OK maybe I was being a bit ambitious with my "One post every day" plan but I'll try to do better.

Brian Cox is a name most will associate with the famous Scottish actor of such films as "Manhunter", etc but a large number of people in the UK are now beginning to associate the name with another discipline. Professor Brian Cox's recent series "Wonders of the Solar System" has just finished on BBC2 and was truly awe inspiring at points.

Sure it had it's flaws. There was a lot of repetition and sometimes Professor Cox's enthusiasms seemed to be getting in the way of progressing the actual programme but I doubt anyone who watched it hasn't come away somewhat blown away by at least one or two of the episodes. I know I now have a much greater appreciation for not only how amazing our solar system is but more so, how precarious our very existence on planet Earth is.

The episodes that focussed on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn were the most interesting, suggesting that out there somewhere the conditions required for life may exist, if not in our own solar system then surely somewhere else in the universe but you do really get the impression from the programme that we are incredibly lucky to have evolved as we have done. I for one won't look up into the sky at night again without a new-found understanding of what amazing wonders are out there.

Professor Cox himself has divided opinion amongst my friends but I really enjoyed his obvious enthusiasm and excitement about his subject (although you do occasionally get the feeling it's a little put on for the camera). I'm not certain he necessarily needed to go to some of the more exotic locations to make his points but I can forgive him for this and just hope he hasn't used up too much of my licence fee in doing so. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more programs from him in this vein in the future which can only be a good thing.

If you missed it I urge you to buy the DVD when it surely comes out. Ideally a DVD release would be in the form of one or two longer programmes that maybe cut an hour or so from the total running time and tighten it up a bit but I assume that is unlikely to happen. Either way it's excellent.

So I failed... I meant to review something new every day but today all I've done is go to work, conduct some yearly appraisals, come home, go round to some friends flat and have dinner. Thanks though to Sunain and Laura for providing food. It was delicious. Does that count as a review? Does a shaved monkey wearing a dinner jacket and one of those comedy bowler hats count as a city gent? No. There's a difference between a monkey and a city gent... one spends most of it's day hooting, shouting and throwing it's shit around and the other is a lesser primate commonly found in Africa, South America and Asia.

Boom Boom!

When I was 8 my family moved from the rugby heartland of Hawick in the borders, where I had been taught P.E. By the legendary, sadly missed Bill McLaren, to the tiny, isolated island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. Those history buffs amongst you will know that that is where Napoleon was dispatched to after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and where he subsequently died in 1821. The reason Napoleon was sent there was twofold. One, it was part of the British empire and two, it was one of the most isolated spots on earth.

In 1985 it was still British (as it still is to this day) and it was still by far one of the remotest places on earth. It took 16 days to get there by boat from the UK (that could be cut to about 4 if you flew to Ascension Island first), had no airport, very few people and, horror of horrors, no television.

To most people my age their first memory of a big sporting event is either the 1982 or 1986 World Cup. '82 passed me by (I was 5 at the time and living in a town obsessed by rugby) and in '86 I was thousands of miles away from the ability to watch any of the action. I didn't even know it was happening. My first football related memory is returning home from school on the 11^th of June 1990 just in time to see Costa Rica score the only goal in their 1-0 victory over Scotland. Seeing Scotland lose to teams that they should have beaten has since then become a regular occurrence.

That's not my first memory of seeing Scotland play sport though. That would be in the early months of 1989, just weeks after we had returned to Edinburgh, watching Scotland and England draw 12 each at Twickenham on the telly. It was the second match of the rugby 5 nations championship and that year Scotland finished 3^rd behind France and England. To be honest I vaguely remember the Wales match two weeks earlier but the match that stuck out was the England one. Even then, newly back in the country I knew that beating England was more important than beating any of the other teams.

I was only 13 a year and bit later when Scotland lined up against England to decide the Grand Slam at Murrayfield. A lot of the politics around that match, and a lot of the history were probably over my head. Obviously now I know how important it was and it brings a lump to the throat watching some of the footage but when that final whistle blew in 1990, and Scotland had won by 13 points to 7, I don't really think I appreciated the full importance of what I'd just seen.

Thanks then to Tom English who has just written a book called “The Grudge” about that fateful match. I started reading it yesterday and hardly put it down until I finished it this evening.

For a start it is incredibly unbiased with contributions from both the English and Scottish players so you get the feeling that the story is pretty straight and as it happens. A lot of the emotion is hyped up a bit but that's fitting with the story and is the case for both sides. It also sheds some interesting light on the politics of the period. I didn't get the political thing really either in 1990.

Thatcher had just used Scotland as her poll tax testing ground and Scotland was angry. The usual mechanism for getting stuck into the English, the annual football home international, had been cancelled less than a year ago and this was finally Scotland's chance for a bit of vengeance. The English team were (unfairly) tarred as representatives of Thatcher, coming up to Edinburgh to stamp her authority on Scotland. As far as Scotland was concerned this was war.

All this is in the book and it makes a really interesting read. It's audience isn't as narrow as would initially seem as this will appeal to lovers of rugby, of Scotland and mainly and most interestingly, to lovers of great sporting rivalries.

I've never understood people who don't like sport. The raw emotion when your team scores against it's rivals is unbeatable and wondrous and that has never felt stronger to me than on those rare occasions where Scotland manage to pull off some sort of unbelievable victory against all odds. It doesn't happen often but it happened in spades in 1990 and it's worth revisiting...

Especially because I won 50p from my mate Jason who reckoned England would win.

There was a moment at the start of tonight's episode of Flashforward where the ever frowning Joseph Feinnes, freshy drummed out of the FBI for being about as unprofessional as it's possible to be, is handed the business card of a psychiatrist. I mentally added the Sopranos to the list of 24, Lost, Heroes, The X Files, The Wire, etc that this series has "borrowed" from. It's almost as if the writers were given a crib sheet and asked to incorporate elements of all the above shows in order to maximise viewing figures.

Tonight's double episode concentrated a lot more on the Mancunian Hobbit himself, Dominic Moneghan who introduced us to his family of typical British folk such as we're used to from Lost and Heroes. I'm sure some of the actors involved were British but dear God it was more cringeworthy than what's her name off Frasier. The episodes also managed to be completely and utterly predictable from start to finish. I genuinely never figured out that Bruce Willis was dead until it was revealed at the end of the Sixth Sense but the plot in Flashforward for all it's complexity is easier to read than the big print version of "Learn to read easy words with few letters".

I still don't really know why I persist with this travesty of a show, returning tonight after a 3 or 4 month break. Maybe I was kinda hoping that in the intervening period they might have managed to fix it. I think I watch though because they somehow manage to put some kind of moment of extreme excitment at the end of each episode dragging me back next week to find out which wholly inappropriate piece of music they're going to use randomly over which piece of cringeworthy action. Maybe I'm interested to find out how many more random British actors will appear in it (James Cosmo tonight in a very small cameo, getting about 5 lines before being strangled). Or maybe I just secretly like it but can't justify it in any way.

Who knows. All I know is I'll be watching again next week.

The objective of this is for me to get a bit better at writing and to hopefully inform and educate people coming here about stuff that's good, stuff that's bad, stuff that's worthwhile and stuff that isn't. To that end I'm going to write a review of something here every day until I get bored or forget to do it. Knowing me I give myself about a week tops before that happens.

Anyway, I reckon I must do, watch, eat, read, play something completely new about once or twice a day so there shouldn't be any shortage of stuff up here. Writing this blog should also hopefully help push me to do interesting things and thus give me stuff to write about. If there are no more posts beyond today you will know that I have failed.

So anyway, enjoy.