About me

An overview of me

Hello!

Favourites

Random things I like

Spy Movies

I like the action ones like Bond and Bourne, but I have a particular soft-spot for more ‘thinking’ ones. Especially those based on the work of John le Carré.

In general I tend to like anything that involves British upper-class men from the 1900’s in tweedy suits smoking, scheming and having to use their over-alcoholed brains. I like the stuffiness and slowness of them. They’re often equal parts dull and confusing. But they also have a comfortable cosiness to them.

Rather strangely I’ve always fantasised about being a civil servant in the 50s/60s/70s. It seems like a world that’s slow and predictable and I like that.

I would wake up at the same time every day in my drab but large home. My white vest-covered body would take a sip of water from a lowball and I’d put on my delicate, small, gold Omega watch and start my day.

After eating a tasteless bran cereal of some description for breakfast whilst listening to the BBC on the radio I’d then catch the wonderfully quiet bus at exactly 08:13 to the office through a fog hugged London. Work would be a nice combo of relaxed and rigorous.

My evenings would be made up of either quiet contemplation and drinking along with some letter and (bad) poetry writing. Or spent at either the pub or a members-only club.

Watches

Films

Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Quite how a director who was inexperienced at making big blockbusters, in a country without a big film industry, managed to make the biggest and the best blockbuster of all time is a miracle. It should not have worked. Something like Lord of the Rings is unlikely to be repeated again for a long, long time. For good reason. I would argue it was reckless for that much money to be given to a relatively unknown director for such a high budget fantasy film.

It’s 20 years on and all three films still hold up. Even the CGI. CGI from other films of the period haven’t achieved really this.

. And the fact you can have an entirely CGI character like Golumn still emote so much feeling in you all these years on was remarkable at the time and doubly so now.

The worldbuilding achieved by director Peter Jackson and crew is one my favourite things about these films. Watching them in the cinema as a kid I was totally transported. The Shire and Bag End is still my dream place to live. It’s my utopia. My heaven.

Its long score by Howard Shore is beautiful and iconic and is his best work.

In Bruges

Withnail & I

Hot Fuzz

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Blade Runner

Shame

Four Lions

About Time

Barry Lyndon

Honourable Mentions

A Single Man.

TV Shows

True Detective (Season 1)

Peep Show

Game of Thrones

The Office (US)

I’m Alan Partridge

Blackadder

Taboo

Penny Dreadful

Detectorists

This Country

Podcasts

• Accidental Tech Podcast
  • An Apple-focused tech podcast I’ve listened to for many years.
• No Such Thing As A Fish
  • A podcast by the minds beyond the TV show “Qi”. Funny and full of facts.
• Animal Spirits
  • A finance podcast that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
• Ramblings
  • Clare Balding walks and talks with a new person each week. The people are often interesting, but not ‘famous’.
• In Our Time
  • A long-running BBC podcast. It interviews three new academics each week to talk about a topic in the world of science and history.
• What Are Your Thoughts?
  • Another fun finance podcast.
• Huberman Lab
  • A new edition to my list. It’s a health podcast by Andrew Huberman.
• The Idea Store
  • A philosophy podcast by a professor called Michel Sugrue. Often it’s just recordings of his lectures and the quality isn’t always great. I don’t always agree with Sugrue, but he’s an engaging teacher.
• The Tim Ferriss Show
  • I skip the bulk of the episodes. But when they’re good, they’re really good.
• Conversations with Tyler
  • The economist Tyler Cowen runs the blog Marginal Revolution. This is his podcast. He has a unique interviewing style which is no frills but gets right to the point and he gets a lot out of a person in just an hour.

Books

History

• “At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime” by A. Roger Ekirch
• “The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age” by Leo Damrosch
• “Churchill” by Andrew Roberts
• “Life of Samuel Johnson” by James Boswell
• “Grant” by Ron Chernow
• “Napoleon the Great” by Andrew Roberts
• “An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine” by Howard Markel
• “The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz” by Erik Larson
• “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany” by Norman Ohler

Philosophy

• “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
• “Letters from a Stoic” by Seneca
• “How to Live: A Life of Montaigne” by Sarah Bakewell

‘Dipping’ Books

• “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work” by Mason Currey
• “Essays” by Michel de Montaigne
• The Major Works by Samuel Johnson
• “A Field Guide to the English Clergy: A Compendium of Diverse Eccentrics, Pirates, Prelates and Adventurers; All Anglican, Some Even Practising” by Fergus Butler-Gallie

Money

• “The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness” by Morgan Housel
• “The Richest Man In Babylon” by George S. Clason

Fiction

• Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
• “The Rum Diary” by Hunter S. Thompson
• “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

Music

My favourite genre is rock and folk from the 1960’s and 1970’s. But I also enjoy and have a passing interest in prog rock, classical, jazz, funk, country, blues and ambient.

Below are some of my favourite bands/musicians, kind of ranked.

Van Morrison

⊕ He’s not in vogue these days, and is maybe seen as a middling creator of decent romantic songs that are liked by the dull rank and file of the middle class. But I think some of his songs have an almost religious quality that transcend music and get to an entirely different plane. He has a certain sound, with a subtle, gentle layering that often builds, repeats and folds whilst Morrison’s powerful, slightly erratic voice moves, swerves and jumps from line to line – and often syllable to syllable – in a way that I simply adore.

His finest albums are probably Astral Weeks, Moondance, Saint Dominic’s Preview, Veedon Fleece and Into The Music. But the good thing about Morrison is that he has few stinkers and his albums outside his artistic peak post-1970’s are still certainly worth exploring, as they nearly all contain a great song or two.

If you want to get into Morrison I have this playlist on Spotify. It contains every song of his that I think isn’t actively average, poor or just very dull. It’s a good way of listening to his entire discography, but without the songs that I feel simply aren’t worth your time.

Neil Young

Bob Dylan

Eric Clapton

The Band