A blog by Ross of Penge (formerly of Balham)

I blogged pretty extensively during 2014 and early 2015, but got out of the habit. In the time since there has been a huge amount I've sort of wanted to write about (politics, terror etc) but I haven't. I tried several times, but anger and frustration about what was happening prevented me from getting things down in a coherent form. Given I couldn't express what I felt, and it didn't seem like it would make a difference anyway, I let it lie fallow.

It's now early 2017, and I'm back, blogging about my attempt to do the first month of the year without social media. After that, who knows?

And why gateway2thesouth? Named after a famous sketch popularised by Peter Sellers:

"Broad-bosomed, bold, becalmed, benign,
Lies Balham, four-square on the Northern Line."

I lived in Balham for 23 years - longer than I have been anywhere else, and it still feels like one of the places in the world I most belong.

Monday, 10 February 2014

Avoiding the Idiots' Lantern

I finished the second series of The Bridge last night. Wow. No spoilers but a twisted ending. You know of course that when the plot appears all tied up with an hour and twenty minutes to go that there must be something else (unless it’s a Harry Potter movie I suppose), but I didn't see much of that coming.

As I don’t watch a lot of TV, the fact that I have spent ten hours over the last four weeks (plus six on Hinterland) on this does make me wonder what I would have done otherwise. I think the answer is that I haven’t been reading as much as I usually would.

 I've been reading widely of late - a mixture of (decent quality) journalism and current affairs, fact, and fiction of wide-ranging heritage and quality. In fact, pretty much the only stuff I don’t read is biography and self-help books. (Anyone reading this blog since the beginning may feel that the second of these omissions probably should be revisited, but I have my pride.)

And The Bridge and Hinterland coincided with having finished some book threads (A Song of Ice and Fire (The Game of Thrones) stuff, the Robert Llewellyn ‘News from’ books and a partial reread of Kurt Vonnegut (still love it).

So I had been fishing around looking for the next thing to read. I was trying to reread the ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels (EF Benson’s light social commentary – he also wrote some great horror) especially as they were about 40p on Kindle, but just haven’t got into them yet. And TV was an obvious alternative.


Now what I don’t want to do is to carry on with the TV watching. So I will be spending some time today (in advance of about five hours on trains tomorrow) seeking out something new to read. Ideas gratefully received.

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