story of the year – Hello Curns

Yearnotes 2024

As the new year allows these moments of self-reflection, here comes my 2024 Yearnotes: a way to look back and be grateful for the interesting things I was able to do.

Lanzarote, 2024
Bananarama, 2024
Starlight, 2024
Green Day, 2024
Corfu, 2024
Paralympic Games 2024

I didn’t do my yearly self-review at the end of 2023. I have no recollection why. When I restarted the weeknotes in mid-2023, I allowed myself the flexibility to be late publishing, and I think that enabled me to keep the streak going. I hadn’t considered that one of the consequences would be I’d write something every month of the year in 2024, something that hasn’t happened here since 2005. I think the weekly writing habit was good for me as I wrote a whole bunch of other things alongside the weeknotes. As the new year allows these moments of self-reflection, here comes my 2024 Yearnotes: a way to look back and be grateful for the interesting things I was able to do.

Two of the things I am happiest about this year don’t fit neatly into the categories I use here. I am delighted that we were able to keep our monthly Pub Quiz attendance going; it’s such a nice way to see friends regularly. And, a random comment in the summer led to the discovery of €25 tickets for the Paralympics and a hastily booked train. It was wonderful to immerse myself in some sport for a day. Even the power cut at the hotel the night before our early-start departure couldn’t spoil the joy of the event.

And there was a sixth wedding anniversary, an eightieth birthday celebration, a fiftieth birthday party, and a King’s Garden Party that I haven’t written about but must be highlights.

Moving

At the end of ’23, I started to suffer with a frozen shoulder. It went through its most painful period in the first quarter of 2024. As a result, I didn’t even cross my gym’s doorstep for the first seven months of the year. And then I only went 6 times between then and now. I should insert the usual new year wish to do better. But, who am I kidding?

If I look at the amount of exercise I actually took, irrespective of time in a gym, my trackers say I took 3,131,527 steps for a cumulative distance of 1,407 miles (and burning 268,888 in the process). That’s 12 days and 17 hours of exercise-like exertion.

2022 in music

I try to make Last.fm the source for this data, but Apple Music’s failure to natively sync means I am dubious about the numbers. Last.fm says I scrobbled 5,170 tracks (down 24% on 2023). Of those, there were 3,093 unique tracks compared to the 2,906 songs that Apple says I played. While Last.fm thinks Lainey Wilson’s Wildflowers and Wild Horses was my top track, Apple says it was No Caller ID by Megan Moroney. To be fair, they both have the same count at Last.fm, so I am unsure why one was picked above the other. They’re both great songs.

Last.fm says Breland’s Cross Country was the most listened to album, Apple says that was number 3, while Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was top. Are you spotting the trend is country music again?

All of that is somewhere between 12 days and 14 days listening in 2024. I think that was pretty good. I just wish somebody did the same for podcasts.

All the socials

I (still) have a Mastodon account but I have yet to pontificate there. Ditto Bluesky, although I keep promising myself I’ll move to a custom domain.

There were 28 Instagram grid pictures. There were 84 stories. It still remains my favourite format, but that’s a 42% decrease on 2023. There is a highlight selection from 2024 stories. Also, although it’s not social media, it is photos, I posted a collection of pictures from God’s Own Junkyard, the warehouse tribute to neon: All lit up.

There are now 98 feeds in NetNewsWire, notably new in 2024 are London-themed newsletters that I read via RSS. London Centric has just published a ’best of’ and The London Minute is becoming a daily read. London Spy, The Londoner and, nearer home, The Wimble are all worth some time. Given that London’s newspaper, the Evening Standard, had to drop the ‘evening’ portion of its name this year because it’s become weekly, these are more than the name ‘newsletter’ might imply, and are all recommended reading if you live – or are interested in goings-on in – the Capital.

Books, TV and Cinema

I failed my reading challenge, managing only 9 of the promised 15. However, they were all excellent and I don’t know which to call out as my favourite.

I saw a few more things at the cinema than in recent years: Poor Things (weird, horrific and compelling), Die Hard (yes, I’d never seen it), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wicked.

I also saw All of Us Strangers, but skipped the cinema to watch it from the comfort of my living room. It takes time to work out the timeline of the characters, but I loved it.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office was the first big television show I watched this year. Slow Horses remained excellent and Lost Boys & Fairies was brilliant. Other highlights included Dead Boy Detectives, Ludwig, Heartstopper and The Jetty. I really enjoyed Celebrity Race Across the World, possibly the nearest to reality TV I’ve watched all year, and we watched Shardlake on Disney+ even though I couldn’t get Cadfael out of my head while watching.

Gigs and shows

Many of the things I’ve posted about here are tracked in some app or other, or I’ve been able to use my own weeknotes as a reminder. I’ve tried using setlist.fm as a gig tracker. And, while it’s great, there’s no easy way to see 2024, and every artist at a festival is a separate entry, which is fair but, perhaps, does not enable an easy count of gigs. I enjoyed the Isle of Wight festival, Bananarama, Grace Jones, Stevie Nicks and even Bucks Fizz. At the Stevie Nicks gig, I saw Brandi Carlile and am now a fan of the music. In mid-December, I saw both the Lightning Seeds and Paul Heaton; two fantastic evenings.

I’ve not used anything to track theatre shows, so I am reliant on my own notes. Aside from Starlight Express, mentioned below, the best theatre included the immersive Guys and Dolls, Stranger Things: The First Shadow (which can be watched even if you don’t know the Netflix show); new musical Operation Mincemeat (inventive and hilarious) and The National’s Coriolanus was great: I surprised myself following the plot, having never read the play.

I only watched the film the week before we saw Heathers The Musical, glad I did. Never seen a play set in a gents’ toilet before? Boys on the Verge of Tears was such a play and, as a result, was really odd. The Time Travellers Wife wasn’t the greatest, but I am intrigued and might read the book. Closer to Heaven made another comeback at the, sadly closed, Turbine Theatre. Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York and Next To Normal were OK, Why Am I So Single needed some cuts to make it work.

Audio

I’ve always loved listening to the radio. This year, however, I found more and more podcasts to keep me entertained. My current favourite is the cooking-interview show, Dish, but I caught up on a lot of Kirsty Young’s Young Again, which is also great.

Broadcaster Steve Wright died at the beginning of the year. There were plenty of wonderful tributes, but I particularly liked Steve Wright in his own words.

There were a couple of things that surprised me this year; I tuned into Test Match Special while Mum and Dad were at Lord’s for the first day and really liked the company. Timmy Mallett’s Radio Oxford show from back when John Lennon’s died was a nice bit of retro audio.

James O’Brien’s Full Disclosure is one of my favourite podcasts. It’s hard to pick favourite episodes, but I went back in time to the Andy Burnham episode (which was great). Full Disclosure hired an actor to voice The Secret Barrister, and that was an excellent episode.

Other writing

Possibly inspired by the forced regularity of weeknotes, I found myself posting a lot more to my blog. In On diary writing, I talk about how I want to improve my ability to articulate feelings and emotions in writing, which is a goal for this year. That was a follow-up to something from earlier in the year, My digital history, where I think of my personal website as a historical record of my life.

In a year of change for the BBC’s local radio network, I found some material I’d had stored in a box for decades and thought it would be interesting to make sure it’s archived somewhere: From the 1985 archive: Background To BBC Local Radio and BBC Tuning Guides for Shropshire. Let’s hope the mention here gets them some Google juice!

Another blast from the past was ‘Mine is the last voice you will ever hear’, a bit of a wander down memory lane reminiscing about “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and how, when we played the song repeatedly at school, we thought it was a form of rebellion.

I also blogged about a couple of events I’d been to this year: Hidden Holborn was another in the Hidden London series where the public is able to go to areas of the London Underground that are usually off-limits. Once again, I went to the Isle of Wight Festival, this year keeping a record of what I did: day one, day two and day three. And, earlier in the year, I was lucky to get tickets for the first real public performance of the new-look Starlight Express and I wrote up my thoughts.

Other counts

I am always fascinated by the stories people who count things in their lives can tell. There are 2,518 photos in this year’s album, but only 15 made their way to Flickr. Thanks to TFL, I know I made 373 journeys on the London transport network, 30 of them were buses. They didn’t tell me I took 6 flights this year, JetLovers did. And on 1% of my mornings in 2024, I woke up in Edinburgh.

Previously

All my previous attempts at summarising my year are grouped under the yearnotes tag.

Yearnotes 2022

I decided to give the Weeknotes format another go in the middle of 2022 but it was, ultimately, unsuccessful. My hypothesis is that I don’t tend to sit at a computer on a Sunday evening and, therefore, writing something at that point in the week isn’t natural. I may play with the idea later this year but – maybe – generating 15 blogs for 2022 isn’t that bad.

There were two major events this year: I started a new job and bought a flat but those are not the kind of things I can track year-on-year.

Moving

Apparently, I went to the gym 38 times which is nowhere near where it should be but also much better than I imagined it would be. I was monitored taking 3,652,508 steps. My cumulative exercise distance is 1,721 miles (burning 253,432 kcal) and exercising for 16 days and 9 minutes in total. But, I still ended up putting on a little bit of weight I lost last year. Not all of it, but some. I’m just glad I didn’t count all the calories that I consumed.

2022 in music

As last year, I have three different services that track some version of my music consumption but I am not really sure how accurate any of them are monitoring my listening.

Last FM should aggregate everything I listen to (they claim 6,663 listens) and say Bananarama was my top artist of 2022 (which may be right, I did see them twice), their latest album, Masquerade, was the most played album but they didn’t get the most played track honour, that went to Cody Johnson’s ‘Til You Can’t.
Apple Music, the main way I play my own music, says I listened to 3,202 tracks and reckons Miranda Lambert was my top artist this year, if I ignore the Christmas Chill album that they say was my number one, Apple also thinks Masquerade was my top listened to album but claims Circles Around This Town, (Maren Morris) is the most listened to individual track. ‘Til You Can’t was down at 6 on Apple’s count.
I don’t really use Spotify for much except some chill-out sounds on a connected speaker. So, to discover that, of the 2672 minutes tracked, the top song was Thomas Newman’s Any Other Name from the American Beauty soundtrack was not a surprise (nor was it that Thomas Newman also tracked as my most played to artist.) Spotify said Maren Morris was my third most listened to artist.

The basic rule here, I shouldn’t rely on a system to synthesise my musical year.

All the socials

Who really knows what’s happening at Twitter? In the last couple months the main reason I’ve logged on to Twitter is to read about Twitter. I have a Mastodon account but I have yet to pontificate there.

In 2022 there were more tweets that last year, mainly generated because of a bit of a rant at noted Apple Commentator, John Gruber, for his mischaracterisation of the European market for NFC payments.

But before Apple Pay, NFC was hardly used, even though Android had supported it since 2011

In the UK, which was definitely part of Europe for most of the period in question, that statement is just plain wrong. Just one example, Contactless payments were introduced by TfL before Apple Pay was launched here and they quickly accounted fro 30% of all travel payments. I don’t agree with some of the EU’s decisions around technology but, equally, the American tendency to assume behaviours in the US reflect the rest of the world is frustrating.

37 grid pictures on Instagram this year. I re-counted last year and I have no idea why last year’s review claimed 16 when it seems there were 45. There were 145 stories in 2022. I really prefer the story format and the 2022 highlights are a great summary of the year but I retain a soft spot for the grid format as a more permeant memory bank. Even though I posted more pictures this year, I relegated most of my social apps to a folder off my phone’s Home Screen and I have found myself endless scrolling a lot less. I am reading more blogs again. At the moment I have around 40 feeds tracked in my NetNewsWire and it’s a much better that all the all the Twitter angst and argument.

Since I started using Instagram all those years ago I have tried to keep it to contemporary pictures and not use it to post old images. There are a couple of exceptions and World Radio Day 2022 was one of them. The post on that day included one of my favourite paragraphs that I wrote this year, which I did repeat on Twitter,

Tomorrow morning, why not ‘turn up the feel good’ with ‘more of the songs you love’ that are probably ‘the biggest hits and the biggest throwbacks’ on the ‘UK’s No.1 Hit Music Station’ or, my current choice, ‘The UK’s Country Station’.

I thought it was a nice way of merging all those big radio marketing slogans I am not sure anybody else did.

I tried to compete a full year of journal entries on Blipfoto but, I failed. Because I tend to write them in another app through the day, I have found cross-posting them a slow and uninspiring process. I thought it would be easier to write in a Journal app which could be used to create a daily Blipfoto diary and weeknotes but it didn’t work out. I’m trying again for 2023.

Books, TV and Cinema

I did manage to complete my Reading Challenge this year, I read 13 books (more than the anticipated 12) which is a great improvement on the pandemic years. For me, reading has always gone hand-in-hand with travel and so, during the COVID years when I neither commuted or travelled, I had no muscle-memory of picking up a book and reading at home.

In 2022 we started to travel a little more and I found that, as I started reading I was able to find a bit of time at home. And so I managed the twelve books. Two of the twelve introduced me to Arthur Bryant and John May, described as “Golden Age Detectives in a modern world” and I found them a lovely read. I look forward to reading more this year.

I read a kind-of love letter to radio, Last Train to Hilversum, which was a fascinating, and two books by radio presenters: No One Listens to Your Dad’s Show, Christian O’Connell’s autobiography and Mark Radcliffe’s Thank You for the Days. I still enjoy reading about radio – such a wonderful medium. But, I didn’t leave TV out this year. I read a couple of histories of ITV (where I was working at the time): Raymond Fitzwalter’s The Dream That Died and ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years which was a bit academic and heavy going.

Perhaps the most influential book was Giles Turnbull‘s The agile comms handbook which has resulted in me keeping up at least one weeknotes habit: my weekly work report.

My favourite anecdote came from Grace Dent’s Hungry where she is telling a story about when she learned enough about wine in eleven short minutes to prepare for a lifetime. What happens if a sommelier wants to talk to you?

Oh, he doesn’t want to talk to you, Hector said. ‘He wants to talk at you. It’s just a game. The sommelier’s job is to know everything about the bottles on the list. Your only job is to drink it. The winning tactic,’ he continued, is to seem genuinely interested when they harp on. It’s simple, really.’

I didn’t get to the cinema in 2022. I actually got to the cinema in both of the pandemic years so this year was very much an exception. But there are some great series on the streaming services. I didn’t get into the new Tiger King but I can thoroughly recommend Apple TV’s Slow Horses, Only Murders in The Building on Netflix and Hacks on Amazon Prime. I did enjoy catching up on 2017’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard and, of course, I sang along about Bruno with the rest of the world while watching Encanto.

Tweetless or Tweet Less?

I realised I only tweeted 10 times in 2019 so I wondered (to myself) what I had written about.

My morning routine, after I have arrived in the office, usually entails eating breakfast while reading a couple of blog posts before diving into my email. This morning, I thought about some content I used to follow on Twitter and decided to look it up. It’s still there: but that’s not the point of this post. Then I thought I would write something to welcome the new decade as, although a day late, I thought it worth marking in my timeline.

That’s when I realised I only tweeted 10 times in 2019. That’s pretty terrible really. I used to use Twitter a lot. Sadly, I find it a pretty depressing place most of the time which – I think – is why I have generally shied away from the platform recently. I’m pretty certain if I had the time I could curate a list that was much more positive to read.

Nonetheless, I decided to look at the topics I did tweet about in 2019 – my logic being that if I use the platform so rarely then what I did tweet about must have been worth the effort of opening the app and might be interesting to see what I cared about in 2019. Sadly not. Here’s my ranking:

1 Politics (Brexit related): 3
2= Technology (specifically, backups): 2
2= Music: 2
4= Life nonsense: 1
4= Podcasts: 1
4= Advertising: 1

So, here’s the tweet I went with:my first of the new decade. I thought about something I’d seen earlier in the day which seemed like positive news:

I locked my Twitter account so this screenshot will have to do

Give this is my 11th tweet in just over a year, I thought I would look at my posting trends. Using TweetStats and picking July as the sample month for no real reason except it was the first month on TweetStats’ graph, my tweet trend is not looking good. Maybe I should do better.

Currently, I am better at Instagram. Come join me there. As an aside, if Twitter made curating lists and generally managing your feed easier then maybe I would spend time creating the view I want.

36 For 06

I have been re-arranging and organising some of my photographs on the site today. In a bid to ease the effort it really would take to maintain this site I am moving all my online photographs to Flickr. I have been using Flickr for a number of years and my installation of Gallery on this site had not been used for a long time. So, shortly, the domain for photos.curnow.org will point to a new page about my photographs.

As a result I realised that I had not created the mobile set for 2006. In recent years I have been collating photographs taken with my mobile ‘phone camera into a story board for the year. In 2004 I selected 100 but for 2005 I only managed 50. In 2006 I was again able to select 100 images that told a brief story of the year. You can see the 2006 set at Flickr. The last couple of sets were illustrated by the inclusion of thumbnails of each picture. I decided against that this year and instead created a mosaic to showcase a random selection from the 100 best mobile picture.

So, the mosaic is a brief selection of the 100 mobile pictures that tell the story for 2006. Click here for the full set and feel free to comment the set at Flickr.