Pun based title, when I think of one

Writing one of these again? A sort of end of year review ? More a sign of nothing better to do I might think. I don't think I bothered last year. But I am pleased with one or two cultural glimmers from the last 12 months, and I never wrote about some of them, so here's a series of barely connected reports about films and books and; not much else actually. Films - off the top of my head, I saw barely three films. But at least I have been getting to the cinema. The thing is, for reasons of circumstance, the cinema means Manchester, which entails an unfun car journey, or what used to be a train journey I was quite happy with, once. But the train services have been getting poorer in the North West in recent years. It's all a matter of slow deterioration, but the little losses make a difference. In my case, the loss of a particular afternoon train from the timetable meant that for most films of typical blockbuster length, I could no longer get home off peak. For the first film

Watching Napoleon has left me feeling a little sad. It's also left me feeling violently shaken, but more about that later. As it says on the poster, this is a Ridley Scott film. I can't claim to have seen all of his films, but I have seen many of them, in the cinema, and the fact that he was the director was usually the main reason I went and parted with cash, to see a film on the big screen. I'm certainly drawn to science fiction, so Alien and Blade Runner are the films of his which figure most prominently in my mind. But I've enjoyed his work in many other genres as well, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator and so many more. I'd barely heard about Scott before I saw his first film, The Duellists (who are Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel), which made a big impression with its spectacle and its rendering of its almost Shakespearean theme. Interestingly, it also has the Napoleonic Wars as its background. I got to wondering how many times I'd seen Napoleon Bon