It was the title "Hannah Green and her unfeasibly mundane existence" that grabbed me, and made me try this book. And the book itself didn't disappoint. The plot itself, about Hannah and how her existence becomes anything but mundane as it is mixed up with an engaging Devil and fantastic deeds and misdeeds, is imaginative. But it is the fourth wall breaking storytelling style which shines, the authorial voice teasing the reader along.

"A Series of Unfortunate Events" is the tragic history of the Baudelaire children, orphaned by a fire and then persecuted by the unscrupulous wicked Count Olaf. Delicious black comedy, weird situations, outlandish characters, a deadpan narrator who constantly advises against watching this tale of woe. A unique experience. This TV series has the advantage of the active participation of the source books' author Lemony Snicket (real name Daniel Handler). A well produced Netflix series which creates a fantasy world in some ways Victorian in feel, but yet modern.

The cake Virginia did for her father's 80th birthday.

Every year we go to see the snowdrops at Anglesey Abbey. The gardeners of the National Trust even in winter manage to create a marvellous display of textures and shades and colours and shapes in the gardens there. The snowdrops were out in force when we went, the different varieties explained in signs which we saw but didn't really read. There are lots of days in a year. As humans we need to divide up the year in some way to make it less intimidating. In the past they had harvest and the equinoxes and the solstices. Now perhaps we have see the snowdrop day, and Valentine's Day, and Bank Holidays. And Black Fridays?

"Beyond" has a young guy waking up from a 12-year coma with superpowers. Mysterious organisation pursues him to use those superpowers. I found this quite watchable, even if it's not classic. It's in a popular vein of such stories.

"Stranger Things" has mysterious government organisations, super powers, secret research institutes, alternate realities. A loving retro throwback to the days of "CE3K", "ET", and many others. Captures that period.

"Once Upon A Time " is a grand collision of a load of fairy tales with an adult context. The plot has an evil queen enacting a curse which sends all the fairy tale characters to our world, robbing them of their memories - and their happy endings. A large number of intertwining storylines with larger than life characters. A complex back story revealed gradually as the episodes progress. Good production values and a wide range of locations. A great performance by Robert Carlyle as Mr Gold / Rumplestiltskin. Very palatable entertainment. I'm not sure how many series I will watch, before it gets samey. Or before it all gets too random. But the first series is an achievement.

In "Shannara Chronicles" three young adults in a fantasy world find themselves on a quest to stop a dark power returning to kill everyone. They have a varied series of cliffhanger adventures while working out their triangular relationships. That about is the plot. This isn't as epic as "Lord of The Rings". It's just simple digestible fantasy fun which motors along at a good pace. Not ponderous or pretentious. The fantasy world may not be as deeply fleshed out as Tolkien's, but neither is the fantasy world in Jackson's LOTR films which major on spectacle. This isn't as massive as "Game of Thrones". The number of characters to follow are far less. The tone is far different to the nihilist amorality of "Game of Thrones", where nastiness and antiheroes are the draw. "Shannara Chronicles" is definitely heroic fantasy, where good with sacrifice will conquer evil, where characters can be redeemed or can be corrupted. This isn't quite the "Shannara Chronicles" as written by Terry Brooks. What we have is a collision between heroic fantasy and YA romance - for me a fun mixture but this is a personal view. It isn't the same tone as the books. Any more than Jackson captured Tolkien's tone.

(Valentine's Day is the 14th but we have decided having a meal that day is a bad idea. After we found ourselves eating in a typing pool layout next to a drunken couple). On the day itself we exchanged cards and bath bombs. I'm glad bath bombs have been invented, they make ideal gifts being both decorative and consumable so you can give them repeatedly. I gave Virginia some from Heavenly Bubbles, she gave me some in a splendid plastic transparent mug with a straw. We had our meal at the Phoenix Chinese restaurant in Histon, opting as we so often do for Set Meal C. The staff were short-handed, two waitresses were off sick, and I felt for them as they had to rush around with a nearly full restaurant. The Phoenix has great oak beams from when it was a pub, and we sat in the corner we often sit in. For me it's an experience as much as it is eating. They kindly gave Virginia one of the roses left over from their Valentine's Day stock.

My father John Sidney Smith died this evening. Oscar Wilde quipped that "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his". For me there's a certain truth in that. My father was a major figure not only in British Origami circles but worldwide. See an Origami focussed obituary. He not only folded models, knew key people, but also contributed to the theory of origami and its use in areas like therapy. I can just about fold a paper aeroplane unaided.

We're just back from a visit to Aysgarth in North Yorkshire. A lovely area, pastoral and peaceful. Dry stone walls divided up the snow streaked hills. Sheep grazed the hills. Villages retained their age-old character. The Aysgarth falls could be heard from the well appointed Robin Hill holiday bungalow we were in, we walked from the bungalow and saw three sets of falls. A great area for walkers not that we count as such. We dined twice at the Aysgarth Falls Hotel which had a peculiar backwards clock, and books around the walls.

The world cried today and we cried with it. Our eldest cat Tabitha was put to sleep this lunchtime. Tabitha was 5 years old when we got her on the 29th of April 2006. We never learnt when exactly she was born so we made the 29th of April the official birthday for our quean. And royalty she was - a blue-eyed rare chocolate colour point Ragdoll. Tabitha looked down on our second cat Amelia as a naughty little schoolgirl one cattery owner said.

"Noble My Love" is a very standard Korean romance with rich chaebol heir, poor girl, a contract fake marriage, etc. But nicely done and packaged, a great example of the genre.

"Sword Master" is a 'remake' of a Shaw Bros film "Death Duel", both based on a Gu Long wuxia fantasy novel. At times the film does have the feel of a studio lot bound film. But it is a modern production, with good production values, and sensible fight choreography while still being true to wuxia fiction and its world of wandering master swordsmen, magical swords, clans fighting for supremacy in the Jiang Hu. The themes of redemption, and the futility of a senseless battle to be first, drive this film. I like films where characters grow and change. Those themes also make the film speak beyond its immediate setting of a martial arts subworld in China to be more universal. A well balanced enjoyable martial arts film.

"Blazing transfer students" is a totally nuts TV series based on a Japanese anime about the Blazing Transfer Students who go to problem schools and sort them out - sort of. Self-referential to absurdity and beyond, aware it is anime and no more, tripping lightly from trope to trope. For lovers of the bizarre and weird.

The film "Gintama" is based on a manga by Sorachi Hideaki it is one crazy and crazily enjoyable experience. The plot has a white-haired ex-samurai (oh yes we're in Edo period Japan after aliens invaded and stopped samurais waving their swords around - the aliens all have animal heads) who gets caught up in a mystery involving a serial killing sword. The film is chock-a-block full of references to Japanese culture, I won't have got half of them but there's allusions to Dragon Ball Z, Rurouni Kenshin, etc. The film also breaks the fourth wall with wild abandon, for instance pointing out that the giant white?duck? Elizabeth is a man in a suit. For me this is a must-see film. Totally silly and non-serious, so bad it's great!

My sister's 60th birthday

Just so we could have a round at Pirates Cove Crazy Golf we've had a long weekend in the Great Yarmouth area. It was a great Crazy Golf course, well laid out, with an edutainment side to it as it had placards recording the history of Blackbeard and Captain Morgan and the like - the moral seemed to be piracy is not a good long-term career choice. The 18 holes were varied, but not too difficult. We would have got round quicker but found ourselves held up by being indirectly behind a slow foursome.

The Boot is one of the pubs in Histon which has been nicely converted into a brasserie. There is a reasonably priced lunchtime menu during the week which changes each month, we haven't tried going any other time yet. The interior is harmonious, new with glass walls yet old with clean wooden beams. The food and service are good, I had to have a souffle off the a la carte menu one time and it was great. The portions are not plate filling, but not artistically small either.

We do a cruise round the British Isles taking in Skye to see dear friends, prehistoric sites on the Orkneys, and the beautiful Tresco in the Scilly Isles. Oh and Monet's garden in France for good measure.

"Thimbleweed Park" is a Kickstarted retro Adventure game created by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. It is retro in its look (pixelated and limited colour palette), and also game interface (you choose verbs at the bottom to interact with the game). It is also retro in being a traditional point and click Adventure, of the kind no longer made. In keeping with the times it does have a casual mode, and Steam achievements. And it also a good built-in hint system which I confess I made use of. It is very self-referential, and fourth wall breaking in keeping with the genre. And funny. I enjoyed playing Thimbleweed Park. The puzzles were fair (in hindsight), and varied. You play as different characters which adds to the variety. A delicious nostalgic trip.

"Torment: Tides of Numenera" is a turn-based RPG set in a far far distant future. You're the last castoff of the Changing God, magical devices from previous civilisations known as "numenera" make the impossible possible, but you are being hunted by an implacable force called the Shadow. A very imaginative game in a very imaginative setting. Beautifully balanced gameplay so even less able players like me can get to the satisfying poignant ending. Most situations have multiple solutions, and the game is very forgiving. A rich spectrum of characters to be encountered, and realms to travel to. This is described as a descendant of the classic "Planescape: Torment". There is a philosophical streak to this game, the writers have tried to make a narrative you can think deeply about. For me some of the elements like the Tides didn't come that well together, your mileage may vary. Tremendous game.

I used up one of the days of holiday I had to use before the end of the year and we went to Audley End. It was late in the season for the gardens, but there was still colour in the parterre, nature forced into unnatural lines and arcs. A fountain fitfully and thinly spouted.

So we used up another of the days of holiday I had to use before the end of the year. Let's go to Mountfitchet Castle, that'll be a nice outing I thought. It was when we got there, and discovered the car park full, that we realised half term week was not a great time to go there. The place was heaving with children, both under parental control and under teacher control (there was a large school party there). I remembered the toy museum on the hill - I'm a sucker for places like that. I didn't remember it had so much war memorabilia in it. And I certainly didn't remember the dinosaurs guarding the entrance with water cannon. You had to time your dash for the door to the toy museum carefully or you got soaked with water. Glad dinosaurs are now extinct. We wandered around the reconstruction of a Norman wooden castle site. There is a lot of information there, it does give an impression of those times. Not good times for the villeins and serfs and poachers. The lords really lorded it over everyone else. The cafe was heaving so we had lunch somewhere else, ending up at our nearest Beefeater the "Travellers Rest".

In "49 Days" a naive nice optimistic chaebol heiress ends up in the body of a suicidal woman who's lost hope after losing her beloved. Our heiress has to deal not only with only having 49 days to return to her own body, but also dealing with her fiancee who is actually trying to destroy her and her father's business. Well paced drama which feels like it has an overarching storyline and not just padded out with episodes. The characters evolve and change during the serial. The last episode has some twists in it which may come as a surprise. It has to be said that this drama chooses to have its cake and eat it. As it is light hearted I didn't mind, but for the sake of the drama things happen which feel like the script writers have forced in. Great fun, I'll be rewatching this one. A drama which for me just works.

We went to Warner Bros studio tour to walk again in the footsteps of Harry Potter. Virginia's sister Vicky was over from New Zealand and this was a joint family outing. I made a fool of myself going through security, I keep having to remove metallic items from my pockets! The entrance had changed, you have a long walk past quotes from the books on the hoardings. The exhibits you walk past haven't changed, but it is still well done and worth one visit at least. Our New Zealand visitors enjoyed it. The day had torrential rain - we had a nightmare journey home, crawling through the St Albans area then crawling up the A1.

The Thursford Christmas Spectacular is almost a fixed part of our year, which we observe. The show is pretty much the same each year, I could do without the comedian and his toilet humour. There was a foreign lass juggling stuff while lying on her back for variety. The shops were more crowded this year, and the marquee had pretty much filled up when we got there just after 12pm thanks to a detour the Satnav suggested. It is a long haul there and back, but it is a grand size show.

Children of the Nameless (2018) follows a young girl Tacenda who is the only survivor after a mysterious Lord destroys her village by summoning ghosts. She sets off to the Lord's manor to kill him even though she knows it will mean suicide. But surprises and twists and turns await. A very readable magical tale, a true page turner written by a skilful writer of fantasy fiction. As through the story we explore the setting, we also explore the characters, what makes them tick. Brandon Sanderson wrote this story for Wizards of the Coast, the people behind Magic The Gathering. The story is available for free, and the author wrote it for free (he's a fan of the card game). A real Christmas present!

Virginia's family enjoy a special toffee made from a secret family recipe. Virginia's grandmother on her father's side made it, and Virginia now makes it as a must have treat for the Keel family Christmas. We wouldn't be admitted to the Boxing Day Christmas ritual without having brought it down from Cambridge. (Virginia did discover the secret behind the secret family recipe, that it's not a secret at all. It's actually Everton Toffee from a recipe book by Hilda Elsie Marguerite Patten.)