The best-selling song in Britain in 2022 was Harry Styles’s ‘As It Was’. It runs for two minutes and 47 seconds. In a recent piece in iNews, Adam Sherwin argues that that popular music is getting shorter because of the attention spans of the TikTok generation. In the mobile world, a song needs to captureRead More
Finally, in this short series of reviews of 2022, we have images. Below is a selection of favourite photographs from the year, excluding images of the Lake District, which form the theme of the previous review post. All have links to higher resolution copies on my Flickr pages. The images document the year as itRead More
Next up in the reviews of my year is a year in the Lake District. It wasn’t a year as such, but it was five weeks, over three holiday periods, the longest I have spent over twelve months in a part of the country that means a lot to me. Below are favourite photos thatRead More
Next in my reviews of the year is music. Spotify loves to hit you with statistics at the end of your listening year (November to November is how they calculate it), and this year I am told I listened to 1,158 artists performing 2,832 songs spanning 61 genres, for a total of 20,072 minutes (orRead More
As 2022 winds its way to its ignominious close, it’s time to look back at some of the things that were good about the year, despite war, weather, viruses, the meteoric rise in the cost of living, and a revolving door of prime ministers. We’ll start off with books, which were the greatest solace. InRead More
An interesting announcement was made this week. Flickr, the image hosting site, has formed the non-profit Flickr Foundation, whose aim is to “to figure out how to keep Flickr around for 100 years, preserving our shared visual commons for future generations.” Flickr has recognised that it is an archive, and wants to ensure that theRead More
Ever since Eden was lost, we have been trying to find it again. Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors that followed him identified various parts of the Americas as the Garden of Eden. Confident claims for its location have been made for Mesopotamia, Armenia, Iran, Jackson County Missouri (according to some Mormons), and Bedford (according toRead More
Bob Dylan keeps on going. Though there have been hints that he may announce a retirement, at least from touring, at the end of his 2021-2024 Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, when he will be eighty-three, there is no certainty beyond life’s inevitability. So it is that, after the artistic triumph of hisRead More
The build-up to a show is always a part of the show. The title, the publicity photos, the names in lights, the walk down a corridor or up flights of stairs, the taking of one’s seat, the buzz of anticipation, the drawing back of the curtains. At the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, some ofRead More
Down a roadside divided by a canal in the Dutch town of Franeker, you come across a smart museum frontage close to a traditional Dutch brick building bearing the word ‘Planetarium’. Having purchased your ticket, you pass down narrow corridors built long before domestic spaces were designed to host public attractions. You enter an eighteenth-centuryRead More