The BBC have a new series on at the moment called Nature's Miracle Babies, and the first episode featured lots of cute and cuddly baby pandas. I only half-watched it really, jealous of the man getting to play around with the balls of fluff, and also slightly concerned when they practically ripped his plastic apron from him as they played. I watched and blogged a BBC documentary on the almost …

Another great installment of the Inspector Frost series. Very similar to all the others, in that there are many different cases, with lots of different people - some of the threads intertwine and some don't. Some spark off clues to others, and some are entirely separate. Frost is his usual grumpy self, although this time he has not one, but two colleagues to try and get on side. One of them is a woman, and that means this book is more full than usual of hideous stereotypes and sexism. A sign of the times, perhaps, but it did make me more uncomfortable than normal.

A while ago, I set up my own About.me page. It's not the most exciting thing you are going to see today, but I quite like the simplicity of the concept. I think About.me are aiming to be the digital version of a business card - a place to send people to find a quick introduction and then all the other places you might be on the web. The nice …

Typical that we get to the final week and I am delayed by... everything. First I went to the Steam Fair and took a day or two to recover from all that walking and all that sun. Then I was prepared to go out, got up early and everything and it was bucketing it down. Didn't quite fancy it. Nevertheless, eventually, I managed to get Week 7, the final one, …

Mmmm, Independence Day. Aliens, action, Will Smith, crazy over-the-top speeches, humour, world in peril, what's not to like? Actually, the main story is silly, with plenty of bits that are unbelievable, but as a whole, it's good stuff. The humour, the partnership between Smith and Goldblum, it makes up for the ridiculous bits. The three bits I remembered were The White House, the Independence Day speech and the guy in the plane saving the day.

It got off to a slow start, I must say. There was a lot of snow, a lot of moments of the pair of them looking cold and fighting and heavy breathing and stuff. However, once it got going, once she pushed that button, it really picked up. I loved seeing her try and fit in, trying to understand the concept of electricity and remote controls.

David Walliams completed an epic 140 mile swim in eight days, following the path of the River Thames to raise money for Sport Relief. He finished yesterday, and my guess is he's been sleeping ever since. Almost immediately that he climbed out of the Thames for the last time, he spoke to the BBC for a surprisingly eloquent, if exhausted, interview. I'm not normally one to take much notice of …

When Mr C and I started discussing book trailers, we did a bit of research and talked concepts and all that good stuff. I decided to make a storyboard of my thoughts on what our trailer should perhaps have in it. I am not good at art, though, as we have previously discovered. Instead, I turned to my trusty iPad, and what do you know, there were a couple of …

Since writing my two-part F1 book and releasing it on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, many people have noted with disappointment that they don’t own a Kindle device. Yet one of Amazon’s best kept secrets is the many, many Kindle apps they have created offering the ability to read their ebook content on a variety of different devices. Even if you don’t possess a Kindle, you should still be able …

But then we were watching, and we watched for an hour, and I just wasn't getting it. It was weird, it was slow paced, if there was humour there it was very sporadic, and good grief, if I heard 'We're on a mission from god' or 'We're getting the band back together' one more time, I was going to explode.

The troublesome trio are off on another adventure. Presumably dissatisfied with the action they found back in "Eastendersland" last time, they are in search of a fun and exciting planet. Only trouble is, Amy has forgotten her phone. "I bring you to a paradise planet two billion light years away and you want to update TWITTER!" The Doctor has heard of Twitter! I digress. Amy forgets her phone, takes the …

As if I wasn't already taking over the internet enough, I've set up another domain and site. If you head over to christineblachford.com you will find a quite sparse, but in progress website. That is the place where I'll be specifically posting updates about books and writing and that kind of thing. Don't think I won't talk about that stuff here too, but it felt sensible to nab the domain …

Formula One, the pinnacle of motorsport, has over sixty years of history - much of it colourful, some of it chequered, all of it fascinating. Instead of wading through pages and pages of mind-numbing facts and figures, That’ll be the Day aims to give you the action one slice at a time. For every day of the year there is a story, a biography, a series of facts, making a …

Whilst wandering around the Steam Fair last weekend, we found a line of displays that showed off how smaller engines could deliver a steady stream of water. One couple in particular had a unique way of showing off their technology. I should have taken video really, because the panda was hooked up to the lever and pumping away at the water. Back and forth he went, poor thing. It was …

BBC Four are re-airing The Killing - 20 episodes of the Danish drama in its native language with subtitles. This is not the kind of thing I would normally watch. I love a good crime drama, but throw in subtitles as well and it all gets a bit tricky. I tend to watch TV whilst I am busy doing other things, so it is difficult to keep an eye on …

I really enjoyed it, and was surprised at how much I laughed. Some of it was a bit coarse, but in the grand scheme of things it was more funny than it was anything else, and that's a win. My crush on Bradley Cooper is fully formed now, so I may have to go back and watch the A Team again, just to see.

Fresh from my adventures with Shelfari, I've also signed up to Goodreads. I investigated them both and went for Shelfari simply because the website appealed to me more, but having had quite a lot of fun with one reading site, I thought why not double it? Goodreads does very much the same, although there are some things it does not do as well, and some things it offers that are …

As this very wise post says, a lot of the goings on in the Archers this month have been to do with business and money. From the trials and tribulations at Bridge Farm, to Peggy's desperate bid to keep Jack's carer, everything has resolved around those little round coins. The Bridge Farm situation keeps on going from bad to worse. Customers are turning away in their droves, businesses are severing …

Overall it was good. Towards the end it got a little obvious, but that didn't really matter. It was more about the dancing, and the overriding theme that you can really do whatever you want instead of being boxed in. I liked the music, although I must say their main dance at the end wasn't as special as I'd thought it might be. It looked quite chaotic.

The story was okay, although a bit cliched in places. It was far too long, but I suppose that comes of having to fit in lots of singing in amongst the story, rather than letting the songs move the story along (like in musicals). I didn't like any of the characters and certainly couldn't relate to them, but their story was interesting enough. I probably could have done with subtitles, because not only were they quite deep accents, they also seemed to mumble an awful lot.

It was an intriguing concept and interestingly portrayed. I really bought into the three different couples but as I am not a big fan of weddings, I felt like an outside for quite a lot of the film. It was amusing, but I didn't really find it laugh out loud funny. My concerns about the mockumentary format were unfounded though. It kept my attention throughout.

The start of the movie was weird, and the end got even weirder, but I really liked the action in the middle. The concept was an intriguing one, although there had to be some kind of suspension of belief to think they would really go that far with it. I love hearing the dialogue of these older films. I really do think there is not enough 'chum' in the world anymore. Overall I quite liked it, although it did get slightly odd at points.

The scariest place in the world is a child's bedroom. I must say, I don't recall finding my bedroom that scary. The occasional moment where you see a shadow and can't figure out what it is, but not much of the "monsters in the cupboard" stuff. However, plenty of children do find bedtime and the subsequent switching off of the lights a rather terrifying time, and this story captures that …

I really enjoyed this book. Having seen the film, I was keen to read where the idea came from, and I was fascinated throughout to see where the differences were between book and screen. There were quite a few differences, it felt like the book had a lot less open strands to take the story forward. I can understand why they would need the film to have more characters and a few more subplots, but I enjoyed it being focused on the main character alone.

Yesterday, I went to the Great Dorset Steam Fair with my dad. He's been before and really liked it. I've never been, or if I have my memory has erased it. I must admit, when we were first talking about going, I was sort of expecting it to be a bit like the Gillingham & Shaftesbury Show, which is somewhere my dad and I also visited. It is nothing like …

I am a terrible artist. I can see things in my head, but there is some kind of communication lost between my imagination and my hand, so that a pencil drawing ends up looking terrible. Nevertheless, I recently got lost in a world of "how to draw" videos on YouTube, and when I realised it was Baby Panda Thursday today, I thought the two things would combine quite nicely. The …

This week was over before I really knew about it, which is odd because it felt like a really mismatched weeks. Sometimes I thought I hadn't been running for ages, sometimes it felt like I was tying up my shoelaces all the time. Nevertheless, the end of the Fitness Class is creeping up on me. After this week, there are just four workouts left. Goodness knows what I'll do after …

Overall, I'd say the film was entertaining. There was a lot of firefighting, plenty of action, although there were some hardhitting moments to go with it. A lot of the emotional moments were just too cliched though. Oh, wait, there's a marine who has a pregnant wife back home? Who'd have thought it? And oh, they need a pep talk because they don't quite trust their sergeant's motives? Some stock lines coming right up. It was cliched everywhere.

Let's come at this from the very beginning then. At the end of the last half of the series, I said I wasn't bothered about watching the rest. I knew I was going to watch this first episode to see where they took it, but the rest was up for grabs. As much as I love the Doctor, there are other ways I can spend an hour on a Saturday …

I have read one Salman Rushdie book before, and it took me three months to plough my way through it. They are not my style at all, but as this one appeared on the list I have chosen as part of my Life List, I was ready to give it a try. The trouble I have is that I can't wade through the strange construction of sentences. There are some great descriptions, some lovely lines of text, but it's so hard to get to them. The characters seem almost incidental to the underlying story, but I could never figure out what the story was trying to get to either.

Split into two parts, the first covers the story in detail - in this case, from the appearance of Stalin to the introduction of Yeltsin, via the Vietnam war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the rise and fall of multiple presidents and prime ministers. The second half is the appendix, with a quick overview of the main characters involved in the subject, and then a great timeline for just the key facts in the order they happened.

This baby panda looks how I feel today. As always, watch with the sound down, because for whatever reason, being in a zoo makes people screech.

I was really looking forward to The Hour, a six part series on the BBC that followed some 1950s Beeb journalists setting up a news programme called, funnily enough, The Hour. It was compared to Mad Men from the outset, but it wasn't much like that crazy advertising world. In fact, the only real similarity was the bad hair and the constant chain-smoking. After the first episode, I wasn't sure …

Turns out, it was a lot better than I was expecting. Far more of a comedy than a romance. It took them a while to get together, and even though there was an inevitable falling out/making up bit, it really wasn't dominating the second half of the film. I laughed out loud quite a lot, and I really enjoyed the kookiness of Drew's character. Hugh played the same character as he has in a gazillion other films, but the partnership between the two was great fun.

I've talked about David Mitchell's Soapbox before, I love the rants and most of them are as if he has read my mind. It's into the third series now, but never before has one been so identical to how I feel. Even if he is speaking through a "gradgrindish persona adopted for comic effect" all of it is spot on.

A pretty quiet week. The distances have been creeping up which I find disconcerting because a) I don't really have the time to run more than 7km, given how slow I am and b) training for a 5k should not involve an 11k, should it? That's not this week, but in a couple of weeks time. Bah! If I could do 11k just like that, then all that 10k related …

Google has made doodling famous, but the practice of scribbling away when someone is talking is still considered rude and/or bad practice. I've never really pondered this fact until recently, when I became aware of the Doodle Revolution. Sunni Brown heads up the revolution, with an aim of changing the perception of doodlers from inattentive listeners to engaged ears, and reviewing working practices to make creativity a bigger part. I …

Mmm, Back to the Future. I love to browse the branded t-shirts, but I never really buy them because once I start, I think I would become bankrupt quite quickly. However, I was looking at BTTF related t-shirts recently, I forget why, and these are my favourite five that I stumbled across. Dr. E. Brown Enterprises I like the ones that aren't supremely obvious, so whilst all Back to the …

A beautiful little animation. It's sad at the end, but the description on Vimeo suggests it "sets off the compassion of an imaginative little boy" which I think can only be a good thing.

This is one of the best films I've seen in ages. It had everything going for it. There was plenty of action, without too much over-the-top CGI. It made you think, without being bamboozling. There was an excellent twist at the end, and a few questions left over, without being annoying. And, there was emotion and romance, without making me uncomfortable. I really don't think I can fault it.

After my rather foolish admission that I hadn't necessarily paid much attention to those that went to the moon after the main three, Steven Roy recommended I watch this documentary film on 4OD - In the Shadow of the Moon. I watched, and I learned, and I made notes. I've posted the distilled version for Film Watch, but these are the full notes I made along the way - 90 …

I loved it! I think I was expecting it to teach me a bit more, perhaps be more educational rather than emotional, but it was brilliant throughout, and did give me a taste for the many different missions that went up to the moon. I loved hearing from the astronauts themselves, particularly right at the end when they talked about how their space travel had affected them, and what they think of the conspiracies.

When JK Rowling announced Pottermore, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The Harry Potter books are some of the few physical novels that I still own, and I haven't wanted to dispose of them until I had an ebook copy to replace it with. It's been driving me crazy, as I only own six of the seven books, and that gap on the shelf is hard to live with. …

When this movie got going, it was brilliant. As soon as she was outed, it really got interesting. All the build up to that, though, I could barely understand let alone get involved in. I would have rather seen more of the aftermath and how they fought their way out, than the hour that was spent explaining the situation in the first place.

When I was younger, I hoarded magazines, and would cut nice stuff out and paste them into books. Mmm, nice stuff. I've just found the site Polyvore, which essentially allows you to do that but in a digital fashion. I've seen people doing this for ages, sometimes they call them mood boards, but I just think it's fun. Polyvore provides you with a gazillion choices, whether it is fashion or …

Yesterday, the BBC screened a feature length documentary following the Team GB gymnastics squad as they trained ahead of the 2008 Olympics. It was called "Gymnast". It started at the very beginning, before the six gymnasts had been chosen, and followed many more hopefuls as they tried to get selected. Hopes and dreams, and all that, it was interesting to see the dynamic between girls, their family, and the coaches. …

We're now on the second page of the calendar for this class. It started in July and ends in August, and that means this is the home stretch. Kinda. I'm still a few days behind schedule, so it'll probably be September for me, but still. It's going okay so far. Unusually, this week has four runs, with the last one being a 5k - presumably to see if you've got …

So far, my blogging about media has been limited to films, Doctor Who and The Archers, with the occasional one-off if a piece of viewing really inspires me. It's something of a dream of mine to have enough time and dedication to blog about TV more often, and I do have some vague plans to do more of it. Here are five blogs that inspire me in that direction, and …

I don't know if it's because I read the second and third parts back to back, but I did find this one exhausting. Nothing ever goes right, people are always getting hurt, and at one point, even Katniss admits no one should be able to survive what she's going through. She's constantly breaking down and having to rebuild herself, just in time for something to break her down again. It is pretty gruelling and draining to read.

You'll remember that earlier in the year I went to my first (and probably only) football match, and somehow became an Aston Villa fan. I vaguely followed what they were doing for a few weeks, and then sort of lost touch until the season ended. Mr C and I watched the occasional Match of the Day update, but even then only if we happened to be in the right place …