Once again, time for my round up of last year. In December, I had been thinking that I hadn’t seen many new films but now looking back at 2023’s list – I didn’t see that many new films then either in comparison to the years before (lol and I even mentioned that in my 2023 round up). Maybe films that I might have been interested in that were due to be released in 2023 and 2024 were affected by Covid and got delayed or cancelled. I guess we’ll see what 2025 shapes up like over the next year.

Films

As usual, in reverse order of how much I liked them:

• Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley – I basically watched this because I was starting to thinking I wouldn’t hit 10 new films for the year. It was fine.
• Apollo 13: Survival – I’ve seen the film with Tom Hanks and read the book by Jim Lovell that that film was based on, so I don’t think I really learned anything new seeing this.
• Gladiator II – Went to see this because my Mum wanted to see it even though she didn’t remember going to see the first Gladiator film, which she would have actually have taken me to see in the cinema. It was also fine, but ehh maybe I am too familiar with the real people some of the characters are named after for it to really work for me.
• Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band – I don’t think I discovered anything new about Bruce himself from this film but it was good to hear more from the band members and what the process of touring is like for them.
• A Real Pain – I don’t often enjoy films where I just don’t think I would want to spend time with any of the characters in real life but this was good. There’s stuff that’s occurred to me now about the marketing of this film in the context of some of the stuff that I do for my job but lol, not getting into that on the internet.
• The Extraordinary Miss Flower – This was a good choice for my last film of LFF as it’s music video kind of a film and by that point of the festival, I need something different.
• Endurance – I enjoyed this because I do love a documentary but really this would have been better as a 3 episode mini series.
• Seeking Mavis Beacon – This was more about the journey and what happens when the destination is something that you’re explicitly never going to reach and where you can go from there, along with some interesting thoughts on identity, representation and yeah, why are all the helpful voices in our devices female?
• Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story – In contrast to Seeking Mavis Beacon where the protagonists tell us about looking for someone, in this film Pauline Black tells us how she found herself, in her own words and that it’s in her own words is the most important draw.
• The Cats of Gokogu Shrine – Look. This is an observational film about cats. I’m not even a cat person and yet here it is, third on my list.
• Deadpool & Wolverine – I feel like this is a good film to end the Deadpool films on but I also feel like there will probably be more films with Deadpool as the main character. The Easter Eggs are extremely entertaining to spot, but are a nice extra rather than having to do the heavy lifting.
• Conclave – I was always going to enjoy a film that was “what if Agatha Christie wrote about cardinals being bitchy to each other” because I am fairly Catholic in an easy-going way (which I guess has to be a thing) but it’s not only that. The dishonesty of some of these men about their past actions and the thinking that they cannot be accountable for those choices because of their position is exactly what then disqualifies them from being elected. This, along with the lobbying and scheming for votes, is a big part of a film which at its heart is about honesty, faith and trying to do the right thing even at personal cost. It’s also a 2 hour long film but moves quickly and it felt like no time passed at all as it’s so engaging.

Music

I don’t remember any new albums I listened to last year. I know Dave Hause put out some mostly vinyl only stuff that I did buy and enjoy – but I remember it mostly because it was a record you had to go in person to a gig and buy.
Speaking of which, I did go to 7 gigs in the end.

• Dave Hause (where I picked up a copy of that album)
• The Gaslight Anthem (who I kind of went off of right around when they went on hiatus (possibly even for the reason that I think they went on hiatus))
• Alkaline Trio (who I really haven’t listened to much in recent years, but this gig was really enjoyable)
• Ásgeir
• Bedouin Soundclash (still thinking about how their support act doesn’t have any CDs or sell music on Bandcamp)
• Sleep Token (awesome)
• Electric Six (who I only really knew those three songs they put out 20 years ago and it turns out they have like 15 albums and a dedicated fanbase since they are very entertaining)

Electric Six was also one of those gigs where the queue for the ladies was non-existent and in an entertaining turn of events it was the other toilets with a queue. Plus the support act, Enjoyable Listens was really good and was kind of like if Gabriel Bruce was English and kind of eccentric.

Other stuff

I suppose if I wrote more about this stuff at the time it was happening I would remember more of it, but I guess I do ok. I went to Valencia because I needed to use a travel voucher and picked it because that’s where Formula E goes to do their testing (although after the huge flooding, 2024 testing had to be moved to Madrid). I saw the penultimate FE race of the season in London. I went to Margate so I could visit the Crab Museum and ended up also visiting other cool places like the Shell Grotto and Walmer Castle. Went on a short cruise visiting France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Went to Norfolk and stopped off at the Oliver Cromwell museum on the way. In sad news, that Uncle who kept swerving meeting up with us each time in the last 14 years that we’ve got on a plane to travel to the other side of the planet where he lives, did in fact die so I guess I was right that we’d never see him again. It is what it is. In happier news, one of my cousin’s daughters got married and I’m extremely pleased for her – her young man seems well brought up etc and I’m sure they will have many, many years of love and happiness ahead of them.

More gigs already planned for 2025, along with one small trip so far and another London e-prix.

I used to post a lot on twitter and then twitter happened and now I’m not really there anymore and neither are a lot of people I would typically follow there – though it’s fifty-fifty on whether that’s because I only look at the “vroooom” motorsport list and not my following or because they’ve actually stopped posting there like I have.

Parts of it are like the post-livejournal splintering. Parts of it are worse because that was so long ago and some of my friends are no longer on the planet for me to be able to follow them to a new social media platform and it feels like I’m leaving them behind, though they’re not there to be left behind. If you get me.

There’s elements of keeping a dead loved one’s phone number in your phone/address book.

I read a lot of email newsletters and of course, I have a backlog of unread newsletters but once again it’s like stepping back into a better time, where the world felt better (though of course, these newsletters are all written during a time AFTER the last time I retreated into the past they offered that I can’t even remember what that event that sent me there was).

Trying to figure out what newsletters in my sidebar I’m still subscribed to and what ones are missing – I guess I’ll have to come back to this one.

I asked someone what their favourite shape was recently and now I’m gently spiralling around the sound of I-S O-S CE-LES

While February 2023 feels like it was only a few weeks ago and I’m sort of wondering what I could have done all year, I also know that I did do some stuff.

I spent Eurovision week in Norfolk and another couple of weeks in Malaysia. I saw Loveless (twice), Asgeir, Dave Hause, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, Hozier, ThxSoMch and Sleep Token play live (and have already bought tickets for a few gigs next year). I went to the penultimate e-prix of the season in London and saw FE cars whizz about making their souped-up milk float noises (affectionate).

I did not really see that many new films – last year there were 25 and this year there are only 13. Partly, I feel like there just wasn’t a lot I felt like seeing at the London Film Festival but also, I did have kind of a general meh feeling about going to my local cinema. Was there even anything I might have seen in another year? I can only think of “The Marvels” and maybe there wasn’t anything else or I just didn’t hear about other films to make me go and see them.

Anyway, those 13 films in reverse order of how much I liked them, as is customary for such things:

• The Monkey King – I get that Monkey is kind of annoying, but I’d thought other interpretations had a kind of loveable scamp quality to him on occasion that this one just didn’t have. It was kind of limp.
• Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine – This was just an hour long documentary about the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which did its job and told me about that but you can see how The Monkey King had to be poor to be less liked than a film that was merely efficient and functional.
• Behind the Mountains – There’s some weird pacing choices and the main character just kind of gets angry sometimes and doesn’t really seem to talk to anyone about why he does the stuff he does.
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – Kept things going at a reasonable pace but might have benefitted from reusing stuff from previous films a bit less.
• Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre – I saw this on the flight back from Malaysia, so I expect I must have seen an edited version but this is the same airline that edited out the word “Jew” from Sandman but not the word beginning with C meaning vulva. I don’t think any edits would have made too much difference in all honesty since this film delivers everything you’d expect from a Jason Statham film directed by Guy Ritchie.
• The Pigeon Tunnel – John Le Carré does have a very interesting life story, and is an excellent storyteller as you might expect from someone who has written so many popular books. I’m not sure I’m entirely sold on Errol Morris’ interview technique generally, but the contrast between them was entertaining at least.
• One Life – I already knew about the Kindertransport and Sir Nicholas Winton before I saw this film and I’ve seen the relevant clips on youtube a few times – so nothing happens in this film that I did not expect but it was still worth seeing how some man just slogging away at paperwork managed to impact so many lives.
• The Book of Clarence – Since this one is related to Jesus, I took my Mum to see it at LFF and she had a great time, particularly since the director was there to talk about the film. I liked the choice to make it in that 50s/60s biblical epic style.
• Fingernails – This was good, but like I’ve said elsewhere, I never want to see it again. I also feel like not everyone in the screening I saw was expecting a science fiction kind-of-dystopia setting.
• Barbie – I mean…she’s everything.
• John Wick: Chapter 4 – For a lot of the year, this film was at the top of my 2023 list and it’s only because I saw two outstanding films in October that it’s in third place. Like the previous films, this is full of deeply satisfying action, beautifully shot and exists in a universe where you don’t need to question how John Wick gets to the places around the world that he shows up in, he just does.
• COPA 71 – FIFA are literally the worst and these footballers are absolute legends. The amount of archival footage was fantastic, especially since the entire event basically got deleted from football history.
• The Taste of Things – I could live in this film. Ok, not literally in that time period because I do enjoy having a microwave, but just put me at those dinner tables. A film about love, that feels like the smoothest, most velvety chocolate ganache and I would absolutely devour it, if you could make the experience of a film tangible.

Definitely see that last one.

Disappointing to discover that when we’re travelling to the literally other side of the planet, one of my uncles will only see us in an airport in an adjacent country to the one we are going to.

Like.

No point leaving the airport to spend any time there, he’s worried that we would want to stay in his house and like, I get that he is concerned about Covid (particularly while travelling) but we have never been welcome in his house and he’s over eighty so why would we even suggest that we would stay in his house? Get in another plane, after having flown thousands of miles already, to just visit the airport of another country and then immediately turn back and get on another plane to go back to the country we initially flew to.

Apparently we can “see him on Zoom” – we will not being seeing him on Zoom because we don’t see him on Zoom now, while we are on the other side of the planet so I can’t see that it’ll happen if we are 200 miles away instead of nearly 7,000 miles away.

Turns out 2011 will have been the last time we ever saw each other, which is particularly sad for my Mum who is his sister whereas I’m just a niece. We didn’t see him the last time we were there as he had some issue with tax in the country we were going to (which was also kind of a weird excuse – the reunion had been planned for some time and it’s not like he doesn’t have his own property in that country to live in anyway).

The new Dave Hause album is SO good. Just, ugh, great great great.

The gig last month was great too and reminded me* that I should go listen to live music more often – something to look forward to and it’s a real mood booster when I’ve been. It’s always “why did you book this Past-me, I don’t feel like going out” beforehand and “Past-me you are a genius, this was the best idea” afterwards. So I’ve added in Postmodern Jukebox and Hozier between now and the Loveless gig I already have a ticket for and I see some time in my near future when I need to sit down and see what else is out there that I can put in around my existing commitments. Definitely see what’s more local to me than the nearest city too.

The other thing to figure out is the crossposter to my other blog – I think the one to Dreamwidth is still going fine but the one to my other WordPress install went wonky a while back and I’m not sure that the plugin I use for other stuff, that could also crosspost, would allow for the posting to Dreamwidth too. It’s been twenty years, I should probably learn how to write a WordPress plugin myself at this point.

Took Mum to see John Wick 4, which she loved and I think she scandalised her friends at church who didn’t expect someone her age to enjoy so much out and out violence. I think it’d be weirder that when you have Michelle Yeoh being a boss at martial arts action movies, a retiree with a similar kind of background wouldn’t love martial arts films too.

* that and seeing Asgeir at the beginning of March.

As I noted in November, I didn’t post my 2021 films for some reason and I still don’t remember why but here they are.  Shang-Chi was pretty great.

Did I do anything this year? Did I go anywhere? I feel like I did visit Walsingham but don’t remember anything about it – oh, I remember now. I actually went on holiday to Ipswich and then drove to visit Walsingham on one of the days I was there and that’s why I don’t remember staying in Walsingham.

I also attended one of the London e-prix and had the great idea of staying the night before in a hotel nearby because lol I am not waking up early to get there. That was also about the time I fell on my car and smacked my shin so hard on the doorframe that it got infected and I had the exciting opportunity to “enjoy” two different rounds of antibiotics. It’s still not the right colour, but that’ll get better in time.

I saw Daði Freyr at the Roundhouse, an event that I bought the ticket for over a year in advance thinking “the whole pandemic stuff will be gone by then” and it’s not really but it turns out that I’m one of those people for whom wearing a mask tight against my face for hours isn’t a hardship (even though I wear glasses and now that I’ve got a pair with the arms that curl round my ears rather than being straight, I’m less likely to have them just fall off my face). Sort of related – I’m pondering going to see Måneskin next year but am extremely ambivalent about the O2 Arena AND it’ll be when I have a week off and maybe I will want to go somewhere that week.  We’ll see. Maybe if there are tickets still on sale closer to the time, I’ll decide then.

Anyway, onto the new films I saw in 2022, from least favourite to most favourite as is customary:

• The Middle Ages -I saw two films set during the pandemic lockdown season and this was the worst. It seemed like an interesting idea at the time I put it on my “to watch” list but it just wasn’t fun.
• Our Lady of the Chinese Shop – I am, obviously, a big fan of Catholic-adjacent tat and this film is named for that. Felt like it wasn’t finished.
• Blind Yellow Sunshine – Knowing something about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner improves this, but since I knew nothing while I was watching – at least it was short.
• Roary – it says something that 6 minutes of the MGM lion just… roaring was better than the first 3 films on this list.
• The Estate – Unfunny. Which is a shame because the cast were doing their best.
• Crows Are White – The director/main character’s wife is a literal saint and must super love him to put up with his shenanigans.
• Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power – Interesting documentary, but weird that the director’s films are irreproachable masterpieces and all other female filmmakers’ work is infected by the male gaze.
• Inside the Mind of a Cat – I’m not a cat person, but it was interesting to see all the cat people and was a frothy light hour or so of viewing when that was what I needed.
• Geographies of Solitude – Turns out documentaries about scientists doing research in remote places is a thing I enjoy.  The sporadic bits of film processed on the island with bits of the island added a good contrast of texture.
• The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness – I liked some of the individual works more than others but thinking about them now I don’t know that I can remember any but Alcestis.
• God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines – I didn’t know anything about the history of techno music so this was educational. I can recognise the nerding out about synthesizers in musicians I know now.
• See How They Run – I think maybe this film was trying to capture that Knives Out vibe but just doesn’t manage it because they were reading from the “how to Wes Anderson” instruction manual.
• Unicorn Wars – Did I see this just because it was teddy bears going to war? Yes.
• My Robot Brother – I feel like I’m getting closer to the top 10 because I’m starting to get to films that was actually “good” rather than just “I watched them.” Has kind of the feel of those educational TV series we used to watch at school like “Through The Dragon’s Eye” if that had been turned into a film solely for entertainment.
• Staging Death – 8 minutes of Udo Kier’s death scenes cut together. The highlight is recognising all the ones you’ve already seen.
• After Sherman – This was another film telling a part of the director’s personal experience and this one has the extreme benefit of not having a deeply frustrating director that sabotages his own life.
• Jill, Uncredited – Anthony Ing manages to weave a story out of a selection of clips of the thousands of Jill Goldston’s appearances as an extra in film and TV which really illustrates just how many productions she was a part of to make that possible (and there were many appearances that just didn’t make the cut on top of these). Jill was at the screening I saw and it was a delight to hear just how much she loved being part of these films and had the best experiences doing them.
• The Wonder – Not sure about the framing device, but this was a good watch.
• Corsage – I discovered that a whole bunch of films was made recently about Empress Elisabeth of Austria and I want to check them out.  It works better if you know a bit more about the real Elisabeth.
• Thor: Love and Thunder – I did think when I saw this film that it would be higher up the list and yes, it is good and enjoyable (even when you’re familiar with the comics so there’s less surprise). I think it’s a combo of “this film could have been better” and “I saw a number of satisfying films this year.”
• Living – This was great. I saw Aimee Lou Wood in Uncle Vanya and she was a delight in that and she’s great here too.
• Into The Ice – This is the other scientists doing research in remote places film I saw and seeing all of the giant holes in the ice was just wild and mindblowing.
• Meet Me in the Bathroom – Documentary about the New York music scene in the early 2000s and yes I was only there for Interpol, whose first album is the only CD I ever wore out, but it was fascinating to hear about the other bands too. Was weirdly like someone did a time-travel to shoot the early 00s footage, but obviously they just recorded video at the time and it’s wild to think that in 10-20 years there could be something like this built out of band’s insta/tiktok videos.
• Hidden Letters – I knew some stuff about Nushu already so hearing from some of the women who have kept this language alive was interesting and touching. “Loved” that moment where some man asked how they could make Nushu, a language that had survived in secret for hundreds and hundreds of years, continue to survive without commercialising it in the cheapest possible way and only saw that as an option.
• Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – I am so glad that loads of people have now seen this because I have been waiting for months, MONTHS, to hear about people’s enjoyment of this film. This takes the thing I love about Columbo and Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple and Poirot (i.e. helping the little guy obtain justice and sticking it to the man) and just SLAPS IT RIGHT DOWN ON SILLY OLD MILES BRON’S FACE. The thing I took away from seeing this in a cinema was that I was surrounded by people who did not know who Yo-Yo Ma is and that was in my top 3 cameos in the film. Re-watching it now that it’s out on Netflix has only improved it because I can spot the things I didn’t spot on the first viewing AND I have the benefit of seeing things that other people who know stuff have picked up on. Knives Out was my 2nd favourite film of 2019 and it’s deeply satisfying that this one was so enjoyable.

I realised about half-way through this year that I didn’t post my films of 2021 but I don’t remember why I didn’t get to it.

Anyway. I’m a sporadic blogger, but I am here.

What if, like, what IF I actually attempted to recreate my LJ theme over here? Although really, it would probably be easier to find a theme that I could just slap my header image into. 

Although I should investigate if this one originally had something like that.

Anyway. I guess the thing I really enjoy is how icons I made about 10 years ago still look ok.

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 A lot of things happened in 2020, but mostly they happened to other people because I didn’t leave the house for most of the year.

And like, I don’t really have anything to say here about those things.

Anyway, on to the customary look back at the new films I saw in 2020 from least liked to most liked. I didn’t step foot in a cinema all year¹, so I’m not entirely sure how I ended up seeing a good 10-15 more new films than usual – especially since I had a hard time sitting down and watching anything much over an hour long – and somehow I ended up watching like 100 films in total which seems… excessive. In previous years, I’ve said something about each film – that’s not happening today lol.

• Genus Pan – This and the next film were just SO boring. This is the kind of thing I end up seeing when there’s a global pandemic and the film festival I normally go to moves online removing the logistic obstacles that needing to get a train across town to another cinema puts in my way.
• Striding Into The Wind
• Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal – Turns out I don’t enjoy interactive films
• The Yalta Conference Online – In some ways, doing the Yalta Conference as a Zoom meeting was a good idea. In other ways, it was not.
• Motorcycle Drive By
• David Byrne’s American Utopia – Maybe this was overhyped? Maybe I’m just not that into David Byrne’s music?
• The Light Side
• Summer Shade
• 180 Degree Rule
• I Am Patrick: The Patron Saint of Ireland
• Possessor – Everything I heard about this one beforehand was like “oooh scary horror, oooh body horror” (I guess because Brandon Cronenberg did it) but like… it’s just a science fiction film. It’s not scary horror.
• Delia Derbyshire: The Myths And Legendary Tapes
• Shadow Country
• Sound for the Future
• Identifying Features
• The Real Right Stuff
• Mulan – I still don’t get why so many of the animated Disney films get remade as live action (well, I mean, I DO, it’s for the money BUT STILL). This was… same old, same old I guess.
• Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb
• My Octopus Teacher
• The Disciple – This was really good. I feel like a lot of good films seem to be way down the list but it’s just that I saw a lot of new films this year.
• Wildfire
• The Old Guard
• Cicada
• African Apocalypse
• Ari Eldjárn: Pardon My Icelandic – Does an hour-long Netflix comedy special count as a film? Well, I guess. It’s in the films section after all.
• Jude – This is a film about someone I know and tbh I don’t know whether I can really categorise it in with all the others very well because it’s valuable to me AS a film about this person and it’s not there to be entertainment.
• One Man and His Shoes
• The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special
• Herself
• The Reason I Jump
• Time
• John Was Trying to Contact Aliens
• Soul – I wanted to go and see Soul as part of LFF but it was one of the in-person-at-the-cinema-only ones, which obviously was ridiculous because of the global pandemic, but then it eventually came to Disney Plus so here we are.
• Undine – I kind of knew the folklore so I figured I knew what would happen, and then stuff happened and it didn’t seem like that but then you get to the end of the film and you realise that exactly what was supposed to happen did happen.
• Mogul Mowgli – This was a big m o o d from start to finish.

  “They ever ask you, “Where you from?”Like, “Where you really from?”The question seems simple, but the answer’s kinda long”

• Stray – I don’t know what I expected when I got a ticket to see a film about stray dogs in Turkey – certainly not a film that’s told at dog-height, but it works and it was great.
• Wolfwalkers – We all know that the villain has always been Oliver Cromwell. The art in this was fantastic,
• Enola Holmes – I am here for a whole franchise of this. CHURN THEM OUT. I will watch them. Forever lol at Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes.
• The Painter and the Thief – This kind of reminds me of the film Dancer, which was about Sergei Polunin, in that clearly they start making the film and don’t really have any idea of where the story will end up and then it ends up being amazing.
• Never Gonna Snow Again – Funny but also kind of sad.
• Another Round – Yes, the last like 5-10 minutes are fantastic, but I think they’re only so good because you’ve just watched the whole film before that part and you need to, to kind of get that release.
• Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga – I LOVE Eurovision and this was great and the best part is how we never actually find out who won that context because that is not the point – much in the same way that with real Eurovision, it’s not really winning that’s the point for me.
• Rising Phoenix – This was a really good look at a few Paralympic athletes from various backgrounds. I really hope that the Games can go ahead this year if there is a safe-as-possible way to do so, but at the same time WILL it be possible?
• Uncle Vanya – Ok, yes, this is the filmed version of a play that I did actually go to see in person, in the theatre, about a week before my workplace sent us all to work from home and maybe 10 days before the entire country did her first lockdown. I’m not convinced that all of the changes they made (mostly way the monologues played out, but how would I have it differently???) were all good choices, but when I watched this on TV, I still felt exactly as I had when I’d finished watching in the theatre. Would this play leave me as emotionally wrung out at the end in any other year? Maybe not, but maybe so. The set was even more beautiful in person, and I’m not sure that the film really captures that. Incredible 2020 vibes.

While I didn’t get to go to the cinema last year, I did manage to go to two gigs back in February – Dave Hause at the Union Chapel which was FANTASTIC and Asgeir at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, which was also delightful. Bedouin Soundclash was supposed to happen in May, but got pushed back to February 2021 and of course, it’s now been cancelled. I’m not sure that they’ll tour again so I’m glad I saw them when I could. The Star Wars concert that I was supposed to attend in March, was also cancelled, but I guess someone is always going to put on a Star Wars concert at the Royal Albert Hall, so that one will come around again one day.

1.I was going to say “weirdly,” but look, we all know what’s going on this year so it’s not weird at all.

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Considering the number of places my blog posts syndicate out to, you’d think I’d update a little more than I do. Such is life.

I’ve been catching up on a bunch of unread email newsletters in ye olde inbox and it’s like time-travel in a really nice way. The world when those missives were sent was still not that great a place but at least less of us were suffering and dying thanks to some pandemic and the failures of government.

The Home Screen newsletter (actually a recent edition, rather than one from some time last year) talked about how Adobe doesn’t like Photoshop to be used as a verb and I could only think that they probably wouldn’t be too fond of how I and a few other people say “potato-chopped” instead.

Read an article about people not remembering the 1918 Flu Pandemic and realising I had no idea that people don’t know about it? I guess a lot of people don’t study that period of history, and if they do learn about the First World War, they don’t learn about how there was this big double whammy of awful at the time. Plus, I guess, people who were alive then and are still alive now would have been tiny babies and there really aren’t that many of them left. And who hangs out with the elderly?

I mean, ok. I do and yeah, I knew a lady whose Dad survived WWI only to get it from flu when he came home – her mum used to drag her along to his grave on birthdays and Christmas and she hated it.

And I was thinking about it the other day, in the sense of “well how did we survive that?” but the thing is – millions and millions of us just didn’t. It’s that the way death works is that when you’re dead you’re not going to come back and chat about how you were sick and it was awful.