2011

As is usual with the Reviews in the Trees, personal stuff is mostly left out, so losses, achievements and events amongst family and friends will not appear here.  Also, this quick-and-dirty retrospective cannot equal Charlie Brooker's  magisterial review of last year just shown on TV.

I began the year reading the excellent Bill Bryson book on Shakespeare. This is very good not least because he tries hard not to put in any speculation that isn’t rigorously supported by the historical record. Hence, also, a rarity.

Three other books I enjoyed were

• Graven with Diamonds by Nicola Shulman - about Sir Thomas Wyatt, his poetry, and mostly about his love lyrics. Although the core argument, that these had been neglected in the past, doesn’t really hold water, it was good to see a big bold book about Wyatt be favourably reviewed.
• The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen. He is very good on democracy as a complex set of attitudes and processes, not just an opportunity every few years to vote for one’s leader(s).
• The Disappearing Spoon: and Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean.  I wasn't totally won over by how this book is organised, but the sories were good.

Three exhibitions were:

• The Steve Bell retrospective at the Cartoon Museum,
• The British Library exhibition of (mostly) British science fiction, “Out of this World.” and
• The Leonardo show at the National Gallery (which we just managed to get tickets for, and went to see on the last day of 2011).

And three shows:

• Ornette Coleman - playing live at the Royal Festical Hall
• Noises Off - at the Old Vic, and
• Ruddigore - at the Barbican

On TV, the usual suspects dominated (eg Outnumbered, Rev and Doctor Who), plus, perhaps strangely, Mark Cousins' The Story of Film, which became unmissable each Sunday evening.

We went to France to avoid the Royal Wedding, and then later to Paris and Berlin for hols.

As lots of commentators have said, there was an awful lot of news in 2011.  The Japanese Tsunami and Nuclear fires, the Arab Spring, the Libyan uprising and death of Gaddafi. Obama got Osama, Hackergate and the closing of the News of the World (well done, The Guardian!), Riots in English towns and cities (which we missed), Lansley (tosser!)'s pause and Cameron's non-veto.  The Euro problems. And Private Eye made it to 50 (years) while The Sky at Night made it to 700 (shows)..

Quite a few rich and/or famous people seem to have died in the year.   Elisabeth (Sarah-Jane Smith) Sladen died of cancer in April at the relatively young age of 65 (63 elsewhere). She was probably most people’s favourite companion, and one of the few actors to work with several Doctors.   Gerry Rafferty, Peter Yates, Vaclav Havel, Henry Cooper (the great smelly brute) and Steve Jobs (who showed through his life that you can make huge amounts of money even if you have a crappy product, if you get the marketing right and make it shiny-shiny).    

Gilbert Adair, Christopher Logue, Christa Wolf, John Barry, Dick King-Smith, Joanna Russ, Pete Postlethwaite, January: Susannah York (a few months after I was her in a play in the West End), Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Lumet, Janet Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, Peter Falk, Ken Olsen (DEC), Brian Haw and Eddie Stobart.   N. F. Simpson, Ken Russell, Anne McCaffery, Stan Barstow, David Croft, Jimmy Saville, Basil D’Oliveira and Dulcie Gray.  Perhaps too many.

Oh, and I saw a lot of trees...