It’s been a slow couple of weeks Chez Pamela. If you read the blog regularly you will have noticed that the posts have been rather sporadic. This doesn’t mean that my general progress has halted, although it has slowed to the pace of the trains which rumble along the track near my flat, often stopping for the light which is almost directly in line with my windows. I live just the right distance from the railway line: the point where I hear the warning toots and the sound of freight trains drawing towards the station, but my possessions aren’t rattling every time a train goes by. To return to the blogging, well, I usually try to compose coherent entries, but all too often real life is just things and stuff. So today I’m going to treat you to a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

After I wrote about my Filofax last week I did some more thinking, aided as I so often am by comments from my lovely readers. I decided to go back to just keeping three months of diary pages in the binder, which isn’t entirely sensible given that my main reason for choosing the Filofax Original was to have space for the entire 2021 week on two pages diary plus notepaper. It turns out I do a lot less future planning than I thought I might.

Then there’s the Lamy Benitoite ink I’ve been using for journal entries – driving me round the bend and making my poor nib feel increasingly scratchy. I am sorely tempted to tip the ink away, but instead I’ve added some Waterman Inspired Blue to it. It’s a combination I’d already experimented with and quite liked so maybe it will suffice.

And, see, knitting is being done! After I completed the front of the Coconut Ice Sweater I faffed about a bit with some other sock yarns then settled on starting Noodle Soup Yarn’s Sturdy Sock in the wonderfully splodgy Speckled Eggs colour. Now I am alternating between the back of the sweater and the sock as the mood takes me.

I’ve worked my way over the past few months through re-listens of everything in my computer based audiobook library so now I’m uploading a few audiobooks I have on CD. The first one is “A Case For Paul Temple”, one of the modern re-makes faithfully reproduced from original scripts of the 1940s. Paul Temple is a writer of detective novels who is often called upon by Sir Graham Forbes of Scotland Yard to help out with real crimes which always involve some “master criminal” with a silly moniker who is co-ordinating all the crime in the country. At the end of eight episodes of cars being blown up, his wife being kidnapped or shot at, and the threat of either drowning or electrocution, Paul helps the police get their man and everyone sits around and eats walnuts. I haven’t watched “Line of Duty” but I imagine it’s pretty much the same thing….

Finally, there’s been film-watching. Having sat through some truly mediocre rom-com with George Clooney in (not good enough for me to bother checking the title), I upped the ante on Saturday by watching “When Harry Met Sally”. I’m sure I’ve seen this once before, but marked it down as sitting in the lower sector of a genre which itself is far from my favourite. I was quite surprised by how much I enjoyed it this time round, although Billy Crystal still isn’t quite charismatic enough for my taste. Very much in the manner of a seesaw, I then watched a truly awful British Film Institue offering which I would mark as “shockingly bad”. There was a lot of scenery within which a group of people did various things for no discenible reason. This, let’s face it, could describe an entire host of British films. I see the British Film Institute have their own subscription service with their hand-picked selection of critically acclaimed movies; one to avoid I think. I finished the weekend on a high note with “12 Monkeys” which isn’t the most cheerful film on the planet, but is very, very good. I’ve been intending to re-watch it for years and I’m glad I took the opportunity whilst it was available on BBC iPlayer.

So that wraps up my miscellaneous perambulations. Hopefully soon I’ll think of something specific to write about later in the week.