the way). Slowly, gradually, my collection built up. There were additional delights in discovering these often ancient books: for example my 1943 US Pocket Book edition of The Best of Mr Fortune Stories asks the owner to send it to ‘Commanding General, Fourth Corps Area Headquarters, Atlanta GA’ when they’ve read it, ‘to help the boys in the service’ who need books ‘for amusement and recreation’. Lovely stuff!

Mr Fortune is one of the detectives emulated by Tommy and Tuppence in Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime and H C Bailey is one of the authors mentioned in another of her books, The Body in the Library, presumably therefore both Fortune and Bailey would have been familiar names to readers of the 1920s-40s. So why have they both fallen into obscurity now? Perhaps it’s because authors such as Christie can transcend their time period, but Bailey is very much of his. In these cosmopolitan days there would be little place for some of Reggie’s deductions – there’s the time he solved a case by discovering that the stomach contents of a murdered victim contain saffron and deducing he must find a Devonshire household as only they would know of saffron cake, and a similar experience when he deduces a fragment of a menu must be from Brittany so searches for a crime there.

Then there’s his relationship with the police which is patronising in the extreme: he frequently bursts the smug bubble of some local police official by pointing out that, eg, an absence of blood on the ground means the corpse was murdered elsewhere, while his acolytes (Mr Lomas, the Chief of the CID, and Superintendent Bell) look upon him with awe (OK, so there was no CSI in the early 20th century, but really...) And then he’ll go in the opposite direction with deductions so out of left field that you have to credit him with second sight – even his colleagues think his powers verge on the supernatural. (“‘Very odd how he knows men,’ said Superintendent Bell reverently. ‘As if he had an extra sense to tell him of people’s souls, like smells or colours.’ And he has a clear head. He is never confused about what is important and what isn’t, and he has never been known to hesitate in doing what is necessary.”)

That’s a quote from ‘The Unknown Murderer’, a story from Mr Fortune’s Practice that showcases several of the features that distinguish the Mr Fortune stories: an unusual and disturbing motive (in this case, murdering people who are greatly loved to inflict suffering on those left behind), and Reggie’s own sense of justice – ‘doing what is necessary’ as the text has it – another thing that might make him unpalatable today. Here, his struggles with the murderer lead to her death, which he then denies knowledge of and classes as suicide during his own examination of the body as Home Office expert. Slightly dodgy? Oh yes. But at least in that case the criminal was trying to kill him at the time; in a really quite startlingly large percentage of stories Mr Fortune either causes or fails to prevent the death of the criminal, often cold-bloodedly – and even considering the death penalty of the time, this can make uncomfortable reading. It may make it more or less acceptable that these deaths often occur when Reggie knows that there’s insufficient evidence for a conviction or when the punishment would be, in his eyes, inadequate – he’s carrying out the death penalty that he feels they deserve. (“‘They’d tortured that boy and his mother. They planned to murder mother and son. They did their best to murder the boy’s soul. And the law would only have given them a few years in prison. I want justice.’ Bell looked at him with dread. ‘It’s an awful responsibility to take.’ ‘Yes. I take it,’ Reggie Fortune said.” – ‘The Only Son’, Mr Fortune’s Trials.)

Children feature frequently – Mr Fortune is a champion of children and places their welfare above all things, but what happens to them before his arrival is frequently extremely distressing, and there are many that he arrives too late to save and can only avenge. But putting aside the terrible things that happen to these children in the name of fiction, possibly the worst crime that is committed in these stories is the way that the youngest of the children speak: so vewwy vewwy twee. Weally they do. It’s the only folly in the prose that really needs the reader’s forgiveness.

Mr Fortune is the opposite to contemporaries such as Poirot and Inspector French in that he works better in short stories than in novels – even with my love of the character I find the novels can verge on impenetrable at times, but there are compensations: Mr Fortune Finds a Pig provides one of the best book names ever created, drily literal and absurd at the same time, although the plot of the 1943 book is grim – pig -> blood of a sucking pig used to culture typhus -> typhus used to murder evacuee children -> murder of evacuee children used to create unrest. Then there’s Dead Man’s Effects, the cover of which provides the unforgettable illustration of some people dramatically looking down at a very small set of false teeth (‘dead man’s effects’ being WWII slang for false teeth). Glorious!

As of 2014 my 30-odd year quest has ended: thanks to the Internet I have finally tracked down all the volumes of short stories. No more new Mr Fortune for me (although there are still those cases never recorded except as a brief recap at the start of a story: “‘That was chocolate cream,’ he said placidly. ‘You’d better arrest the aunt’” or “Mr Fortune came back from the Zoo pensive. He had been called to the inquest on Zuleika the lemur – a strange, sad case”, which can at least be discovered by an exercise of the imagination). So where do I go from here?

Mr Fortune is a great character. He’s lucky that in these Internet days he’s become slightly less obscure, there’ve even been reprints of a couple of his books in recent years – but they still need to be sought out, which requires people to know about them in the first place; that’s the challenge. How many other great characters have been lost to all but a few who frequent second-hand bookshops? How many now exist only in the few stories that have been anthologised? So I’m going to keep my eyes open for some other tatty, foxed, century-old volume that’s never been reprinted – and maybe find another character who doesn’t deserve to have been thrown on history’s scrap heap. Why not join me? Rescue a lost character today!

A few story picks:

‘The Furnished Cottage’ (Mr Fortune’s Trials): a twisted tale of revenge. “Perhaps the water wasn’t really poisoned. He put the tip of a finger into it and touched his tongue. Bitter! Yes, the old woman told the truth. Strychnine, and a good dose of it. And he would be sitting there, wild with thirst, looking at her poisoned water. . . . The old woman must have thought a good deal about making him suffer.”

‘The Dead Leaves’ (Clue for Mr Fortune): picturesque murder in the Lake District. “’He didn’t get it on that rock. It wouldn't grow there. He’d been higher. On the mountain.’ Bell watched him gaze up at it with a queer wistful look. His round face had the expression of a child wanting the cruel, difficult world to be kind.”

‘The Little House’ (Mr Fortune, Please): a drawing of a kitten leads Mr Fortune to a tortured child. “’They’ve been making experiments. Not for science. For the devil.’”

‘The Profiteers’ (Mr Fortune’s Trials): Reggie’s only supernatural case. “‘When they broke the door in they found him over there in the corner. Sort of kneeling in a heap, they say. As if he died saying his prayers.’”

You can follow Jac on Twitter @girlfromblupo.  This is her Amazon shop and she also has a Doctor Who blog.