I thought I would throw this poll open as it was great fun when we did that last time. You guys didn't disappoint. Sandro was the top answer, the obvious choice really, I suppose. I do love the options, although I'm not sure Mr C has a super-licence at the moment. Also, I'm quite intrigued by Mason's cousin. Would that make him Uncle Mortimer's son, and what kind of family …

Party people! It's only right to celebrate, no matter what kind of a headache you've got! See? Let us see what a Mortimer celebration is like! Mitch sat at the hotel bar, watching the celebrations going on around him. Mason and Bella were entertaining a large group of mechanics, regular bursts of laughter drowning out any other chatter. He sipped at his orange juice. Melissa appeared at his side, and …

Several times on this blog I have talked about how very excellent the Four Chords song is by Axis of Awesome. And it is fabulous, I'm not going back on my word. At the same time, though, it's fair to say that those four chords have ruined my musical life. Twice in the past couple of weeks, Mr C and I have ended up racking our brains for hours and …

I'm not sure we've ever had a unanimous vote before, how exciting! I hear ya! Mitch brought the car in, stopping perfectly inside the Mortimer GP pit box. He was hoisted up on jacks, the crew changed his tyres, and out of the corner of his eye he spotted an extra mechanic having a closer look at the rear end of the car. It felt like he was stationery for …

We recapped Mr C's top five films at the very end of 2010, and after a little bit of pondering (and a little bit of tardiness on my part), he's back with his top five songs released in 2010. It was a good year for us and music, after a few years of not being that interested in the output of that particular industry. So, here are his top five: …

I mentioned this in my recent Life List recap of 2010, but it bears repeating here. I've been finding these episodes of Doctor Who a bit of a struggle to get through. It turns out that I'm really just not that big a fan of Christopher Ecclestone. I still think he was absolutely necessary as the Doctor, and it wouldn't have worked if David Tennant had just dived right in …

I haven't had a proper cold for a long time, well over a year. The occasional sore throat descends upon me, and I always prepare for the worst, but then it just goes away. I don't know whether that means I have a better constitution than I used to, or if I am just lucky enough to have already had all the germs that have been circulating recently, and therefore …

Here are the results of the gridwalk poll: As noted in the comments, Mitch is normally painted as the good guy, and I had thought the gridwalk would be a sure thing, but as a die-hard racer, Mitch is more professional than that, and Pierre wins his attention. So, on with the chapter. Mitch waved a hand at the cameras and offered a positive thumbs up, but turned his attention …

You're all so adventurous! I will not chatter too much now, except to say the wiki page is pretty much done, so head over and have a look at everything you could possibly need to know about Life in the Fast Lane. Don't go yet, though, we've got a chapter to get through. The dry tyres were on, and Mitch's car was lowered to the ground. He could see the …

I really liked this, and it made a lot more sense than the last time I watched it, but I still got a bit confused towards the end. Why do there have to be so many sides all against each other? Anyway, my fascination with Matt Damon continues to grow, and I can't wait to see the third movie. Whenever that may be.

Ahh, I missed this. Mitch and Mason and them all. As my favourite lady of the moment would say: Such fun!I must point you towards the brand new section of the wiki dedicated to Life in the Fast Lane. It has all kinds of crazy information about characters and plot points, plus some fantastic livery designs from Lukeh. It's a work in progress but it's going to be excellent. Anyways, …

For some reason, I saw the word 'witch' this week and it started me thinking about all the different witches that are out there in books and on TV. There are quite a lot when you give it some proper thought. To narrow it down to five, my top five at that, I decided to pick only the good ones. Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My goodness I loved Sabrina. Those …

I'm rubbish at birthdays, okay? Many happy returns to Franck who turned 33 yesterday. I wonder what he did to celebrate, wherever he is hibernating away for the winter. The worrying news is that Franck's website is no longer working for me. Anyone else? I mean, it's not like it had been updated in forever anyway, but even so. At this rate, I will not only forget FKM's birthday, but …

From the Chengdu Panda Breeding Centre, the subject of that BBC programme I sort of live blogged. Credit: tinachensf/Flickr

"WHERE IS IT?" Mason roared. The mechanics nearby jumped, and rapidly turned their attention to minute tasks. Mason glared at them, but getting no response, he began stomping around the car. "What's going on?" Melissa asked, approaching Mitch with his drinks bottle. They watched the spectacle from their side of the garage. "Mason has it in his head that he needs his lucky wristband," Mitch shook his head. "It's a …

I've made lots and lots of New Year's Resolutions before, both on the blog and in my head, and very few of them have worked out. This year, I changed the concept around completely and debuted the Life List - a long-term set of goals and things to aim at. Some are crazy, some are impossible, some are easy and most will take time. I figured a quick review for …

I don't know if it's because I have read this so many times before, or if it is the quality of the writing (or maybe both), but it feels so effortless to read this book. Almost as if the words are floating off the page directly into my head. It's so easy to picture everything, and that's not just because of the on-screen versions that have planted imagery there.

The BBC have gradually been building up to this evening's episode, with behind the scenes stories and footage littering the news and blogs and a great campaign to get listeners to tweet-along with the episode. Although I knew it was supposed to be something special, I was just going to treat it like any other episode and listen to the podcast when I had the chance. How much damage are …

The story gets off to a bit of a slow start, although personally I did enjoy reading all the history of the colony and exactly how things work there. I'm not sure it would be gripping reading for everyone, but I could be wrong. In the end, this type of story is right up my street - a little bit science fiction, but quite a lot about how human behaviour affects the situations that these people find themselves in.

Excellent, excellent film and exactly what we were looking for. The plot was unpredictable, there was nothing too complicated to try and figure out but it wasn't boring. Steve and Tina were both brilliant and very funny, and it just ticked every box. I feel like it shouldn't get top marks, but I can't quite put my finger on why, I certainly have no complaints about it. Great way to spend 90 minutes.

For the new, I'm switching up the way I change headers on the site. I'd come to a position where I could make a perfectly good header in a week and that was fine. I could keep on finding brushes and doing what I could, but a week wasn't really long enough to make anything particularly special. Instead, I'm going to do a monthly header, with the hopes that I …

To celebrate Christmas with the Archers (and a year since I have been blogging about Ambridge - a year? Where's that gone?), I thought I'd do this post a little differently. I'm experimenting with the format a little, and will go through the month show by show. It's not as scary as it sounds. Let us just begin. 1st - Tony is mean to Kathy again, but she is still …

I must have read this before. I must have, surely? I don't recall! I know I have seen the film with Keira Knightley, and I know I didn't like it as much as I liked the Emma thing with Johnny Lee Miller. But have I read the book before? Well, either way, I have definitely read it now. It's quite long, isn't it? I didn't realise quite how drawn out it was when I started, and not that that is necessarily a bad thing, because you get quite a sense of all the characters, but it did seem to take forever to read.

This may be the first time in a long time that we have watched enough recent films to create any form of top five list. We have indulged in many a movie night, so I tasked Mr C to choose his top five films that were released in 2010, that we watched in 2010. Here is what he came up with: Inception. "The closest thing to the Matrix since the …

This was surprisingly good in the end, but it took a long time before it started making sense. The business model still remains a mystery, and for at least half the film I was pondering exactly where they were going with it all. Maybe that's a good thing? It certainly wasn't predictable. I enjoyed the fact that there was a romance element but it wasn't mushy, and I would mark it higher if the premise actually made it a bit more sense.

Mmm, I love Bourne! Considering this is at least the third time I've seen it, the film doesn't get old. It gets funnier towards the end as well, I don't remember laughing out loud before, but I did. In a good way. Matt Damon is at his best when he's going about doing heroic things without really knowing why.

I treated myself to the first series of Miranda, and after watching the first episode I found myself ever so confused. The iTunes version has the Channel 4 logo at the beginning. How odd, I thought. Miranda couldn't be more BBC. Created by BBC Productions, broadcast on the BBC. The show came about because of a radio comedy that was on... wait for it... BBC Radio. But there it was, …

I liked this. It got off to a really slow start, and it wasn't at all as action packed as the trailer made out, but the slow burn really made you wonder who it was and what was going to happen. I loved the gory bits at the end, and I'm so happy that I guessed the twist. I'm on a really good streak with this guessing business at the moment. It wasn't exceptional but it was intriguing.

It wasn't a good film, I would not go so far as to say that, but I did enjoy it. I did end up liking Tom Cruise's character, which is something I wasn't expecting to do at all. The stunts were silly, the story was unbelievable, but it made me laugh throughout, and as a bit of escapism, it didn't go far wrong. Thankfully there is no room for a sequel!

Just cuteness today. Credit: Ross Manges/Flickr

Today I braved the supermarkets to pick up ingredients for the mammoth piece of gammon we received. I told you about it yesterday, and the fact that I am even blogging about the results means I didn't burn it. That is a bonus! I was following this BBC recipe, but I sort of modified it for my own results, due to constraints with both time and the size of the …

Very beautiful film. Nice and slow-paced, with plenty of time to appreciate all the nature going around. About halfway through the over-dubbing started to annoy me, and the child kept doing stupid things to intervene in the foxes life, but even so, it was still quite fascinating.

Just as good as the first one, unfortunately. There are some interesting bits and bobs scattered along the way but as mentioned, the fight scenes are far too long, and it's hard to understand why everyone adores those kids quite so much when they really don't seem all that special. Still the lion is quite good.

Last night, there was a Celebrity Mastermind episode in which one of the contestants chose the Back to the Future trilogy as their specialist subject. Thanks to Alex for pointing this out to me, these questions could have been made for me! As is becoming a bit of a tradition when there's a subject we know about on Mastermind, I thought I'd gather the questions for others to see how …

It's an interesting enough story, but the film felt long and drawn out, like the content could have been covered in about half the time. The two don't look like sisters, and the relationship between Anne and the King makes no sense because he never really showed any signs of actually liking her. Still, it made me curious to learn a bit more about this bit of history, and that can only be a good thing.

This was an insight into a world that I know precious little about, and the entire Diana thing was a bit of a surprise to me really. I know about the conspiracies, obviously, but I never really thought about what went on inside the palaces. Anyway, I thought it got off to a bit of a slow start, but then I realised it was never going to be action packed, but was more of a fascinating, if fictional, glimpse into a life that you'd never normally see.

Someone gave us a gammon joint! Mr C is partial to a bit of gammon, and I normally buy the ready made slices that just need grilling or frying up, with a bit of pineapple thrown in for good measure. Now I am faced with this: I didn't have a clue what to do with it, but after a quick search, I found a nice, simple recipe. It starts with …

I liked this one far better than I liked the Corpse Bride, although there are a lot of similarities between the two. The story is interesting and unusual, and the characters are fun. The songs are catchy, particularly the Christmas Land one that is repeated throughout. There are some amusing one-liners, and some great emotion. All it is missing is a bit of Helena Bonham-Carter really!

For the first half of the film, I was not convinced. Pierce wasn't scary enough to be a bad guy, and I wasn't 100% convinced about the situation. It got a bit better as the twists and turns started, and by the end I was intrigued. As you can see, I guessed the first twist about half a second before it happened but I didn't get the last one.

This film had me all confused. It was clearly trying to be a modern take on a slasher film, with a tiny political edge, in the form of it being people from an arms company. However, I couldn't quite work out where it was pitched. At times it was almost a satire, particularly the head rolling bit, and the leg in a fridge thing.

Remember a while ago I was blogging about my Rubik's Cube? That is still in progress, by the way, but I am in the same predicament I was before - keep trying to achieve something but messing it up and finally scraping back to having just one side complete. At some point I will just go ahead and buy the book to attempt to move on, but I am not …

When they announced that this year's Christmas Doctor Who would be based on the Charles Dickens novel, I thought that sounded quite interesting, particularly as I knew they would be incorporating time travel and that's my favourite bit. Then they made a big deal of announcing the name, drum roll please, A Christmas Carol. I felt a bit deflated. That's not very creative at all, is it? Naming the story …

I really just have to point out this amazing food blog called Zoom Yummy. I think perhaps I discovered it via Wordpress's Freshly Pressed feed - a daily selection of the best posts from anyone using Wordpress, and it turns out that's quite a lot of people. I usually only scan through the list and see if anything catches my eye, and this blog certainly did. I can't really do …

At the weekend, Lukeh posted a great item on his blog, the age-old game of who you would invite for a dinner party. It never gets old because your tastes change, there are always new people to discover, and mostly because it is always fun. At the bottom of the post, Lukeh warns to give it some serious thought - if you're going to be spending an entire evening with …

Part of the BBC's festive output this year will be a one-off special comedy show from Ronnie Corbett, quite sadly entitled The One Ronnie. I don't particularly like the naming convention of the show, and I wasn't at all convinced about watching it. There are times when these comedians really should hang up their hats, you know? However, Mr C pointed me in the direction of Engadget, who particularly enjoyed …

Travelling in and amongst the snow is a nightmare, but I refuse to moan as I know plenty of people have had it a lot worse than me. What I would like to do is plug the RAC Traffic App, available via both Apple and Android. It is super duper useful, pointing out the tricky situations on the roads - from slippery bits, to hefty delays due to accidents, to …

So, yes. It is a really good film. There are plenty of bits that are unbelievable, and there's no way you can like every single one of the stories, but it is a great piece of work. The way that you can have the smallest story (such as Stacey and him from the Office) and that is just as important as the big Hugh Grant moments, it's fabulous. At the start, I mentioned that I forget what an epic cast this film has, and now I've realised that I also forget just how funny it is too. It doesn't make my cry, which is more than can be said for other members of the household, but it's good stuff.

I wanted to do something to commemorate all the snow we have been having recently, and I pondered the idea of taking a photo of the white stuff, but didn't find it all that inspiring. Instead, I went in search of some snow-related brushes and found some really good ones. With a bit of adjustment to the scatter patterns, this is what I came up with. Made with: Pixelmator Font: …

This morning, Mr C pointed me in the direction of the Quest Visual site, where they demonstrate a brand new iPod/iPhone app called Word Lens. It is crazy! You open up the app, hold it up in front of some signs and it translates them on the fly. At the moment it only does English to Spanish, or the other way round, but I would imagine there are more dictionaries …

I must say, being back on Wordpress is just like putting on your favourite jumper. It may not be pretty, but it's warm and comforting. The Squarespace adventure was a bit of a disaster. I have never known such unfiltered spam to be allowed through. At first I thought I was doing something wrong, missing some kind of obvious step but no. The commenting system over there just isn't up …