TV – Page 18 – Well Eye Never

January 2017 Favourites

Well, here we are then. After all the planning we’ve done and the curveballs that have been thrown our way, my mother and I are finally living in London! 🙂 We’ve already had our first Christmas as new residents, and now 2017 has got off to a very busy and interesting start.

So I want to bring you up to date with what I’ve been doing over the past few weeks. And instead of posting journal entries like I was doing in Devon, with everything randomly mixed together, going forward I want to try and write more structured Favourites posts each month, where I share the things that I’ve been enjoying the most in the city and elsewhere. The aim is to include details of social events, museum exhibitions, theatre shows, walks, travel, TV, films, music and anything else that takes my fancy.

This first month has been all about settling in of course. There have been plenty of things to sort out at home and regarding my job, but I’ve also got out and about a lot too. In particular, I’ve attended several events by a social group called Thinking Bob, who I’ve been curious about for a while, plus I’ve also been to a museum and had a few nice walks. So there’s a lot to get through here, and I hope you enjoy it!

Virgin Media Installation

I’ve been in London for just over a month now, and so far things are going well. As anticipated and hoped, it’s been a much needed and refreshing change of routine, and the last few weeks have been pretty busy as you can imagine. I’ll write about the many things I’ve been up to soon.

The one thing we have had trouble with, however, is getting the internet set up, which is why I’ve been so quiet here. We had been assured by BT that they could transfer our broadband account to our new property without any problems, which we were glad to hear. But unfortunately, as I explained in detail in my Christmas journal, their system got completely confused by the additional homeworking line my employer had installed. So the transfer kept failing, and after spending ages on the phone we cancelled our account.

We then signed up to Virgin Media instead, taking advantage of a generous offer via my employer’s benefits scheme, whereby I got free installation and a £10 per month discount for the first year. Since then I’m happy to say that the switch to Virgin has been successful so far. They’re not perfect – who is? – but on the whole we’re very happy with what we’ve got. So I thought I’d do a review of their service to give my first impressions.

Journal – Christmas 2016 (Moving To London)

Finally, after nearly 120 journal posts – and thank you so much for reading if you’ve gone through some or all of them – my mother and I have now moved away from Devon into my Nan’s house in London, which we inherited when she passed away.

So in this post you’ll find out how we’ve settled in over the festive period, sorting through various bits and pieces, having problems with BT, going shopping and taking some nice walks. I also got to see my best mate and his wife who were visiting the city, signed up for some social events in January, watched a lot of TV, and was shocked to hear about the deaths of 3 very popular entertainers.

Going forward, I’ll be sharing my (hopefully many) adventures in London in a monthly roundup format, as I’ll explain at the end. But for now, I hope you enjoy this bumper post about my long-awaited arrival in the capital!

Thank You Rio – Paralympics Review

If you’ve seen my School Days video, you’ll know I used to be a member of a local sports club for disabled people when I was a kid. So, as well as doing sports at school, I would also take part in lots of swimming galas around England, from Darlington in the north, to Plymouth in the south, and lots of other places in between.

There were people with lots of different disabilities at those events, so to try and make things as equal as possible, they would either try and group people with similar conditions together in each event, or the competitors in each race would start at different times (from slowest first, to fastest last), based on their personal best times. The theory being that the finish of each race would be quite close, although often that never really held true.

In any case, I won a lot of medals and a few trophies over those years. And it got to a point where I was offered the chance to train for the national disabled swimming team. But I decided not to take it any further. I wasn’t sufficiently interested or motivated to take it to a more professional level, instead having my sights on things like my exams, university and my career beyond that.

I didn’t even know about the Paralympics back then. If I had been aware of it, and if it had been as widely covered as it is now, and if the right support, coaching and funding had been available, maybe I’d have thought differently, who knows? But at the time, I was more interested in other things. And I don’t regret my decision at all, I’ve been very successful on the route I did take through life. But when you watch the kind of performances that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, it’s impossible not to wonder how things could have been, potentially, with the right drive and determination.

So with all that said, I hope you enjoy this review of the Rio Paralympics, and I’ve created a Youtube playlist of highlights from Channel 4 as well.

Journal – July 2016 (London Visit)

Welcome back to my journal. This month I stayed with a friend in London for a few days, at my Nan’s house that my mother and I are soon hoping to move into, and there are some updates on our relocation plans as well. So I hope you enjoy!

The Liebster Award

I hadn’t heard of the Liebster Award before I started blogging, but it seems to be a fun way of promoting other bloggers. The basic idea is that you answer the questions you’ve been asked, then nominate a few other bloggers and give them some questions to answer. And I’ve been very kindly nominated by The Invisible Vision Project – thank you so much! 🙂 They’ve also nominated Nataemily and Blind Moving On, whose blogs I also recommend checking out.

So here are my answers to the questions I’ve been asked, followed by my questions for the bloggers I nominate at the end.

Journal – May-June 2016

Welcome back to another set of journal entries. Things were pretty quiet between February and April, hence I’ve waited until now to do an update. So there’s plenty to mention here, including good news about our planned house move, my first proper attempts at blogging, some notes about the elections and EU referendum, and more. I hope you enjoy!

TMI Tag

I saw the “Too Much Information” tag yesterday, so for this post I thought it would be fun to give it a go as well. I hope you like my answers, and feel free to answer the questions yourself as well! 🙂

The Music Never Dies

This week Prince became the latest in a seemingly bewildering number of prominent celebrity deaths in 2016. After Lemmy from Motorhead passed away at Christmas, the Grim Reaper seems to have been putting together his own entertainment festival, picking up people like David Bowie, Victoria Wood, Glenn Frey, Ronnie Corbett, Paul Daniels, Terry Wogan, Frank Kelly, Alan Rickman, and many other, with Prince being the latest. We’re only in April and already the year hasn’t been great for the celebrity world.

Audio Description & DVD Navigation

I’ve just received, and have happily started watching, Doctor Who Series 9 on Blu-ray. And from a visually impaired person’s perspective, I’m very pleased to see they’re continuing with audio navigation and audio description on the discs. Sherlock gets the same treatment as well.

I personally find it very useful for pointing out smaller details that I’ve missed, and for reading text on the screen that I would otherwise have to pause and squint at to read, among other things. But it’s frustrating that such audio assistance isn’t much more widespread. So I thought I’d quickly explain what it is and why it’s useful.

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