With hours left to go in the day, month, year and decade, there’s no time to wrap up the many other aspects of the year or indeed decade that I might have covered, so it’s one last post in this format before everything changes in 2020.
After rounding up the decade’s albums and movies, it’s time for the small screen. The TV I watched in the 2010s included a lot of crime drama, a bit less comedy than the 2000s, a few reality shows (broadly defined) and documentaries, and a bit less SF/fantasy than I managed at the movies.
Western Harbour, Edinburgh, 23 December 2019. Click for more.
One of my pet peeves this election has been the idea of “lending your vote”. The idea that you “lent” the Tories your vote to get Brexit done, but that you aren’t actually a Tory voter.
No. You are now a Tory voter, and your vote for the Tories has helped deliver five more years of Tory rule. You’ve voted for the Bullingdon boys and the credit traders and all the rest of them. At least be honest about it.
Seven weeks left in the EU, a year of tortuous trade negotiations, and years of damage once those negotiations either fail and lead to no deal, or are extended again and again until they’re concluded.
In the early days of Detail, I used to experiment with galleries of different sizes, not all of them travel-related. Here’s one like those, featuring a single page of photos of suburban Melbourne mailboxes taken on a Canon Ixus in 2001.
There’ll be bulldozers over/The White Cliffs of Dover...
After three years of banging on about Brexit here at any opportunity, I couldn’t bring myself to repeat it all in the past six weeks, and the General Election itself has been too depressing to contemplate. It seems clear that most people made up their minds long ago, and in far too many cases have done so on the basis that leave means leave, get it done, take back control, three bags full, pigs might fly. The one ray of hope is the surge in new enrolments in November, suggesting that younger voters could lead to upsets in key seats. Perhaps, just possibly, we might yet see the back of this hat-trick of historically awful prime ministers.
As with music, I’ve let my film commentary slide for the past couple of years, and end-of-year round-ups are a thing of the distant past. So once again I’ve corralled my favourites of the decade into a matrix, which by an uncanny coincidence is the same 8 x 11 size as the one I just did for albums.
I used to be pretty good at rounding up my favourite music of the year every December, even if I hadn’t tracked it consistently throughout the year. But after 2013 I fell behind, and the prospect of catching up on what I’d missed grew more and more daunting, to the point where this year I haven’t posted about music at all.
So, what better way to atone than with a giant 8 x 11 matrix of my favourite albums of the 2010s.
Ending the year with galleries of my travel photos from the 1980s is timely, as this year my sidebar images have featured paintings that have held meaning for me throughout my life, many of which I first saw on those trips. There are others that would have qualified, but I couldn’t always find high-resolution images to get the best results for the sidebar excerpts. Still, I managed to find most of the main candidates.
Here’s a gallery of the relevant paintings, along with some notes about when and where I first saw them.
