A Cold Day in December

I suppose that I should be engaging in one of those 'end of the year' retrospectives, being in the dying days of 2014 as we are.  Certainly, various friends and acquaintances online have being just that since Christmas.  But I don't quite fell ready for such nostalgia.  I'm sure the old year still has a bit of life  left in it, so I'll wait to see what happens.  Not only that, but I'm too cold to think straight, let alone write. Today was so cold that the frost lay on the ground all day.  On days like today, still suffering from the tail end of last week's cold, I just feel like going back to bed and hibernating.  Unfortunately, today I couldn't, as I had a BT engineer coming around with regard to that bloody unresolved phone fault.  Not surprisingly, when I spoke to said engineer this morning, prior to his visit, he confirmed that it sounded like an exchange problem and couldn't understand why he was being sent to the property.  Anyway, he did some cursory tests when he arrived to confirm what we already knew, before decamping to the local exchange to fix the problem.  Hopefully, this will be a permanent fix.  We'll see.

But it hasn't all been freezing cold and phone faults over the past few days.  I've also caught up with some films.  In some cases these were re-watchings of old favourites - I saw The Blue Max again yesterday, in part to compare and contrast it with Corman's Red Baron, which I watched on Christmas Day and which used the same locations and replica aircraft - but some were new experiences, most notably The Sex Thief.  A surprisingly good seventies British sex comedy, I'll hopefully look at this one in a bit more detail later on this week.  I've still got several DVDs to go, including the first colour series of Public Eye from the early seventies and the surviving black and white episodes of Callan.  As I get older, I'm clearly regressing, viewing-wise, into my childhood.  Modern TV drama might be far slicker, but increasingly, for me, it seems to lack the substance of these old shows.  I also have some stuff even older than me, in the form of the complete series of Edgar Lustgarten's Scales of Justice.  Quintessential late night TV viewing when I was a kid.  Maybe I'll get around to that 2014 retrospective tomorrow.  Apparently the weather is forecast to get mildet as the week goes on, so you never know...