Day 2968

Aka Saturday 7th January 2023

A chilled out day today, spent doing the crossword, and various other puzzles, in the paper, and watching the last few episodes of Season One of ‘Elementary’:

…which I have very much enjoyed. 'Elementary' is a great updating of Sherlock Holmes and has a great cast that have gelled well and their relationships and interactions feel genuine and real and the stories have been interesting and engaging. Season One has mostly been stand alone stories, with a few hints to Sherlock’s past and the last few episodes gather these together for a great multi-part story introducing Irene Adler and Moriarty. Saying any more would spoil things! Johnny Lee Miller does a great job portraying Sherlock, someone who sees and takes in everything, knows a lot and is a brilliant detective, who is constantly on edge because he sees all. And Lucy Lui does an equally great job as Watson, someone who cares for Sherlock, is willing to compromise to help him, but is also able to stand up to him when he oversteps the mark. Possibly a pairing equal to the Brett and Burke/Hardwicke portrayals of the ‘80s and ‘90s…and as we’re mentioning other Sherlocks, plus I don’t think any (brief) discussion of ‘Elementary’ can go without mentioning it, there’s the Moffat/Gatiss ‘Sherlock’...

...I had enjoyed the first few episodes of ‘Sherlock’, but it soon became a chore to watch as the stories left behind the cases and mysteries and focused on Sherlock himself. ‘Elementary’ (at least Season One) is so much better, it just has more heart and joy in it. I highly recommend watching ‘Elementary’…and the postie delivered some cool post, the first was a letter from my bank, which initially filled me with dread as banks don’t normally write with good news. Normally it’s to remind you that, for some reason or other, you owe them money, but this time they were telling me that they had failed to notify me of overdraft charges and would be refunding me £55.62, which was nice…the second piece of post was this 'High Noise Cassette Tape' by ’M*A*R*Y’:

…which is a collection of early work by Richard X, so it was a bit of an automatic purchase (he has created some great pop records and mash-ups, which are all worth checking out). Now all I’ve got to do is wait for the download code or get the tape deck out of the loft and fiddle about connecting it to my laptop and working out recording levels! And, as mentioned above, I also did today’s G2 Crossword:

…and we finish the first crossword week of 2023 on a pretty damn solid note. We only had to cheat on 8.33% of Saturday’s clues (two out of 24). The little grey cells found most of the clues easy peasy to get through, just stumbling on a few chewy ones. And we learnt that ‘lack of religious virtue’ is ‘impiety’ and that an ‘ovule’ is the ‘plant structure which becomes a seed when fertilised’. Overall, a super solid start to the crossword year, on average we only had to cheat on 9.39% of clues per day, hopefully we can get that number down as the year progresses…