My maternal grandfather was a carpenter. Every time I visited his atelier, welcomed by the sweet smell of sawdust, I was amazed by all his tools, from the huge and very dangerous table saws to the many different types of hammers, screwdrivers, etcetera.
Similarly, I remember looking at my father’s three-level portable toolbox and wondering about its several variations on pliers and wrenches and the many drill bits for wood and metal.
It would be logical to think that I have followed one path or the other, and that, as an adult, I have developed a fervent DIY passion and own lots of different tools. That’s not the case.

Since it’s July and the Summer holidays will come much later, I took a week off to decompress a bit from work. I had to honour a couple of non-work commitments, but I also managed to squeeze in a few days in London (more on those, probably, later). The intake of films was quite steady anyway…

Just a quick post to document two horror-related connections I came across last week.

These past weeks I have often used the guidance of Scott Derrickson’s top 100 horror list to choose my cinematic entertainment. At this point, the films included in it that I haven’t watched yet belong to one of these three categories - films that I just can’t find on streaming, classic movies from the ’60s and earlier (which - with exceptions - I don’t find very interesting), and films that are notoriously difficult to watch (which require the right mood).

In the past few days I’ve applied some changes to this website - are they improvements? I’d say so, but it’s a matter of taste, I guess.

This week most of Europe was busy watching the UEFA football championship; I’ve tried too, but I haven’t been able to watch more than twenty minutes of a match without questioning what the point is in spending time watching such a widely accepted non-violent form of Nationalism. But then, millions of football fans could ask me what is the point of spending time watching a reasonably widely accepted non-violent form of violent acts simulation? To each their own…