GreyShuck

• Historical Fiction: I, Claudius from 1976. It stands up staggeringly well.
• Fantasy: Extraordinary (2023), Neverwhere (1996 - Gaiman's first TV series)
• Crime: The Night Manager (2016), Slow Horses (2022), Mare of Easttown (2021)

Also Beforeigners (2019, Norway), which kinda qualifies for all of these categories.

Bbc Radio 4 have any number of dramas in their back catalogue. One that I particularly enjoyed is Alan Plater's Only a Matter of Time - available on the Internet archive, I find.

Then Orson Welles original War of the Worlds by the Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938 is well worth a listen. That is available in several places around the Web.

Then, of course, there is Big Finish, who started off doing Doctor Who audios and have produced hundreds over the years - far more hours than there are of T V Doctor Who, classic and new - but they also produce a lot of other dramas, based on other properties and some completely original.

Overall their earlier ones are where the standout tales are, but they are fairly reliably entertaining throughout.

Last was in May this year and the next - probably just camping - will be in September.

I am very fortunate in having a friend with a holiday chalet. A group of us go down to open in up and stay for a week or two most years. The only cost is the fuel to get there.

My SO and I usually aim to get another week away - maybe camping, maybe a holiday cottage - later in the year too.

We are in the UK and always go to other location in the UK for holidays. Neither of us have flown since the '90s and have no intention of doing so again.

Archive.is link..

Personally, I always used to carry a paperback with me and would read in the odd moments that this writer seems to recall as being so dull and soul destroying. I still do carry e-books on my phone of course and use them in exactly the same way - but also with the option of doomscrolling, of course.

As for TV, I was never one for TV - or radio - as background noise. With fiends, I had a bit of reputation of going round and turning such things off when I entered the room, so that we could talk without distraction. I would ask them first, of course.

The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has a reputation as being an homage to LotR, and they are quite enjoyable.

Waaay back, this was what I turned to after reading LotR. He had only published the first then and it was what made me understand the difference between good writing and bad. It gave me nothing else other than that lesson and certainly didn't scratch the itch that I had for something like LotR. In fact nothing did and I found it best to look for something completely different that was good in it's own right rather than poor imitations.

A regular weekly schedule would look something like:

• Practical volunteering with a local wildlife organisation.
• Studying something, maybe with the OU.
• Working on the house and garden
• Reading
• A decent length hike
• Working on a particular project: woodworking, writing, painting, coding, maybe putting whatever I have learnt recently into practice.
• Visiting somewhere.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.

I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.

As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.

It is pretty clear that this is a joke sign/poster - akin to "you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps" and so on.

Definitely worthwhile!

feels a lot like Columbo.

It is very conciously like Columbo - even down to the font of the titles I think. I see it as 3 parts Columbo, 1 part The Fugitive and 1 part Knives Out. There are a couple of wonky episodes but I enjoyed it a lot overall - especially the penultimate one.

Another BF listener here - I really liked Walker and McGann on screen in Annika too.

Otherwise, my SO and I have the Ted Lasso finale lined up. The third season (yes, I know, but I agree with the Americans that there is a distinction between series and season) has been a necessary conclusion to the material in the previous two, but not without some fun moments.

And - in terms of other UK TV - we are just on to season two of Jam and Jerusalem which I totally missed at the time but am enjoying now.

Otherwise, in non-UK shows, Drops of God and Shrinking are the clear highlights in our lineup at the moment.

A week.

I was in my teens and had no commitments at the time and just spontaneously decided not to eat or sleep for a few days - which I later decided would be a week. At the time, I had no idea of the world record for this or I probably would have tried for that - although, obviously, I was not supervised or anything.

The afternoons from the second day onwards were the worst - when I felt pretty lousy - but otherwise I was running on serotonin and was pretty much on a natural high for most the duration.

At the end, I cycled 12 miles during which one of my feet cramped and left me jabbing at the pedal as it went past, but I did it ok.

I slept extremely well when I finally did, but I took some while to get back into the whole eating thing again.

There is no way in hell that I could do anything like that now.