Autumn colours arrived late this year, were glorious for a short time then disappeared rapidly.

Midway through December and I have failed to keep any blog promises so far… I meant to provide a playlist of last year’s December music – family emergencies and family celebrations have conspired to prevent anything from happening. I also intended to provide some Christmas cooking advice and that may yet happen. Meanwhile, I have, later in the month, a holiday story ready and waiting, and will also link to my Secret Santa fanfic once it is posted.

For now, have some reviews of what I watched in November.

Shetland***** (BBC1/iPlayer) Case satisfactorily resolved. Plenty of personal angst for next season.

Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation*****. (BBC4/iPlayer) Repeat of a film I missed first time around. Nice long interviews with Keith and other musicians. I kept thinking how wonderful it would have been to have similar footage on composers like Mozart (Keith’s favourite).

Wheel of Time***** (Amazon Prime) I was excited to see this – I read all the books then gave them to a friend. She has now started a discussion comm (reading/viewing) on Dreamwidth. There are flaws (as there are in the books) but I shall continue. This is Amazon but is a weekly programme. I ended up writing a very angry letter to The New Statesman re a review of episode 1 by a journalist who clearly had no idea about the fantasy genre. I do not usually write to editors…

City Homicide.*** (Amazon Prime). An Australian cop show set in Melbourne. I was hoping for something like Mystery Road. I watched one ep and only carried on to the second because it was a two ep case. Adequate mystery and solution but the detective team was boring.

The Harder They Fall (Netflix) No stars. This is an alternative Western and sounded interesting. I stopped watching and read while husband got to the end. Brilliant acting and direction and fascinating to see black actors in all the leading roles, but the plot was very thin and there was almost non-stop violence so not a film for me. A friend recced it and I will be wary of her recs in future.

Joanna Lumley and the Human Swan (itv hub) Joanna followed the journey of a woman paragliding round Great Britain. No stars. I sat through this (doing other things) because husband is a keen paraglider. I am frequently irritated by Joanna Lumley and on top of her style of presentation we had some fairly stupid commentary about climate change. Yes, cliffs are collapsing but they must always have done so or why would they be there? Worthy but could benefit from some serious editing. I admit I was already a bit upset at the notion of a programme featuring a guy who died in an accident whilst they were filming; we knew from the outset that it was dedicated to him and again, worthy but not something I was happy to watch.