Before I started building up a digital bookshelf with seemingly every book available via Kindle or Apple Books, I used to pick up most of my reading material from charity shops. There’s usually a good variety to choose from and one of the great things is seeing the older books that are dropped off for re-use. One of the best genres in this category is movie novelisations - an author’s official take on the plot of a film with more prose and less script. They can offer a lot of interesting insight where films don’t do so well, getting inside the head of the protagonists or antagonists, but at the same time can sometimes steer quite far away from your take on the original material. It’s always a bit of an adventure.

With any new hobby that you get stuck into, you can probably find a podcast out there that will offer up help, tips and advice. My increasing obsession with veg growing and gardening means I was quickly searching for green-fingered podcasts and this one caught my attention quite quickly. Epic Gardening is a mission founded by Kevin Espiritu and with a host of expert collaborators to get people growing more plants.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to dominate a lot of my viewing, with recent additions having mixed results. I’m loving a lot of the TV content they’ve developed, while some of the movies have been less successful for me (I’m looking at you Eternals). One thing I’ve really enjoyed, though, is the Marvel Studios: Assembled series. I’ve mentioned it before when it highlighted some great things about the making of Shang-Chi but there have been a lot more episodes since. For every big TV series or movie that is released, the team put out an accompanying Assembled episode which goes behind the scenes of how the content has been put together. (Oddly, the first six were grouped together as a series and the rest as standalone episodes but you can find them if you search ‘Assembled’.)

If you had to say to me, which of the Guardian’s of the Galaxy would make the perfect subject of their own spin-off TV show, I don’t think Groot would be my first choice. Baby Groot is, of course, adorable, but the limited dialogue offered by everyone’s favourite tree-based character would seem to reduce what any follow up shows could be about.

I didn’t know a six-part documentary charting the beginnings and growth of Industrial Light & Magic was in the works so when the show arrived on Disney+ last month, it was a pleasant surprise. I love a glimpse behind the scenes at how the magic is made in the film industry, and watching creative and brilliant people do what they do just fills me with inspiration and joy. So, as it turns out, this show was absolutely made for me.

Being in the Apple device cycle means putting up with the unfortunate changes they make to their devices until either you get used to it or they roll it back. I tend not to complain too much about them because I’m still so hugely in awe of how brilliant my phone and iPad are, so the benefits far outweigh the cons.

I had seen a couple of people talking about air fryers on TikTok, but not really paid it too much attention. It sounded like just another cooking fad that would pass me by, like slow cookers (I did actually try a slow cooker with disastrous results) and pressure cooking. But then a couple of friends were discussing their own joys of frying in only air and my ears perked up.

The level of curated content available on Apple Music is so good that it’s overwhelming - partly because there’s so much of it and partly because, despite repeated upgrades and efforts, navigating around the Music app is still really difficult. However, it’s super easy just to pop on one of the three radio channels and listen to whatever’s being played and my one favourite find at the moment is Rock Classics with Jenn, on the Apple Hits station. The premise is simple, Jenn guides us through brilliant rock classics from throughout music history based around a theme… and it’s the themes where the fun starts.

This website, mrschristine.com, has been hosted on a static site generator for just over three years and it’s been a fantastic step forward for me. At the time of the big switchover, I wrote about the pros and cons of moving away from Wordpress and it’s fair to say since then the pros keep getting better and better but the cons haven’t necessarily gone away.

Two years ago, to the very month, I wrote about my frustration on trying to follow news and blogs via RSS feed. It wasn’t hard to find great content that I wanted to keep on top of but finding the best way to actually subscribe and follow was really difficult. I think that problem has continued, particularly with the more fragmented world of newsletter subscriptions and paid for content.

A TV show about the challenges of parenting wouldn’t usually be up my street given how very happily childfree I am. However, buoyed by the success of watching Trying (a show about a couple looking to adopt) and by the excellent casting of Daisy Haggard and Martin Freeman, I thought I’d give Breeders a go. There have been three seasons, and the first one is slightly different to the others. I thought the first episode was an absolute triumph in plotting, following a sleepless night that really sets the scene for the rest of the show. It starts with a pact to sleep two hours on, two hours off, and it ends up with Freeman waking up in his car being accused of killing his kids… and yet it makes total sense.

A new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars series Andor was released this week and it looks so good. So very good. Rogue One was such a good film that it’s been a long time coming for a spin off of the spin off. The Disney+ blurb says the series ‘focuses on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make… the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved."

I was pretty ignorant about the state of the UK’s wildlife until the big lockdown meant concentrating on these four walls plus the back garden. You’ll know I concentrated my efforts on turning into a vegetable gardener, but alongside that is a growing understanding of the other creatures and insects that use our little pieces of greenery to survive. Hedgehog populations have been falling for a long time, and there’s always talk about what you can do to help. I went with the bowl of hedgehog food and a saucer of water each night to keep our prickly friends going, and noticed there were already little hedgehog-sized holes in the fence to let them come and go as they pleased. In fact, one evening, I followed a hedgehog at a safe distance around the garden and it magically disappeared in what seemed to me to be a dead end, so I’m confident they’ve got the fence network sorted.

Did you know there’s stand up comedy on Apple Music? I just found some recently, stumbled across it by complete accident, and I was surprised. Although, when I really thought about it, it does make sense. Old school stand up comedy used to be released on records, didn’t it, with people happily playing their favourite stand up on repeat.

We’ve reached August and it’s time to start the eighth 30 day challenge of my year. Off the back of timing the Waterllama hydration challenge so perfectly for the hottest days in the UK ever, the summer vibe continues and this month I’m focused on lunchtimes. We’re going for 30 Days of Salads. I’ve been eating more salads recently anyway, but it feels like it’s time to give the meal some proper attention. Firstly, I want to investigate varieties and recipes for salad so that it’s not just lettuce and cucumber every day that could get boring. Secondly, understanding what I can use from my garden and what I can look to grow next year to make salads for lunch an easy and super tasty thing.

When I kicked off July’s 30 Day Challenge, to get a full month’s streak on the health tracker Waterllama, I thought it was just a fun thing to do with a cute app that would help me keep hydrated. How could I have predicted that it would be around at exactly the right time - when temperatures in the UK hit their highest ever for a couple of days and keeping fluid levels up became crucially important?

Not long ago, I wrote of a new fondness for gin, particularly as June celebrated World Gin Day. Since then, I’ve learnt even more about the tipple and even managed to find a whole gin universe to be unravelled. Bear with me on this. I talked of James May’s gin, the cleverly titled James Gin, which has the broadcaster’s traditional understated marketing and labelling but is packed full of taste. Recent efforts to sell the gin have seen James May recruiting fellow Grand Tour star Richard Hammond, a noted gin-fan, for various things, such as talking about gin, or playing chess whilst under the influence of gin. All fun and games.

I’m not great at planning or being organised or looking too far ahead, although it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time (especially if the number of to-do apps I’ve reviewed on this blog are anything to go by). However, when it comes to gardening, apparently, a bit of forward planning is necessary.

I love stories about time travel so I was very intrigued by Sky’s new TV show, The Lazarus Project, an eight part series about a covert group trying to stop the end of the world. The premise is that this group keep an eye on world events and if there’s an extinction-level threat, they press a reset button that loops time back to the 1st July.

I got a couple of episodes into The Undeclared War before I realised I needed to get Mr C on board with this show. It’s airing on Channel 4 at the moment, or available as a boxset via streaming, and we very quickly demolished the lot.

I saw this clip on YouTube recently of Olivia Rodrigo on tour in London, bringing out Natalie Imbruglia to sing the Australian’s big hit Torn. It’s fun and frothy and, of course, an excellent song. Unfortunately, the video isn’t available to embed but it’s worth going over to YouTube to watch it for the frankly incredible quality.

Two weeks of tennis drew to a close yesterday, with the Wimbledon 2022 tennis tournament crowning its final champion and then standing down to give the grass its well-earned rest. It wasn’t a simple fortnight, with plenty of discussion points and controversies, and a final day of tennis that included a fight for the men’s singles championship between two less-than-ideal candidates. I kept abreast of the men’s side of things only because I was listening, as I do every year, to the wonderful Wimbledon Radio Channel - a fantastically fun broadcast that covers everything going on every day with a rotating set of presenters, guests, experts and commentators. Otherwise, I would only have focused on the women’s game, which itself was full of intrigue.

At the end of the June, the fabulous West End live celebration returned to the heart of London - two days of various musicals and productions putting on their best efforts to show the crowds what they can see in the West End at the moment. I missed keeping track of what was on during the weekend, mostly because of Wimbledon, but was surprised and thrilled to find lots of clips on YouTube.

Recently, I watched The Butterfly Effect - a film I’ve seen before a long time ago and couldn’t remember a lot about. The movie features some kids going to the cinema in the 90s, opting to watch the thriller crime drama Se7en, and we get to see a few clips from that film-within-a-film. I hadn’t seen Se7en, something which was instantly rectified, but the fact that I watched it specifically because it was mentioned in another movie got me thinking.

The third series of Apple TV+’s comedy series Trying starts next month and I am so excited for it. I watched the show as it aired, and loved it, and then recently rewatched it again to prepare for the new arrival. And now, if you want me to be really honest, I’m watching it again to pull out the best quotes from the show because it’s just that good.

This is just a short note to say, if you have access to Disney+, you absolutely have to watch Baymax! - the new spin-off show featuring the inflatable companion from the movie Big Hero 6. I don’t actually remember a huge amount about that movie, other than how adorable this giant cuddly robot was, so I was super happy to see the lovable giant got its own TV show.

The third series of Apple TV+’s comedy series Trying starts next month and I am so excited for it. I watched the show as it aired, and loved it, and then recently rewatched it again to prepare for the new arrival. And now, if you want me to be really honest, I’m watching it again to pull out the best quotes from the show because it’s just that good.

As always during the Apple Design Awards, this year I found myself downloading a variety of different award-winning and nominated apps. One of those was Waterllama, which is an adorable hydration tracker featuring several animals, including the titular llama, that you have to fill up with logged liquids to reach your goal.

This was a really interesting 30 day challenge for me. For the first week or so, it went perfectly, and then, of course, life got a bit busy and I started to lose the plot. In my head, ‘take a photo every day’ had become ‘take an amazing photo and post it to your website every single day.’ That, I think we can all agree, is much more challenging.

Glastonbury returned in triumphant fashion this past weekend and it’s the first time I feel like I’ve been really properly involved - to the extent of even checking through the lineups and making a list of what I wanted to track down if possible. It wasn’t all available to watch from the comfort of my sofa, but I think I did the best job I could and caught much of the fun from the weekend. Here are a handful of my favourite moments, starting with the first and most important.

I know I’m super late to the party here, but do people know how brilliant GoodNotes is? I’d tried it before, a long time ago, but it didn’t really register. This time, it came back to me as I was looking into bullet journals and other note-taking. There’s a whole eco-system out there of people designing and selling pdfs and downloads of organisational pages - recipe trackers, to do list pages, cleaning lists, habit trackers, pantry inventories, they’re all out there.

The third series of Apple TV+’s comedy series Trying starts next month and I am so excited for it. I watched the show as it aired, and loved it, and then recently rewatched it again to prepare for the new arrival. And now, if you want me to be really honest, I’m watching it again to pull out the best quotes from the show because it’s just that good. On paper, it probably shouldn’t appeal to me: a couple desperately want to have a child and are going through the rigorous adoption process to achieve their goal. I’m not really into the whole kids thing. But the relationships on this show are brilliant, perfect, hilarious, warm and wonderful. Nikki and Jason’s relationship and understanding of each other is the closest thing I’ve ever seen on screen to my own partnership.

The excitement and hype for this six-part Star Wars story featuring everyone’s favourite Jedi (except Yoda, and baby Yoda, and maybe Ahsoka too), was incredible. I was right there. I wanted to know what Obi-Wan had been up to in the time between the prequels and the original movies, and the trailers only served to make it an unmissable event.

I’ve been meaning to write about my growing gin obsession for a while now but realising it’s World Gin Day today kicked me into gear. I always liked the odd gin here and there but recently it’s become my tipple of choice. Partly that’s because I wasn’t enjoying the hangovers that wine left me with, whilst gin doesn’t have the same effect, and partly it’s because the word got out that I liked gin so that was often a gift I got, and the more I got, the more I liked it. Hooray!

I just finished watching the second series of The Flight Attendant, HBO’s dark comedy crime mystery show starring and executive produced by Kaley Cuoco. It was brilliant, potentially even better than the first series. 2020’s initial outing followed the adventures of Kaley’s character Cassie as she, a flight attendant on a fictional airline, woke up in a hotel bed in Bangkok next to a dead body. Gradually the mystery unfolded and following the twists and turns was exceptional.

A few years ago, boxed wine was the kind of thing you had when you couldn’t really afford the good stuff. It was looked down upon. Apparently, now, that’s all changing, and boxed wine is actually what we should all be buying. Unless you’re buying super posh wine that needs to sit in a cooled cellar and age for a few decades, there’s no actual advantage to having wine in a glass bottle, but that’s such an ubiquitous method of wine delivery, no one has really questioned it.

I’ve had a few months now that are more passive, reading challenges, so it’s time to turn the creative flow back on and do something productive. I’m going for something a bit more traditional this month - it’s June, it’s potentially summer, the sun should be out more than it isn’t, and there should be an opportunity for some good photos. That’s right, it’s a 30 days of photos challenge, where the plan, quite simply, is to take a fresh photo every day.

At the start of May’s 30-day challenge, I thought it was going to be a bit of a slog to get through a poem a day. By midway through, I was coming round to the idea, and by the end of the month, I think I’m okay with a bit of poetry now and then. I don’t think it’s something I want to keep up reading every day, despite having the book that makes it super easy with one poem for each day of the year. But I might keep it handy and catch up once in a while.

In coming up with plans for my various 30 day challenges this year, I stumbled across the 30 Days Wild initiative - an annual challenge from the Wildlife Trusts that encourages people, particularly kids, to get outside in nature and do wild things every day. It can be a fundraising thing, or just a participatory thing and it’s such a great idea. From 1-30 June, take part in the UK’s biggest nature challenge!

I’ve gone down a bit of a subscription rabbit hole recently. In working through various replacements for household goods as I go through this zero-waste obsession, I’ve found a lot of things that offer subscriptions, so that if it’s something you get along with, you can have it turn up to your door without thinking too much about it. Given the current pricing pressures in the UK, subscriptions can be a bit hit and miss - it’s good to know what you are paying out and when, but on the flip side, it’s useful to have control and delay payments where necessary.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m completely into the Top of the Pops replays on BBC Four at the moment, as they have reached the early nineties and I’m loving this era of music… we’re heading rapidly towards Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls and so much more goodness. They recently rounded out the year 1992 with the Christmas special, and at this moment in time, Whitney Houston had her vice-like grip on the number one spot with I Will Always Love You. This, of course, from the movie The Bodyguard featuring Kevin Costner.

Often, if I have a spare minute to fill and I’m near an Apple TV, I’ll pop up YouTube and have a riffle through what the US chat shows have been up to. I’ve often posted here about Jimmy Fallon and James Cordon and the silly antics they get up to, but I’ve got a new go-to that I tend to check first - Kelly Clarkson. If you’d have asked me three years ago who could take up a new chat show and make it not only work but be amazing, I don’t know that Kelly would have been my first pick but she’s brilliant. Bubbly and obviously awesome, but also with a self-confessed over-competitiveness in the games, alongside a keen willingness to bond with her guests… it’s pure and frothy and I love the clips I find.

The zero-waste challenge is still ongoing in my household, or maybe I should call it the reduce-waste-as-much-as-possible-because-zero-is-unrealistic challenge. When I use things and throw things away, I try to take a minute to think about if there’s a better alternative, and quite often find that there is, even if it’s not a perfect swap. That’s good news and it’s always a nice feeling when you embed something more virtuous into your life.

I’ve not set any hard and fast rules about how much to update my blog during a particular 30 day challenge because they’re all so different, and have different outputs. I only wrote an intro and an outtro to the Core challenge because what else is there to say? I didn’t gain a six pack so let’s move on. Meanwhile, I wrote three times about the Marvel Comic book challenge because there were things I needed to get off my not-very-defined chest.

I’ve been meaning to write about Slow Horses for a week or so now, having wrapped up watching the six-episode first season - it’s brilliant! The first episode had me concerned, the opening sequence of a terrorist hunt in an airport going wrong was fab but then followed up by a grumpy boss being awful to his employees. However, the intrigue overrides that and once you hit the second episode, you can’t look away.

Another month has ticked into action which means it’s time for another 30 day challenge to begin. This time: 30 Days of Poetry. This has come from a combination of lingering thoughts about Emily Dickinson following the exceptional Apple TV+ show, and the after effects of dipping into comics last month. Not two things that appear to have much in common at first, but the thing about the comics is, it made me see that to give a new type of media that you don’t usually like a go, you really have to give it a chance. I like the odd poem here and there, the standard classics and some old ones from childhood, but otherwise, I really don’t care about it much.

And we’re done, 30 days of comic books done and dusted. Have I learnt anything? Quite a lot actually but I think the main result of this thirty days is to prove that the Marvel comics are too complicated for me. Brilliant but hard. However, the Star Wars reboot - with that hard cut off between current canon and previous legend - is much easier to deal with.

Recently, I seem to have watched a lot of second series of things, either because they’ve just been released with much fanfare, or because I’ve done a bit of a catchup. Four of the shows I’ve watched recently have all had second series’ that differ quite significantly from their first, and it’s been very interesting to watch them myself and also see the reaction to them in the wider world. I thought I’d put my own thoughts down on paper (digital screen paper, obviously):

One of my favourite things about this year so far was getting to early spring and realising the desire to get back to my vegetable garden was back. Last year, I gave it a go but chucked it all in as a bad job after a disappointing haul of carrots. In my offline diary, I specifically wrote “and that might be the gardening over with. Bored of it now.”

Ten days of comics later, and I’m going to be honest, I don’t think I’m going to be reading all the Marvel comics that have ever been published. I like the idea of it, of course, but by day twenty I felt like the vast array of comics available was starting to get a bit wearing. I quite like browsing the covers and revelling in all the creativity that has gone into these issues - but picking what I actually want to read has been a challenge.