REVIEW

2007 has been a strange year on a personal level - lots of highs and a few lingering lows. Rather than dwell on all that, here are some reflections on the year's favourite things that I personally enjoyed, and for the same reason wouldn't necessarily recommend.

LIVE PERFORMANCE
The concert in Prato (Italy) seems like ages ago now - it was one of those trips where everything seems to fall into place at just the right moment in your life, and I mean that in more ways than one. Playing in Edinburgh for the first time ever was really fun too, much more than I had any right to expect.

RESTAURANT
This is pathetic, what the fuck am I doing talking about restaurants? It's desperation. Even worse, I can't even remember its name, but the place in Kitakyushu where we had the fish was a true heaven of the gustatory senses.

FILM
A goodly harvest this year, and that despite doggedly sitting through some turkeys of anthological magnitude. I loved A Bridge To Terabithia and The Notebook (but both of these only for the discerning fan of the romantic genre), Saw IV (expect the same tedious verdict from me next October), The Bridge (months on, still haunted), Sherrybaby (Cassavetes reborn), Loose Change - Final Cut (definitive work now that David Ray Griffin is on board - cue some abuse from the anti-'conspiracy theory' brigade), and lastly, The Boss Of It All (another LVT classic).

LITERATURE
A year of consolidation. At one stage books were arriving so frequently from Amazon that I could barely keep up, and it's been rewarding to have the chance to fill in some of the gaps I still had in the classics, as with certain works by Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky. Notable mentions too for Pirandello's plays and the final part of Stanislavski's great trilogy.

MUSIC
Mostly a diet of African origin percussion music at loud volume (big thanks to Brian Conniffe for providing much of that rare material) - all part of an unconscious learning process whereby through repeated listening I'm hoping for a big osmotic jackpot pay-off, and in fact that's happening already. In between times, lots of Magma, Albert Ayler, Coltrane, or else exploring Mezzo's more obscure offerings. Truth is, I'm shamefully out of the loop as far as popular music is concerned, and my nomination of year's best to Christian Scott's album Anthem is clear testament to that.

ART
A few contemporary exhibitions were OK, yet nothing as moving as the Angkor Wat exhibition in Bonn earlier in the year, and it's another reminder of how important opportunities to travel are for seeing the good stuff.

EVENT
The magical August night of the meteor shower. No contest.