Lle Llywela

1. I have been very off the airwaves lately. Life seems very full and busy and I'm tired all the time. I would say I'm looking forward to spring, but with the seasons the way they are, who knows when that might be!

2. On the bright side, I have a holiday booked for the end of April - a week in the Norfolk Broads. We're all getting together as a family to celebrate my Dad's 65th, which is that week, and we figured that end April/early May was just as likely (or not likely) to be warm and sunny as July/August, so why not, since we're no longer tied to school holidays.

3. Aunty Marj's funeral went well. Everyone was given a long-stemmed rose to take home, because Marj used to say that flowers are for the living, not the dead. It's still going strong, a week later. I wasn't too sad at the funeral until I talked to Aunty Marion, my granddad's youngest sister. Marion grew up with 9 brothers and sisters and now the only one left is Ivy, who is riddled with dementia. Marion was so very close to Marj, all their lives. It's hit her hard.

4. In happier news, my Aunty Lel (actual aunt, rather than great-aunt like the above) is now making real progress at last, after three weeks in intensive care. She had the tracheostomy taken out of her throat on Wednesday, but they haven't stitched up the hole, only covered it up with gauze, so she has to put her fingers over the hole if she wants to talk. The trouble with that is that she does like to wave her hands around when she talks, so keeps forgetting and letting go and suddenly her voice disappears and she's got weird breathy noises coming from her neck! One day she will be back home and well and we will be laughing about the time she used to fart through her throat...

5. I have too many projects on the go. I can't decide which to focus on!

6. I am very sad that Leverage was cancelled. I really loved that show and the characters. The finale was fantastic, though.

7. Season 8 of Supernatural has me almost on the verge of breaking up with the show. I'm very sad about that, too, because I loved that show so very much, once upon a time, but it just isn't what it used to be.

8. Have just completed an epic re-watch of HBO's Rome. Still stunning. And an epic re-watch of Firefly. Still so much love.

9. Am currently re-watching Game of Thrones season 1. I can follow the various storylines so much more clearly second time around, now that I know who all the characters are. I got so confused the first time, I couldn't keep track of anyone!

10. Also still watching and re-watching Classic Doctor Who like whoa. Because who needs free time, anyway?

11. Went to see The Hobbit and thoroughly enjoyed it. It kills me that Gandalf spends the entire film counting dwarfs, like an exasperated schoolteacher leading a field trip. Also re-watched The Fellowship of the Ring and found myself wondering what it might have been like if instead of three films, the trilogy had been adapted into a TV series, like Game of Thrones...

12. Am no longer seeing Mr Boyfriend - not as a boyfriend, anyway, we're still hanging out as friends. Mutual agreement. He's really nice and all, but that spark just wasn't there - I like him, but I don't fancy him. I think we both feel much happier now we've had that conversation.

1. It was a good night for actor Mark Lewis Jones last night – on BBC1 he was an upright, hard-working pillar-of-the-community in Baker Boys (which I haven’t seen yet – that’ll be an iPlayer job) and at exactly the same time he could also be found over on BBC3 as a depraved, evil vampire on Being Human! Not bad going.

2. The location-spotting in the new season of Being Human is awesome. I love that they’ve moved to South Wales. *G*

3. I have somehow managed to volunteer to do some transcribing for the FreeCEN online census project and am now learning how to navigate the systems in place for that (and how to decipher illegible 19th century handwriting!)

4. Finally got around to watching the Dirk Gently adaptation that aired on one of the BBC’s digital channels a couple of months back. I was in two minds before I watched it, and I remain in two minds now! On the one hand, taken at face value, it was a fun, light-hearted hour’s entertainment, with a suitably convoluted, brain-twister of a plot. But on the other hand…it bore little or no resemblance whatsoever to the book on which it is based and therefore it just felt wrong. The names of the characters were pretty much the only thing the show had in common with the book – and even their personalities and/or back stories had been changed. They hadn’t just modernised the plot, they re-wrote the entire story and gave it a completely different plot. And Dirk Gently himself was hopelessly miscast. So I remain in two minds. Half of me thinks it was a decent, fun hour of bubblegum entertainment, which is clearly all it was intended to be, but the other half of me resents it deeply for not being faithful to Douglas Adams' original vision. Ah, TV adaptations of much-loved books are always so contentious!

Last night on BBC2 I saw a orphaned baby rhino being bottle-fed and it was the most adorable thing ever. ♥

It was in the one-off Last Chance to See, a special programme dedicated to the critically endangered northern white rhino, which was declared extinct in the wild about a year and a half ago. There are exactly eight northern white rhino left in the whole world, and the programme last night documented the return of four of those eight animals to Africa from a zoo in the Czech Republic. Three of the four had been born in captivity, the fourth had been taken from the wild as a youngster, 35 years ago, but rhinos don't breed well in captivity, they need more space. The hope is that in the safety of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya these four rhinos will start to breed and thus begin the painstaking process of bringing their species back from the brink.

I actually had tears in my eyes watching those four rhinos taking their first steps onto African soil. This is it for the northern white rhino, the last possible hope of preventing total extinction, their last chance to survive. It is a humbling thought.

...so there's new George Gently this Sunday, which: yay. But it's on at the same time as ITV's new costume drama, Downton Abbey, which I also want to watch. Whose bright idea was that?

Okay, so which one do I trust to appear on iPlayer/Catch Up, and which do I watch live? Decisions, decisions!