Hello again, I hope your year’s got off to a good start. For me, as noted in my recent update about my career and being a carer, my circumstances are set to change due to my mother’s ongoing support needs and funding cuts for my current job role. But Mum is much better than she was last year, I’ve already secured a new freelance position, and I have other financial support, so there’s good reason to be positive and hopeful about the year ahead.
I’m also celebrating 10 years of blogging and YouTubing, and that decade has really flown by! Thank you so much if you’ve played any part in that, whether it’s quietly reading my posts or interacting with me in some way, I really appreciate it!
But to focus on January, I have started going out and about more again, now that my mother’s situation has eased a bit. So I’ve met a couple of friends, eaten some delicious food and taken a few nice walks. Meanwhile at home, alongside my usual favourite TV programmes, I’ve been having a stand-up comedy binge by watching several specials and finishing an autobiography. So there’s quite a bit to mention as usual, none of which is sponsored to appear here, and I hope you enjoy!
Contents
Out & About
Now that Mum’s more comfortable being on her own again at home for a few hours, I’ve finally started to go out more at weekends like I used to, so that’s been good.
I’m not going to talk about every single outing of course, as there’s no need to. For instance, I had a delicious Sunday roast at Mabel’s Tavern while catching up with a friend, which was just personal time for us, and not all of my walks are worth mentioning.
But here are a few highlights from the month for which I have images to share.
Simmer Huang Restaurant
Firstly, my friend Emily from Fashioneyesta very kindly invited me to join her at a Chinese restaurant called Simmer Huang in Canary Wharf, just a short walk up the road from Crossharbour DLR station. And it was a very filling meal. It was also complimentary, as Emily was reviewing it for her social media.
For starters we shared small plates of Chicken Kara Age and Deep Fried Crispy Pork, both of which were delicious with nice crunchy coatings, but the chicken in particular was very moreish!
The main course then had two parts to it. To begin with, we shared a large Golden Chicken Katsu Hotpot, which had lovely big strips of chicken along with various vegetables. And then once that got low, the waiter poured some hot water into the pot to create a broth, and the hotplate underneath made sure the water was brought to the boil and stayed there. We then had various dishes which we could cook in that boiling water, including some lamb, beef, crabsticks, potato slices, sweetcorn, mushrooms and so on. It wasn’t easy to tell when things were done, but we figured it out as we went along.
And everything tasted very nice. Naturally the meat appealed to me most, but I enjoyed the potatoes and vegetables as well. And while Emily has become adept with chopsticks, I have no idea how to use them, so I was glad I could ask for cutlery instead!
We also opted to try their Wheel of Flavours, not really sure what to expect. I had imagined it being just a flat wheel that lays on the table and you turn it around. But it was actually a proper ferris wheel contraption you could spin with little plates of food on each platform, including tofu, quail’s eggs, beef balls, salmon, and so on. I couldn’t tell what most things were just by looking at them, but with Emily being a foodie expert she was able to identify most of them. And we also had cocktails to drink, so I had a Sex on the Beach, which was very refreshing.
Suffice to say, we were very pleasantly stuffed by the end of all that! So thank you to the staff at Simmer Huang for looking after us so well, we had a lovely time.
Canary Wharf Winter Lights
Emily and I walked off our meal at Simmer Huang by going to have a look at the Winter Lights trail nearby. This annual event, now in its 10th year, consists of various lit-up artworks around Canary Wharf, that are often moving or animated in some way with a music soundtrack.
It proved to be fairly difficult though, as it was very crowded, it was tricky to find our way around sometimes, and ironically the lighting wasn’t always very good for navigating safely. There was an accessible map on the website with step-free information, but it’s of no real help when you can’t see your way around to start with, so you really need to go with someone fully sighted. We did speak to a couple of members of staff who were helpful at pointing us in the best general direction, but it was still difficult to work out where the next installation was sometimes. So we didn’t stay for too long and only looked at 6 of the 16 displays listed on the map before we gave up and made our separate ways home.
Nevertheless, it gave us a welcome bit of fresh air, and what we did see was nice, if a bit underwhelming considering how it had been promoted as “spectacular”, but then maybe we didn’t get to see the very best ones.
The Hulahoop installation by a French collective called Scale, with lines of rings moving around and changing colour, was my favourite, and it’s the one we spent the longest watching. And Blueprint by Studio Vertigo from the UK, designed to look like the spiralling double helix structure of DNA, was good too. I also liked seeing the blue whale made out of plastic waste again, by Jason Klimoski & Lesley Chang, which wasn’t part of the new trail as it’s a permanent installation, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it lit up since I originally stumbled upon it during the daytime last year.
So on the whole, while it’s the sort of thing that’s nice to check out if you happen to be in the area, like Emily and I were for our meal, it’s not something I would make the trip to see specially. In any case, it’s too late for you to see the trail now, as it ran for less than 2 weeks, finishing at the end of January. But it’ll be back again next year I’m sure.
River Thames North Bank Walk
For the first time in ages, it’s now possible to walk along the north bank of the Thames from Westminster to the Tower of London uninterrupted, after the opening of the Bazalgette Embankment by Blackfriars Bridge. The site had been closed off for 9 years as part of work on the Thames Tideway super sewer, which meant you had to cross over the busy main road and take an awkward route to get back to the river again on the other side of the bridge. But now you can just stay on the same side of the road. There are still bits of work going on at other points, so there are a few brief occasions where you can’t get right up to the water, but you’re never more than a few metres away from it now.
So I decided to walk that route one afternoon, starting near Big Ben and finishing near Tower Bridge. The north bank will never be as attractive to walk along as the south bank, so I don’t do it very often, but the views you get across to the south of the river are great, with the London Eye, Tate Modern and the Shard obviously standing out the most. There are some interesting sculptures and other items along the way too, such as a dragon boundary marker and an old police telephone box.
Before you get to the new section that’s opened, there are some other public spaces you pass by as well, where people can get away from the road for better views of the river. However, they do have unusual layouts, with some sections higher or lower than others, and consequently they could do with properly marked steps and ledges as well as more railings for safety. There are some surprisingly big drops within those spaces if you’re not careful, which thankfully I was!
As for the new Bazalgette Embankment, it’s lovely for the views and continuous access to the north bank, and it also has a little bit of greenery and some benches. But its most prominent features are huge monoliths, part of a series of sculptural forms called Stages by Nathan Coley. As impressive as some of them are in size, however, I can’t say I found them particularly inspiring, but perhaps with my eyesight there are subtle details of interest that I missed. All I can see from zooming in on my photos is that the birds have already started to make their mark on what are quite big targets for them, and black is hardly the best colour for hiding that. They’re going to need regular cleaning!
What actually grabbed my attention more though was further east along the river, in a section that reopened in March 2023 called the Globe View Walkway, so named because of its view of the famous theatre across the river. That section had been locked away for two decades due to antisocial behaviour, and the City of London had to overcome various hurdles to get it back into public use.
I did wander through it not long after it reopened, but since then some artworks were installed last year, collectively entitled Thames Made Modern. The intergenerational project by Artbash has produced some lovely paintings that mix together three elements:
- Backgrounds by Year 6 children from Aldgate Primary School, inspired by mudlarking sessions.
- Buildings by Year 9 children from Haggerston Community School, reproducing what they could see from the walkway.
- Wildlife by the congregation and local residents of St James Garlickhythe, collaborating with artists.
They’re beautiful and enjoyable visions of the river, and alongside each painting is a section of the poem written to accompany the series, including a braille label and a QR code at the bottom. You can read and listen to the poem, and see all of the images, on the Artbash page. So it was a nice surprise to stumble across those, and it’s wonderful that people from different generations have worked together on them.
Freddie Mercury Exhibition
If you’ve been following me during the month, you can’t have failed to notice my biggest ever series of posts – a 10-part special to mark my 10th blogiversary, looking back at the Freddie Mercury: A World Of My Own exhibition that I visited at Sotheby’s in 2023.
It’s taken a couple of years for me to go through the hundreds of photos I took, to find out what most of the items are and put those posts together, but it’s been well worth it, I’m really pleased with how they’ve come out. It’s a nicely organised portfolio of possessions that I can look back at any time now, so I hope you enjoy looking through it all as well. Here’s the full list of posts:
- Japanese Art & Fashion
- Other Japanese Items
- Garden Lodge Furniture
- More Furniture
- Art
- Awards
- The Collector
- Little Things
- Stage Fashion
- The Performer
Stand-Up Comedians
Chris McCausland, Jack Dee & John Bishop
I’ve dedicated separate posts to no less than 3 of my favourite comedians this month, as a result of listening to an audiobook, watching a couple of TV specials and revisiting a whole bunch of DVDs. So do check out any of these that interest you:
- Chris McCausland: Keep Laughing Review – My mother and I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to the audiobook of Chris McCausland’s autobiography Keep Laughing, which he narrates himself. It’s fascinating, funny and sometimes moving, so I highly recommend it.
- Jack Dee: Stand-Up Comedy Reviews – The deadpan comedian Jack Dee had a new special out on Sky over Christmas, so I’ve watched that as well as his old DVDs. I think his earlier material is better, but the new show is still good.
- John Bishop: Stand-Up Comedy Reviews – Liverpudlian star John Bishop also had a gig shown on Sky over the festive season, celebrating his 25th anniversary on the stand-up scene, and it was great. So I had fun revisiting his DVDs and checking out some other shows he’s posted online.
Ricky Gervais: Mortality
Mortality is the latest Golden Globe-winning hour-long Netflix special from Ricky Gervais, filmed at the London Palladium, and having enjoyed all of his previous specials on DVD and online, I was naturally keen to see this one as well. And I wasn’t disappointed, he’s still funny.
It’s nothing exceptional compared to his earlier specials, as his style of humour is the same as it’s always been. And I know he’s not to everyone’s taste, which is fair enough. But I enjoyed it. He does use strong and occasionally controversial language, yet it isn’t without reason, so I never feel offended by it. Complaints about his previous specials have largely resulted from people seeing or being told about clips that have been taken out of context, which is why they never get upheld. If he were being truly offensive, Netflix would have caved into pressure and dropped him years ago.
During the show he makes well-considered and often humorous points, without being patronising, about free speech, hate crimes, the dark side of social media, morality, and the importance of comedy vs people who take offence to everything. And right at the start he sticks up for disabled comedian Rosie Jones, not just for the ableist abuse she receives in general, but also for the backlash she got for the inclusion of the R-word in the title of her documentary about online hate speech. Whether she should have used it will always divide opinion, but his point is that she had the freedom to do so. And it did generate a lot of headlines and discussions that raised awareness as to why it’s such a bad word, including in this show.
But he discusses plenty of other things too. Indeed, the title of the show, Mortality, mainly refers to the fact that he’s now in his 60s. So he talks about what it’s like getting old and the things he’s learned at his age, his frustrations with everyday things and annoying people, why he’d be alright in jail or in hell, and what he considers to be the best part of the body.
He also tells a funny story about preparing one of his monologues when hosting the Golden Globes, and having to persuade the lawyers to let him use a particular slang term. And there’s an amusing tale about how he inadvertently upset Elton John.
So it was a good show, he had me laughing out loud several times. He’s also donating £2.5 million to animal charities from the premium ticket sales on this tour, which is generous. And he’s already doing warm-up gigs for his next tour, called Legend, so I expect that will end up on Netflix as well. It would be fun to see him live one day though, if I can get around to it.
Glenn Moore: Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, Glenn I’m Sixty Moore
I’ve been aware of Glenn Moore for quite a while, as I once saw him live at a comedy night in Devon in 2016, plus I’ve watched him on Mock The Week and Live At The Apollo, and heard him on the Absolute Radio breakfast show, so I’ve been following him on social media as well. But this is the first time I’ve seen a full stand-up show of his, which was broadcast on Sky Comedy in December.
Filmed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, it lasts for 1 hour 15 minutes and is very good. He has a fast, fluid, confident and impassioned style of delivery as he tells his stories and offloads his thoughts, regularly injected with funny asides and one-liners. And that in turn allows him to punctuate the action with pauses and moments of silence to great effect as well. So there’s plenty of laughs in quick succession and nice callbacks towards the end too.
From the outset his show has a very unique feel, as he enters the auditorium already in mid-conversation, pretending that he’s had to start his set on the way there due to time constraints. And he wears a rucksack to begin with, joking that it allows him to make a quick exit if his jokes don’t go down well.
The main focus of his set is the Covid lockdown, and how it caused him to lose motivation and confidence in his comedy career. Which sounds depressing, and you can tell that he truly was miserable during that time, yet he clearly drew inspiration from that period and talks about it animatedly and very amusingly. By sheer misfortune he and his girlfriend had to live separately as nobody was allowed to travel, so he talks about how he had to move in with his brother and why he was jealous of him, how he tried to save money, and how he had therapy for his obsession with working.
Occasionally he reminisces further into his past as well, from explaining how he was a hardworking kid to telling us about his first date with his girlfriend and how they ended up moving in together. And talking of his partner Katie, whom he married in late 2023, he talks about why he didn’t want children and was frightened to discuss it with her, even imagining his worst nightmare of a child in a routine that gets him very worked up.
Those are the main points of the show, but there are some other tangents mixed in as well, such as his experience of doing gigs in America, why he hates his name and grocery deliveries, among other things.
Altogether, therefore, it’s a well written, nicely structured and very funny show, and Glenn has great energy throughout, so I’m glad I watched it.
Ania Magliano: I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This
Also on Sky over Christmas, and also filmed at the Royal Court Theatre, was a show by Ania Magliano. She came on to my radar due to her involvement on Taskmaster last year, so I thought I’d give her stand-up special a go, and I’m pleased I did, she’s very good. It’s only short, as even including adverts it only runs for 55 minutes, but she packs plenty into it.
After an opening routine about her love of gossip, including why the Bible is basically a gossip book, she gets into her main set. It revolves around a time when she went to a new hairdresser and had the worst haircut of her life, and the impact that it had on her mental state and behaviour.
So as well as funny observations about being in a salon, she also talks about breaking her toe, getting into boxing to channel her anger, volunteering for a charity that provides companionship for old people, how getting breast reduction surgery helped to make her feel more self-confident, and why she believes hair is how we judge the sanity of women in society.
And alongside all of that she also explains why she hates voice notes, why an offer of a threesome didn’t go the way she’d expected, why she was happy being single, and her mindset now that she has a boyfriend despite being bisexual, among other things.
It’s all very well structured and she has a great sense of humour, which allows her to skilfully slip in one or two serious details about her life as well, that give a rounded picture. So it was worth watching, it was interesting and fun to see her performing for the first time.
Katherine Ryan: First Born Daughter
The final special I watched on Sky was from Katherine Ryan, lasting 1 hour 20 minutes, and it was filmed in my neck of the woods, at the Stratford East theatre. If my life hadn’t been so disrupted last year, I might have looked at going to that in person (likewise for the other shows above), though I imagine it probably sold out quite quickly anyway.
I’ve seen a few of her shows online and on TV before, and once again she’s very good here. She’s also pregnant with her fourth baby, and during the show she addresses the fact that she’s had so many children. We see the other three, along with her partner Bobby, in the intro film, where she tries to get inspiration for material from them, and she talks about them all during the show, explaining both what frustrates her about them and why she loves them.
The title of the show refers in part to her first daughter, Violet, who is now a teenager with all the issues that entails, but also herself, as Katherine is the first daughter to her own parents. So she naturally draws comparisons between what life was like for her growing up compared to Violet.
She also has routines about men, including a few she doesn’t like or trust, such as Gavin Plumb (the man who was jailed for planning to kill Holly Willoughby) and Tommy Fury (a Love Island contestant), along with the time she went viral after accusing a colleague in the industry of being a sex predator, which is a serious topic for a comedy show but she handles it well. However, she also defends men when it’s warranted too, illustrating her point with a story about a teacher who failed to realise his laptop was still broadcasting to a projector. And she also jokes about why men having sex is ridiculous, given the way their bodies behave compared to women. But it’s not all about guys, as she also talks about going to Dubai, being fat-phobic, sex dolls, being a white woman over 40, and more.
In amongst all of that, there’s also quite a bit of audience interaction to pad out the show, as she invites them to text in their dilemmas, and at various points she picks out one or two to see if she can help. These include questions about a vasectomy, a gay guy who’s unsure about someone he’s dating, a woman dating a man who won’t move far away from his young healthy mother, a Canadian trying to find guys to date in London, the unexpected consequences of returning a lost wallet, someone taking drugs on a date, and a woman wanting a copy of a sex tape she made. One wonders if Katherine’s advice helped in the end, especially for that last story.
As she herself acknowledges, incorporating that kind of thing into a show, especially one being filmed, is a brave move in case there aren’t any stories of great amusement or interest, but fortunately the audience don’t let her down here. And she shares a couple of good examples from previous gigs as well.
So altogether it’s a fun show, given the mixture of stand-up material and audience participation, and the variety of topics covered throughout.
Jimmy Carr: Road Kill
During his latest tour, Jimmy has given over sections of each show to audience heckles, comments and questions, and shared lots of videos as a result, many of which I’ve seen and enjoyed, and he’s still releasing new clips every week. So this hour-long Youtube special includes his favourite crowd work moments from 2025.
His comebacks are often very funny, but he also offers up well-considered thoughts on serious issues, is movingly sincere and supportive to people who are having a difficult time, and deals with disruptive audience members firmly when necessary. So these clips actually give a much more rounded picture of him than his main comedy sets, and they are a great deal of fun.
Other TV Shows
Here’s a quick roundup of other things I’ve been watching, which is again mostly comedy.
- Live At The Apollo – On the theme of stand-up comedy, this show recently returned for its 20th series, with a variety of performances from various acts. A lot of guests on it don’t appeal to me these days, so I only watch occasional bits and pieces. But I was pleased to see Josh Widdicombe and Dara O Briain hosting an episode each, so I watched and enjoyed their routines. I had a little look at a few of the other comedians I’m not familiar with out of curiosity, but none of them particularly jumped out at me, so I didn’t watch their routines in full.
- Mock The Week – Talking of Dara, I’m thrilled that he’s back hosting this satirical news quiz, joined by familiar faces who have been on the show before, and Hugh Dennis will be back as a regular panellist from week 3. The new series actually started on 1 February, but is worth a brief mention here before I do a proper review later, probably in my March roundup after the series has ended. The BBC cancelled it in 2022, but it’s returned with hour-long episodes on the relaunched digital channel TLC for a 9-week run on Sundays at 9pm. Right now you can watch the first episode for free on Youtube and Discovery+, and it’s great, it’s like they’ve never been away.
- Would I Lie To You? – Following the Christmas special, I’m delighted that this show has returned for its 19th series, and it’s still really good, with the guests telling stories that could be truthful or complete nonsense. In just the first few episodes there have been particularly funny appearances by Chris McCausland, Harriet Kemsley, Gyles Brandreth and, of course, Bob Mortimer, who is legendary at this game, driving David Mitchell to despair with his preposterous yet potentially true tales!
- QI XL – I’ve continued to watch the rest of the W series of this show of course, which is always very interesting as well as funny. Some guests contribute more than others, but there are always at least one or two good ones alongside Sandi Toksvig and Alan Davies. One episode featured Chris McCausland for example, during which Sandi ended up laying on the desk so he could feel her body length, to get a sense for how big an iguana is! That was a particularly strong line-up in fact, with Ed Byrne and Zoe Lyons also on the panel. This series has just finished, but we already know that they’re preparing to film the X series, so there’s that to look forward to.
- Other Shows – I’m also very happy that Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, The Last Leg and 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown have returned in recent weeks. The guests are a mixed bag, as is their nature, but overall they’re still fun. Saturday nights have also been boosted by the return of Gladiators as well, and they’ve added some fun new events in this third series to keep things fresh. Meanwhile the Taskmaster spin-off Taskmasterclass has also come back, which is just a compilation of highlights from the main series, with a bit of commentary by Greg and Alex. So it’s nothing special, but it’s a nice enough way to kill an hour. There are a ton of highlights online already though.
Beyond that, I did try a couple of episodes of the new BBC sitcom Can You Keep A Secret?, starring Dawn French as the mother in a family who has to pretend the father is dead in order to keep the life insurance mistakenly awarded to them. But it just didn’t keep my interest, it’s certainly not a patch on The Vicar Of Dibley. It was worth a gander out of curiosity though, and I know some people love it.
And then over on Channel 4, the Big Fat Quiz Of Telly wasn’t as good as the annual Quiz Of The Year, as apart from Harry Hill I wasn’t a fan of the other guests. So I didn’t watch much of that, and having looked up a synopsis of the show on Wikipedia, I didn’t miss much. Talking of Harry though, he has a new video podcast – or vodscarf as he calls it – on Youtube, which features his usual brand of surreal humour. But while it’s ok with little amusing moments here and there, he hasn’t yet had any guests I’m a big fan of, and the gags I’ve seen aren’t hilarious enough to make me want to tune in every week. It is well worth a look if you’re a fan, and it’s great to see that he’s still having fun entertaining people, but I miss TV Burp really, that was Harry at the top of his game.
Conclusion
And that’s it, I hope you enjoyed that. I’m glad I was able to start going out a bit more during the month, complete all my Freddie Mercury exhibition posts, and watch so much stand-up comedy, among other things. This has also been my 7th straight daily post in a row, the first time I’ve ever done a week-long streak here, and January was my most prolific month, with 13 posts altogether. So I think I’ve done very well in marking my 10th anniversary. I won’t be bombarding you with quite so many posts in February, I promise!
In terms of what’s next, I don’t have any major plans for February, other than doing the training needed for the freelance job I’ve signed up for. My mother and I are effectively in a transition period right now, getting over the difficulties of last year as we prepare for the months ahead, and I’m glad I’ve started to lay down some good foundations already. But I do intend to go out more when the weather allows, and when it comes to entertainment I know what my next Blu-ray binge is going to be, plus I have an audiobook gifted by a friend to listen to.
So I hope you have a good month, whatever you’re getting up to, and I’ll see you again soon for my next post!
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