You're a beautiful woman probably...

We went to see Cabaret at the Sunderland Empire last night. This touring production (directed by Rufus Norris, featuring Wayne Sleep as the EmCee and Samantha Barks as Sally) really just served to show how brilliant the film was. On the plus side, the stage show generally looked excellent, with appropriately tacky sets for the Kitkat Club and more subdued colours and lighting for the boarding house. Samantha Barks as Sally shows great promise and gave an impressive performance in the musical's better songs. Unfortunately, attention to detail was sadly lacking. Anyone who knows a word or two of German can tell you that their translation of "Miss" is not pronounced "Fraw-line", and yet here, we had at least three supposedly German natives saying it that way. While that would be understandable in an amateur production, in the professional theatre it just isn't good enough. The problems didn't end there. The whole thing didn't seem to "gel":...

New Year's Day can be pretty grim - one way of lightening things is to go out for a walk (which I'll be doing soon); another is to listen to some good music (my plan for later on). Catching the famous theme from Brief encounter on Classic FM one Sunday morning reminded me of how wonderful I think Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos are - and there are more reasons than that film why Number 2 is his most popular. Later on, listening to Radio 4's Desert island discs (and exercising my prejudices, thinking that some of the guests' musical choices are unbelievably poor) made me think of my own list of favourite records. Try it yourself - if you have any love of music at all, it's quite hard to get it down to eight! Debussy's La mer (strangely enough, not all about his mother...). Debussy was a pioneer of a whole new musical sound, dubbed "impressionism", and this is probably my favourite example. Finzi's Severn Rhapsody . An encapsulation of everyth...

The extent, and the increasing prematurity, of the Christmas hype really brings out my Scrooge-like tendencies. As if it wasn't enough to start selling Christmas decorations in October and putting the things up in town centres in November, Look North (our local TV news programme) had a live outside broadcast from Keswick this evening of a choir singing Christmas carols! I wanted to shout at the screen "It's 28th November!" As a sufferer of SAD (Seasonally Affective Disorder) who always feels like going into hibernation from November until early March, I find the whole season quite claustrophobic. We know that Christmas is only four weeks away, so why do we have to be reminded constantly by almost all of the media? All the hype only makes it more impossible for Christmastime itself to live up to expectations. It's not without reason that there is an increase (or, at least, a perceived increase) in suicides around the turn of the year.

I've been thinking for a while that it's time to upgrade my three year old Canon EOS 350D camera. I still like Canon and have no reason to change make, particularly as my three lenses are all Canon fit. Like most people, I'm not rolling in money and, while the 50D was tempting, it's also very expensive. Did I really need 15 million pixels? There were other plus points like the higher resolution display and improved weatherproofing, but the resolution means its photos take up considerably more storage space (particularly if you go for the quality option and use RAW format) and that's a problem. So I plumped for the 40D instead - 10.1 megapixels and, according to most reviewers, with marginally better image quality than the 50D. This saved me more than £300, coming in at about £520 after the £60 cashback. I bought it in Newcastle on Saturday - no price advantage from buying online this time - and was immediately impressed. The whole thing feels solid, the viewfinder i...

John and I went to York yesterday for a day trip (an hour from Newcastle on the train) and confirmed my impression that it's a great place to visit in the colder months, because of the number of good museums. The morning was spent wandering the old streets, and then we had a pizza at the rather good La Piazza restaurant in Goodramgate, in what looked like an authentic Tudor building. Looking round the town again, I was surprised to see that a number of buildings there seem to have survived from the sixteenth century: as far as I'm aware, Newcastle only has one or two (not counting churches or the Castle itself) and Gateshead has none. In the afternoon, we went to the York Castle Museum, somewhere I hadn't been for maybe 20 years, and it was excellent - lots to see. I've only posted one photo on my Flickr pages so far, but I'll try to get my finger out and put one or two more on there.

Q: How many ears has Mr Spock? A: Three. A left ear, a right ear and a Final Front Ear... Q: How many ears has Davy Crockett? A: Three. A left ear, a right ear and a Wild Front Ear... These cheesy cracks (I won't dignify them with the title jokes ) were inspired by a song that I can't get out of my head. It goes "Sa-rah - Sarah Palin. Queen of the Wild Frontier" to the tune of "Davy Crockett". We're told we haven't seen the last of Palin, and that she'll be back. In days when the world is less and less stable, and we're all faced with annihilation in a variety of ways, this is not a comforting thought. Surely the US electorate must be starting to realise that being religious, photogenic and a supporter of "the right to bear arms" are unbelievably feeble qualifications for people looking to run their country.

The fact that fireworks are going off this evening seems fitting - as if to celebrate that the US electorate has finally had the good sense to vote in a President with some intelligence and who - unlike "Dubya" - isn't promoting a foreign policy based on the world view of a 10-year old child. Following the very dubious election result in 2000 and his record of wilful ignorance and incompetence over the subsequent four years, it was astonishing to me (and, I think, many in the UK) that Dubya was clearly voted into power for a second term. Fighting terrorists who were happy to take their own lives using bombs and missiles? Yes, that was always going to work. And by invading a country with which they had no clear connection? Good thinking. The most depressing part of the saga was the enthusiasm with which Tony Blair followed the USA into the disaster of the Iraq War - making him, in his foreign policy, the biggest let-down in UK politics of my lifetime. The number of innoce...