But I do have another motive: I’m determined to visit the Rough Trade shop, at long last, after my two previous abortive attempts (in 2001, lost in Covent Garden; and 18 months ago, bewildered on the wrong section of Talbot Road). If I don’t find it this time I’ll cry, I really will.

Aside from that, I’m planning to fill up the rest of my time with some quirky sightseeing and gallery-hopping. My current list of attractions is as follows:

• The Tates, Modern and Britain
• Thomas Demand at the Serpentine Gallery
• Future City at the Barbican Art Gallery
• The City of London Festival
• Dan Holdsworth: At the Edge of Space, Parts 1–3 at the National Maritime Museum

I’d also like to take some interesting photos around the city, for which I’ll do a bit more research on good architectural walking tours and the like before this weekend. My time in London may be limited, but I want to make the most of it. (Hell, I’m paying enough for the privilege.)

So I might as well turn this question to the audience: What should I see? What’s good to photograph? What am I missing? Your contributions will be muchly appreciated — bonus points for anything that’s free.

• A couple of weekends ago, the hard drive on my iBook started dying. Stressed me out no end, it did. The poor machine is in the shop for a replacement right now — the new shipment of drives is due later this week — so I should have it back soon. I hope.

• Seems like nothing but problems with my broadband recently, too. It was slower than dial-up for two days last week, and a fortnight before was down completely on two separate occasions. Apparently they’re ‘upgrading’ the exchange at the moment… at least I can’t fault the customer service, which was more helpful than I expected. And it’s been working uninterrupted since last Friday. Touch wood.

• After all the stress caused by the above, I gave Lightning Bolt a miss last Wednesday and had an early night instead. But I did go see the Boredoms on Friday night, and boy was I glad I did. Their current line-up of three drummers — plus Yamatsuka Eye on vocals and electronics — is quite a departure aesthetically from the sounds they were famous for with the cool kids back in the day, but the new direction fits them like a Saville Row suit. I’m a sucker for good percussion so I was in my element — if a little tired on my feet after a long day — for the more than 90 minutes they performed, perfectly in sync. Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe it. (And to top it off I bumped into at least five people I know when the house lights came up after the show, and everyone was chuffed to bits. That never happens.)

• Speaking of music, on the same day as that Boredoms show I bought News And Tributes, the new album by The Futureheads. I’ve only ever been as disappointed by one other record, and that one — Chris Cornell’s Eurphoria Morning — stayed in rotation for at least two weeks before I was convinced of its craptitude. Oh, what have The Futureheads done to themselves?! The songs are there, more or less, but the production is just plain terrible; never has a ‘big sound’ sounded so small. And what’s with the rhythm-section-hating? The drumming, especially the snare, is barely audible on most tracks, while the bass is mired in murk. And don’t get me started on that godawful track 11! I’m sure they’ll sell bucketloads and get lots more teeny-bopper emo-lite black-rim-glasses-wearing groupies before they realise how far they’ve sold themselves out, and make up for it with a better third album. But this one? I disliked it so much that I returned it on Monday and got the new Mogwai CD instead, which is far more satisfying. (On a related note, most of the reviews of the Futureheads’ record give it a thumbs-up while almost universally referring to the term ‘mature’, as if pedestrianism in art is supposed to be some kind of virtue. Quite frankly, that’s bollocks. Whenever I see a record described as ‘mature’ it’s the kiss of death as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure others would agree.)

• Continuing the music thread, and on a more positive note, today happens to be the last day of NARMo — and I’ve just recorded the final minute of my album. Can you believe it? I actually followed through on one of my many promises and recorded a whole 31-minute album in the 31 days of May! I’ll be putting some finishing touches on the songs over the next few days, doing some overdubs, sorting out the track listing and so on, and then I’ll post the whole thing online early next week for the world’s delectation. (In the meantime, you can add this link to my MySpace page — yes, MySpace! — to your bookmarks.) You’re all gonna hate it. But I don’t care. In fact I’m looking forward to the hate mail.

• Oh yeah, and yesterday was my birthday. I turned 26. I feel old. However the wonderful Benitha, who also celebrated her birthday yesterday, is still full of youth and vitality and the joys of spring. So I’ll have to live vicariously through her, then. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a place in a nursing home to book…

I missed it. This morning most of Northern Europe experienced a partial eclipse of the sun. And seeing as I don’t happen to have a telescope and a piece of card handy, I missed it. The shot above is the best view I could manage. Crap, isn’t it?

Oh, if only it were overcast! In the right conditions, the cloud layers filter the sun’s beam, letting the solar disc shine through in a perfect outline while cutting out all that nasty, retina-melting glare. I’d only have to look up, and there I’d see it — the sun, with a chunk bitten off. But alas, this morning we were cursed with the clearest, bluest sky we’ve had in months. Fuck.

I missed the last one too, the better one. It was a morning in mid-August 1999. They issued warnings about going outdoors in the hours preceeding — lest you be burned alive by magnified cosmic rays or some such, I don’t know. Anyway I had a shift on the concession stand at my local multiplex that morning, stuck behind the counter serving popcorn to gluttonous philistines as the sky grew gradually darker, so the warnings didn’t apply to me.

Turns out, in the end, I didn’t really miss all that much. There was no sudden pseudo-nightfall like I expected; just a slight dimming, like what normally happens when a large cloud passes overhead. Big deal, I said to myself as I snatched glimpses at the glass-fronted foyer every now and then.

Now that I think about it, I didn’t really miss all that much today, either, which makes me feel a little bit better. Still, would have been nice though.

On the colour: Gordon asks what the story is regarding the coloured links on the front page. It might look random at first glance — which is kind of the intention; I want the front page to change over time — but there’s a logical basis to it. I don’t want to say too much about it as I want to maintain some of the mystery. But if you really want to know, the smart cookies among you will figure it out (here’s a hint: view source).

Whenever I think about redesigning this site I always have some sort of argument with myself in my head about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and so on. There’s a part of me that always wants to scrap what I have and just upload some standard template because that’s what a lot of other people have and they seem to the popular and don’t have a problem with looking like everybody else. In other words, I seem to have a problem with my site standing out from the crowd, to an extent. I also seem to have a problem with setting down; I’ve redesigned this site four times in the last 12 months, in contrast to many of the sites and blogs I love that haven’t changed in years, and still look impressive.

But I feel like I’m convincing myself to change my ways, and the site as it now looks is a testament to this. It’s mostly just a new stylesheet, after all. I may — I will — make a tweak here and a change there, but I don’t need to go back to square one. And I don’t need to renovate every five minutes.

So apparently bloggers like books, eh? What with all the reading and the writing and all, who woulda thunk it?

But enough of my sarcasm. I also share the bookish addiction. It’s not so bad that I can’t walk past a bookshop without being drawn inside by some mysterious magnetic force. But when I do pop into Waterstone’s or Hodges Figgis now and again, more often than not I can’t leave without having bought something. Damn those three for two offers!

As for reading the bloody things? I do tend to go through periods of not reading anything substantial, bar newspapers and magazines (and websites, natch), so the book pile has been growing steadily for some time. But I have been on a bit of a reading buzz lately.

Since my recent jaunt abroad I’ve read and enjoyed The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (highly recommended Markham, if you haven’t read it already); The Quarry by Damon Galgut; The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem; and am trying to make Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures last as long as possible…

I also breezed through Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, which had been sitting in my bag one-quarter read for the last six months, and I’ve just started A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester, on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which I picked up for virtually nothing over Christmas downstairs at Eason’s.

And there are at least ten other books on the shelf just waiting to be delved into. Provided my current reading buzz lasts, that is. If not, they’ll just have to wait, and make room for the others I’ll undoubtedly add to the pile in the coming months.

(And by the way Markham, The Winding Stair is still open. Or at least it was when I was crossing the Ha’penny Bridge on Monday morning.)

But hey, I’ve never been one to catch onto these net fads on time. And besides, it makes for a cheap and simple way to break the writer’s block and ease myself back into this blogging lark, now that I’m stuck here once again in deepest, darkest Dublin. So here goes:

Four Three jobs I’ve had:

1. Cinema operative (read: concession stand guy).
2. Music store sales assistant (read: ephemeral knowledge guy).
3. Freelance journalist (read: jobless bum guy).

Four movies I could watch repeatedly:

1. Billy Madison. I hate Adam Sandler, but I love this movie.
2. Sweet Smell of Success. I need to get this on DVD.
3. The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Took me completely by surprise.
4. All the President’s Men. Another must for the collection.

Four Two places I’ve lived:

1. Dublin, Ireland.
2. Pretoria, South Africa (only for a month, but a great month).

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1. University Challenge.
2. MythBusters.
3. The Daily Show.
4. Family Guy.

Four places I’ve been on holiday:

1. Pretoria, South Africa, 2006.
2. Ghent, Belgium, 2001.
3. Paris, France, 1998.
4. Nottingham, England, 1996.

Four of my favourite dishes:

1. My homemade naan bread pizza. Trust me, it’s gorgeous.
2. Sandwich on thick-sliced wholemeal bread with chicken, grated cheese, Hellmann’s chip sauce, dijonnaise and a potato farl. Yes, a potato farl.
3. The gyoza dumplings at Wagamama; expensive but delicious.
4. That thing Benitha improvised with the chicken breasts and the noodles a couple of weeks ago. That was great.

Four websites I visit daily (even though I use NetNewsWire so I don’t really ‘visit’ any):

1. Guardian Unlimited. It’s so good, I buy it on paper too.
2. Pitchfork. Yeah. I know.
3. 411 Wrestling News. For all my wrestling needs.
4. Express Train. One of many photoblogs I frequent.

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. In Pretoria, with Benitha.
2. In New York, looking up at the skyscrapers.
3. In Tokyo, at a wrestling show.
4. In London, at Tate Modern.

Four people I am tagging:

1. Grover.
2. Dave R.
3. John.
4. Piglet.

While I’m there I may have an opportunity to post here now and again, or then again, I may not. I may also take lots of photos for future posting, or then again, I may not. But one thing is for certain: I will have a fantastic time, and make lots of people very jealous in the process.

• Eat less. Not that I’m a pig or anything, but I have been consuming more than my fair share in recent weeks. This one goes hand in hand with ‘Walk more’. I’ve lost the weight before without much effort, and I’ll do it again.

• Write more. I enjoy it, so why don’t I do it more often? That’s a question I need to answer this year. Writing this is a start, at least.

• Read more. You should see the tower of books behind me. They’re leering at me, taunting me… No more! This year I will read the feckers. I’ll read the shit out of them. Then they’ll be sorry.

• Work hard. This is the big one. It’s time to put my degree to good use. I have a craft to refine and skills to use and develop. I am marketable, and I am great at what I do and put my mind to. This year I will have a job I can be proud of, and which will finally enable me to…

• Move out! I’ve been home long enough, it’s about time I had my own place, to make my own home. Even if it is just a bedsit. Moving out of the country will help, too. Watch out London, here I come.

• Travel wider. So many places to see, so many new things to experience. If I strike even one off my personal list, I will consider myself fulfilled for the year.

• Take more photos. I bring my camera everywhere, but I rarely take it out. This reticence simply has to stop. This year I will be snap happy.

• Spend more time with Bee. This one’s a given. A proper job means more income which means more trips to Africa which means more time with Benitha much more often. More more more, that’s my motto.

• Enjoy myself. Not as easy as you might think. But I will do my damnedest not to lose any day of this year to unpleasentness. Carpe annum!

This time round I don’t have the excuse of spending time with a beautiful woman (at least not until next month, when I jet off to South Africa for a long-awaited getaway with said beautiful woman) but it still seems as equally pointless as it did last year, compiling my own detailed list of the best 2005 had to offer, especially when the web has already been pre-surfed for me.

If there’s any one place I can send you to, it has to be Fimoculous, which has hosted the Holy Grail of year-end lists for the past few years, with 2005 being no exception. If somebody somewhere has made a list and posted it online, chances are that Rex has found it and linked it. I’ll make a note to send him a few shekels for all the hard work.

I already spent some shekels on Kottke’s blog last February, and he’s kept up with the goods all year long. For the end-of-year clearance, he’s compiled his own best links of 2005, along with a bonus list of some of those that didn’t make the final cut. There’s quite a few gems in there that I’ll be re-blogging myself in the weeks to come.

When it comes to the arts I won’t be noting any of my own best books or movies of the year, because I regard them both as distinctly atemporal media. (In other words, I rent DVDs and buy paperbacks so I’m always a year or so out of synch.) But I’m not one to leave you completely empty-handed.

I’m sure The Guardian’s Books of the Year report and The Onion A.V. Club’s Best Books of 2005 will steer you straight if you’re on the lookout for something good to read. (Of the A.V. Club’s list —which is refreshingly unafraid to defy genre and literary snobbishness — I’ve got Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore but have yet to read it, while Chris Ware’s The Acme Novelty Library will be added to my leaning tower of reading forthwith.)

Film-wise my 2005 was neatly dissected by a true highlight, We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen, and bookended by two of the year’s (if not the decade’s) funniest flicks, Team America: World Police and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Three movies from the whole year isn’t much, I admit, but I’ll be using the A.V. Club’s guide to the year in film to plan some of my DVD rental choices for the coming months. So now you know.

As for music, I didn’t buy many albums this year since not having the temptation of a music store staff discount meant I was far more choosy. And of those I did purchase, most were back-cat (the Big Boys were on rotation for quite some time). In fact, of all the albums released here in the last 12 months, I only own five of them. Which is just the number required for my personal top five, conveniently enough. In no particular order:

• I Am A Bird Now by Antony and the Johnsons (Secretly Canadian)
  I’d heard of the band since the end of last year, but didn’t actually hear their music until the Mercury Prize on BBC Four in the autumn. Antony played ‘Hope There’s Someone’, and I damn well nearly cried, so I did. The album won the prize deservedly, and I finally got my own copy as a gift from Piglet just before Christmas. It’s wonderful stuff.

• Bang Bang Rock & Roll by Art Brut (Fierce Panda)
  Two songs: ‘Formed a Band’ and ‘Modern Art’. Enough said.

• The Campfire Headphase by Boards Of Canada (Warp)
  It’s not as good as Geogaddi, but I don’t think anyone expected it would be, really. The treated guitars add a fresh texture to their pastoral, nostalgic sound, which has always them far apart from the chill-out fraternity (and it’s what got me interested in them in the first place).

• A Certain Trigger by Maximo Park (Warp)
  This was a late purchase. I let their videos (on MTV2, natch) grow on me as the year went on, and I’m quite partial to them now. Great pop music without the awful baggage, like a more high-octane Franz Ferdinand. Still don’t know how to pronounce their bloody name, though. Maximo. Max-ee-mo. Whatever.

• For Screening Purposes Only by Test Icicles (Domino)
  Oh I know so many critics hate this band, but the critics have got their heads up their arses. If the phenomenal success of F. Ferdinand means that Domino has the funds to take more chances (like signing Test Icicles) then we’ll be all the better for it.

As for all the stuff I missed out on this year, I’m sure if it’s worth hearing the A.V. Club (again!) has covered it with their overview of the year in music. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some of the records noted in this Barbelith thread, either, and there’s always Pitchfork’s top [insert bloody anything here] of 2005, if you’re willing to wade through all the hipstery nonsense.

Well. It seems this post has turned into exactly the kind of list I vowed at the beginning to avoid. But I’ve come this far so I might as well finish, by linking some of the year’s finest journalism and other news tidbits.

Thursday’s Guardian featured excerpts from the best articles of 2005 as chosen by the paper’s readers the world over. There are one or two bad apples (Polly Toynbee’s rant against Narnia was a tad hysterical, let’s be honest) but more than a few of those chosen were my favourites too (Ben Goldacre’s series on MMR and the press, in particular, was the kind of writing that makes you want to clench your fist and shout “go get ‘em!”).

Cyberjournalist.net also has a rundown of its most popular media stories for 2005. The tsunami and Katrina stories in particular will be added to the thesis section of this site (when I get around to updating it, that is).

This year has been an important one for photojournalism. Reuters has selected 40 images for its Pictures of the Year gallery (via Kottke), ranging from the silly to the poignant to the shocking, and every emotion in between. For even deeper resonance, Dan Chung’s year in pictures — where the Guardian staff photographer (and photographer of the year) gives an audio commentary for some of his own outstanding work throughout 2005 — is a must-visit.

On the more whimsical side, the BBC News Magazine has compiled a list of the 100 things we didn’t know this time last year. Lots of fluff, yes, but some interesting factoids too that you might well thank me for one day.

To wind things down, the year in a nutshell can be found at the Google Zeitgeist for 2005. Google went all out this year with the tabby, graphy goodness, and it’s obvious that someone in there has been reading about infographics. The World Affairs and Nature sections, especially, provide an intriguing snapshot of the web’s reaction to some of the year’s more memorable occurrences.

On a personal note, 2005 was a very significant year for me. While it began on something of a sombre note, saying goodbye to Benitha after an unforgettable three weeks together, I soon threw myself into my studies (as did she) and the weeks flew by, inching ever closer towards our shared goals.

It became a year of great personal achievement. My classmates and I published a magazine that turned out far more professional than we imagined, and should be a formidable challenge for next year’s group to better; I spent my summer in and out of the library researching and writing a thesis, the single largest body of work I’ve so far undertaken, and it’s something of which you have no idea how proud I am; and at the end, after months of hard work, I came out of it with a Master’s degree (First Class Honours, too). Not to mention that got my first paid work in my chosen profession, invaluable experience which bodes well for more professional success in the new year. I’ve kind of surprised myself, to be honest.

It’s taken a while to get to where I am now, but 2005 was the year the ball really got rolling. And if I have anything to do with it, 2006 will see that ball roll even faster.

And that’s enough from me, I think. It’s been a good year, to be sure, but now I’m going to put the computer to sleep and have a lie down. To all my readers, have a happy new year. See you on the other side.

I mean it was alright as big action-adventure event movies go, but it’s no bar-raiser. Sure, it’s no ‘Kong Bomb’ (as some cynical critics have quipped) either, but it didn’t inspire in me anything like the kind of awe experienced by Tom Coates, and I can’t concur with Kottke’s amazement. In fact, the parts they seem to have enjoyed the most bored me after a few minutes. Also, I hate insects.

In Peter Jackson’s defense, it didn’t feel at all like a three-hour movie (I only checked my watch three times, which is a personal record), yet there were too many points where I was impatient for something to happen to propel the story, which itself fell apart for me in the final act (I had much more sympathy for Adrien Brody’s character than for that bloody monkey; somehow I don’t think that was the intention).

As for the cast? The intentionally hammy acting was a gamble that works, in my opinion, and the cast was well chosen. But in hindsight Jack Black may have been an ill fit. Not that he’s a bad actor or anything of the sort, however he’s pretty much typecast as himself. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is open to interpretation.

On the plus side, though I was disappointed by the footage in the trailer I saw in November, the CGI Kong looked surprisingly impressive (outside of the action scenes, at least). Even better was the New York cityscape that filled the screen at the film’s conclusion. The attention to detail is astounding; I could have sworn it was real. Plus, the philosophical subtext (the whole ‘giant of one world is dwarfed by another’ thing) brought some depth to what is essentially a popcorn movie, though it was kind of hard to miss.

And I confess, I marked out for the ‘Sumatran Rat Monkey’ sign in the background. Nice touch, that.

See also: On King Kong, the Empire State and the dynamism of the city