I do quite a lot of work in schools now and I realise today that I have been lying pretty much every time I’ve gone in. Because at some point when I’m talking to the teachers, occasionally when I’m talking with the pupils, I will recount the reason I do this.

Which goes thisaway. When I was at school, my careers teacher laughed at me for wanting to be a writer. I’ve said this before, in case you’ve come to this through some strange Google search that has got you all my mentions of this instead of whatever career laughing advice you were actually looking for.

This fella, whoever he was, laughed at me and got the class to laugh too. It did damage.

What would’ve countered that was if the school had got a writer in to talk to us. Any writer. Even me. Seeing that writing is something possible as a job, that would’ve made a big difference. That’s why I go in. Also, I get paid.

So far, so true, not a word of a lie. The lie comes from how I then explain I went the wrong way instead. I went into computers and actually I still usually think it was the wrong way but it wasn’t half a handy wrong way to go. I worked hard to get out of computers, I got into writing about computers and then I worked hard to get out of writing about computers. Come on, one grey box after another. I’m asleep at the thought.

Flash forward a lot of years and there is nothing grey, nothing boring and if I’m falling asleep it is because I am so bleedin’ tired. But there is computing. Again.

For the past month or so I’ve been writing software reviews for MacNN.com, the Macintosh News Network. I’ve done some sixty pieces for them and I’ve had a ball. Old computing muscles come back and they join new writing ones: I don’t know if you’d like my review writing but I get to do things that are important to me. Specifically this: MacNN feels the same way I do about why one reviews things. There’s never going to be a geek-out analysis where I conclude that X is better than Y because it’s a pixel faster or a megabyte bigger.

Instead, MacNN is all about what does the bloody software do, is it any good at it, and who precisely will benefit? That attitude permeates the entire process starting with what gets picked to review. I should’ve made notes about this but at a guess, I’d say maybe 70% of my reviews have been positive because 70% of them were of software that did something well and useful. Might be a really obscure thing, might not be anything I have the slightest interest in myself, but they do something good for someone.

The key is someone. I think that thinking about people is more interesting than thinking about computers. Thinking who something would be for is certainly like marketing but I think that it’s also like drama. I don’t want to draw too contorted a conclusion here but the best software I’ve used has been really clear about who its audience is.

Just as with drama, when that audience happens to be me, I don’t just like the software, it grabs me. I become evangelical about it. It matters to me.

And the fact that some one or some few people working somewhere in the world can make something, can create something that matters to others, that is drama.

Despite all the other things I’m doing now, not one of which I’d trade you for, there is a certain portion of my week that is back being devoted to computers and computing and software. I have been wondering why I don’t feel like it’s a regression since I previously associated software with my very earliest writing days. The reason is that while the role and the importance of software hasn’t changed since I used to do this, I have. I’ve changed a lot.

The fact that I went into computers does not mean I went the wrong way. I just went a certain way. And in a Mobius-strip like fashion, it has led me on to drama in human and computer form.

You can go back, you just aren’t the same you when you get there.

Two things. First, “I’ve had a few thrilling moments” is a quote either from Grosse Pointe Blank or Ally McBeal. I forget which, I just use it a lot.

Second, this is a stupid idea. Stop reading this. And definitely do not do what I do.

I’ve been enjoying reading blogs about what people got up to this year, I’ve been enjoying those a lot, and I did think it would be spectacularly easy to do one myself. Of course it would: I have a trick.

Follow. Last year I did this thing, right, and by mistake believed I was supposed to report back at the end of each month. I was entirely wrong. But it took a good six months for them to say, William, look, it’s all very nice, but… And in those six months I had learnt something. I learnt that having to account to someone made me do things that were accountable. Most especially in the last week of each month. Oh, yes. I’m a demon from the 27th onwards.

Consequently I ignored these fine people and continued reporting back to the end of the project – and then I carried on doing it over on The Blank Screen productivity website. That version is a bit sanitised, a bit more careful, but it’s all there and it’s all true every month. And yep, 27th onwards, demon.

I’ve got this down now, I really have: when I’ve done something, I make the tiniest of notes in Drafts 4 on my iPhone and know that it is squirrelling it all away into an ever-lengthening document over in Evernote. Effort on my part: pretty close to zero. Result on its part: the demon run of the 27th onwards.

So doing you a list for the year should’ve been a doddle. It was an enormous doddle. Couldn’t have been easier. Open Evernote, select all, copy, paste, go make some tea.

Except.

I’m not stupid, I think the list is okay. I think I did alright. If pushed, I would say that I’m pleased with 2014.

But have you spotted the ENORMOUS FLAW yet? I have nothing in 2015. Not a bean. This year, not bad. Next year, tundra blowing across the hills. There should be a couple of books coming out, possibly even three, and I’ve been booked for some events that I am spectacularly looking forward to. But tomorrow morning I get back to this desk and I look at the very blankest of blank screens.

Frozen. Paralysed.

At least until January 27th.

If you’ve read this far, thank you and it’s been a treat talking with you this year. If you read on to the list, you’re mad and I am even now dialling NHS Direct to get you some help.

William

2014

Writing: approximately 620,000 words

Books:
Filling the Blank Screen (September 2014)
The Blank Screen Guide: Blogging (January 2015)
Editing Catherine Schell’s autobiography (2015)

Speaking engagements:
88 talks, workshops and presentations including:
Page Talk panel discussion at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Representing the Writers’ Guild in the House of Commons for Parliament’s Birmingham Day
Promoted the Writers’ Guild at two RTS Mini-Summits including one at BBC Nottingham
Spoke at Combrook Readers’ Group for short story I’m writing for them
Performed three workshops at Original Writing Day in Newman University
Ran three-day workshop at Fircroft College
Many Young Writers’ Write On! group sessions for Burton, Birmingham, Rugby
The Writers’ Toolkit: produced one panel, spoke on a second, chaired a third
Three productivity workshops for the Federation of Entertainment Unions

Produced Events:
9 including:
One Steven Knight interview evening for the Screenwriters’ Forum
A separate Steven Knight event at the BBC Drama Village for the Writers’ Guild and the Royal Television Society
“Women in Theatre” panel discussion at the Birmingham Rep
Erica Whyman Royal Shakespeare Company event for Writers’ Guild
Royal Television Society Film and TV Summit breakout sessions

Fiction, drama and poetry:
Doctor Who: Scavenger radio drama released
River Passage: earned Arts Council England funding for poetry app
Wrote and shot “Ye Olde 3G” 30-second video promo: won an iPad Air
Thirty-minute stage play “Murder at Burton Library”
Directed “Murder at Burton Library” for Burton Young Writers
Resistance: radio, theatre and TV proposals; dozen script pages
Transferable Skills (4 pages of script)
Soundscapes education scripts (2015)
Wrote poem “My Curse” for Jo Bell’s 52
1x poem ‘Heart’ (100 words)
Revised novels “Man and Wifi”, “Transferrable Skills”
New novel “Men Win” 10,000 words
Seven short stories including The Book Groups for West Midlands’ Readers’ Network and The Flare, a GISHWHES short story by request

Blogs:
The Blank Screen: 1,229 articles
Self Distract: 56 articles
Guest blogs: 9

Attended:
Theatre: 25 shows
Other (meetings, workshops): 54

Journalism:
Edited Write On! Magazine issues 3, 4 and 5
Radio Times reviews 10
Magazine tutorial feature re iPad
2 ecourses on productivity issues
2 presentations
1 Lifehacker UK article
Launched weekly email newsletter for The Blank Screen
Took over monthly email newsletter for the Writers’ Guild West Midlands
Four iPad software tutorials
MacNN: 30 reviews for US technology site
Wrote Writers’ Guild press release re Library of Birmingham cuts

Publicity:
Photoshoot for Writing West Midlands
Interviewed for From Croydon to Gallifrey podcast
Interviewed in Doctor Who Monthly
Chiefly great reviews on Doctor Who fan sites
Stonking review in Doctor Who Monthly: “Seductively gripping”
From Croydon to Gallifrey podcast interview aired
Radio interview: BBC CWR re anniversary of moon landing and TV history
TV interview: Russia Today

Other:
Became regional representative of the Writers’ Guild
Joined Royal Television Committee
Ran day-long workshops in London, Newcastle and Birmingham for Federation of Entertainment Unions
8 pages copywriting for PR firm
Joined Creative England crew site
Asked to judge RTS awards
Two-day drama meeting with Nadia Kingsley and Tom Wentworth
Na wrote a poem about me
Produced video for Parliament Day and the Writers’ Guild
Promoted the move to get Alan Plater a blue plaque
Produced 2x videos for The Blank Screen site
Writers’ Guild and Royal Television Society event invitation emails
Birmingham Rep theatre programme copywriting for Of Mice and Men and Solomon and Marion
Met with BBC to discuss general projects plus liaising with RTS and Writers’ Guild
Launched The Blank Screen mentoring
Room 204 Buddying Group: took over managing; ran two quiet social events

ENDS

(Image from Mac-History.net)

It’s thirty years since Tommy Cooper died on live TV. It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Colin Baker’s first trip in the TARDIS and of Virgin Atlantic’s inaugural flight. Also, importantly, it’s three decades since some sports thing. But of all the things that happened in 1984, I’m feeling compelled to talk to you about just one –

– no, two.

Officially this is also the 30th anniversary of Cyndi Lauper’s debut album, She’s So Unusual. I remember that so well: I remember the feel of the vinyl in my hands, I remember that it was an unusual impulse buy of an artist I’d only vaguely heard of. I remember that it was the first album that felt like a single body of work to me instead of a series of songs. And I remember that was because it seemed so strikingly clear that Side 1 was terrific – Money Changes Everything, Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Time after Time were all there – and that Side 2 wasn’t.

You don’t remember when albums had sides. I hate you. Give me my biscuits back. For my part, I don’t remember exactly when I bought it but the album came out in 1983 so it bothers me that it’s this year that a 30th Anniversary edition is being released. I’m wondering if they’ll sell me the first half.

But I know I’ll buy it, I know the odds are that I’ll buy it online and I know for a fact – because I’ve just done it – that I called up the original album right now on iTunes. Curiously, it’s the only Cyndi Lauper album that I don’t have complete. It’s not as if I stopped ripping the CD half way either. I’ve a patchwork of songs from it. Definitely going to buy the thirtieth, then.

So it’s 05:46 and Girls Just Want to Have Fun is in my headphones, I’m writing to you in Evernote, my email inbox is teetering, my calendar is throbbing and my OmniFocus To Do list is wiping its brow. Every part of that sentence, bar the stupidly early time, is tied up with my Mac.

And that’s the one thirtieth anniversary I really am compelled to write to you about.

It’s actually thirty years to the day that the Macintosh was launched. It would be perhaps five years before I used one but the Mac that launched in 1984 directly changed me: it stopped me being interested in computers. I know I’m talking to you about machines and that at least software tends to come up a lot with us, but that really is what it did: after I used a Mac, I wasn’t into computers.

Maybe I never really was into them – I’m certainly not as technically minded as so very many people I know – but I think I enjoyed the puzzle of them. I definitely enjoyed all the fiddling with all the settings and the options. That day at school, right at the end of the last term, when I found out if you bash your head onto the keyboard in despair it would restart the RML 380Z and save you the usual twenty minute wait while a tape loaded. (“Oh, yes, I meant to tell you,” said the teacher.) The way that I learnt to swear while just trying to fit a bigger hard drive into a PC. (I got it exactly right the first time, motherboard jumpers and all. But it still took me a week of increasingly foul evenings before I got it working by doing exactly the same right thing again.) The satisfaction, even the sheer victory of getting computers to work.

Bollocks to that.

Here was a Mac and it worked. I could write books on it. So I did.

I was still split between Macs and PCs because I got work as features editor on a PC magazine – which is also where I learnt that I am a magazine kinda guy far more than I am a computer one – but nonetheless, when it came time to spend my own money, I bought a Mac. I vividly remember my flat with its Mac and its CD player. (Oh! I played John Barry’s Dances with Wolves soundtrack a lot on that CD player. Hang on – just switched to that on iTunes.)

A few years on, Apple bought me a Mac that had a TV in it. It was a time when Apple was doing badly and apparently its PR firm reckoned it could either spend a lot of money on ads that nobody would write about or they could just buy Macs for a lot of journalists and hope it would have an impact.

It had an impact. I had that Mac throughout the rest of my time living in London. I remember watching Alan Plater’s Doggin’ Around on it. Sitting in my narrow flat, eating my then healthy and obsessively favourite meal of French bread pizza, waffles and sweetcorn, watching that TV. You must’ve been able to record TV on it because I clearly remember watching Northern Exposure when the phone rang and then when I continued watching, the sound was vastly poorer. Mono instead of stereo.

I remember later using a review PowerBook Mac, I think the first with a colour screen, and seeing that screen permanently die in front of me just as I finished writing something. Saving that document, copying it to a floppy disc, gathering up all of my work and copying it off to many floppies – all without being able to see anything at all on the screen. Oh! Another PowerBook Mac, another day: being late delivering an article to Macworld and, knowing the editor would be at the same press launch I had to cover for PC Direct, writing the whole article on a PowerBook on the Tube train on my way. Handing him a floppy.

I don’t miss floppies, I’m not compelled to write to you about floppies.

But I am clearly compelled to write about the Mac today. I’m curious how the one thing I would tell you about these machines is that they get out of my way so that I can get on with writing books, talking to people and watching Alan Plater dramas, yet even as I can forget the computer entirely, I remember that I am forgetting it. I heard an argument once that said Android phones are always so bad that you are driven to upgrade where Apple wants you to like your iPhone so much that you upgrade to get more of the love or whatever. I don’t know enough about Android to judge that: Android phones seem to me to be great for fiddling with and that’s very nice. But I think there’s something to it.

I could not tell you the name or manufacturer or any single thing about the PC that I spent a week inside fitting that bloody hard drive. Nothing. The image of tiny jumper settings is burnt into my retina and I could probably work out from a calendar which version of Windows it had. But I’m not going to.

Whereas I can tell you with impossible fondness that my first Mac back in the 1980s was a Mac SE running System 6.

Ironically, the books I wrote on it were all computer manuals. I remember the boss of the technical author department regretting having bought Macs. “Seriously?” I said.

“Yes.”

I think the man was just bored with his job because he explained that it was because PCs were different. That’s all. He wanted a change. Hadn’t tried Windows, didn’t know anything but that they were different to Macs.

Can’t fault him for technical accuracy, then, and it is entirely coincidental that I left shortly afterwards.

Seriously, this is just you and me. So I can tell you that this is the first Self Distract blog that you’ll see here. (Wait. What about the eleventy-billion previous Self Distract entries you can see? They were all first written and published on my old Blogger site.) From this week on, Self Distract is here on williamgallagher.com/selfdistract.

You will not see a single difference. Well, not unless you look up at the website address. Or if you look across at all the other lovely things on this new williamgallagher.com site. There’s a lot to see and that’s really why I’m doing this. After eight years on Blogger.com, I’m moving Self Distract to join in with all the other stuff I do online and make one single, big, new, williamgallagher.com.

I’ll talk to you about this. Probably at length. But since it is you, let me just say that the impetus was that my productivity for creative writers book, The Blank Screen, has been such a success for me that it has spawned a workshop that is touring various literary festivals, universities and possibly even prisons. That’s definitely a topic for another time. The Blank Screen has had such a response that it feels it’s tapped in to something good, something that I can usefully do. So as of today, there is now a Blank Screen blog that has news on productivity software deals, lots of stolen advice from clever people, and a lot of my own experience polished up and made to sound smart.

And also since it’s you, I’m going to tell you that I’ve been secretly running that Blank Screen blog for about a month. You can now see everything: some eighty-odd posts if you really had the time and a lot of tea. The Blank Screen is a news blog with a lot of entries; Self Distract is where we can chat.

It feels very strange moving Self Distract. It’s like we have to find a new coffee shop. In some ways it’s also very strange officially launching the new williamgallagher.com. Exciting but strange. And a bit scary, if I’m honest. And when am I not honest with you? You’ve got that I-can-tell-you-anything face.

At one point during the testing of the new williamgallagher.com site, I had to put it live. Had to. Couldn’t complete the testing without it. I put it live in a secret place, didn’t tell you, didn’t tell anyone, and within a few days I’d somehow gained followers to it. That was immensely, just immensely invigorating and validating. So much so that I have this terrible feeling that the new site is a huge success so long as it stays secret.

It’s a shame I’m such a blabber. Now I’ve taken a deep breath and told you, I’m heading out into the big, wide world to tell everyone.

But while I would love for you get something from the new site, I need our little spot for chatting. And while I suppose I should shut up and let you explore the new place if you will, what I want to chat to you about is the whole of last year. When I’m asked how many people read this blog, it’s easy. One. But when I lift up the lid and see what Google tells me, well, okay, you’ve been telling a lot of people about us. Again.

You’ve told enough people that I can see an actual top ten list of the most popular things we spoke about in 2013.

And it goes thisaway:

10. INT. DESCRIPTIONS – OVERUSED (30 May 2013)
This one got picked up by the Writers’ Guild. It’s a piece about how scriptwriters sometimes think they’re really writing novels so instead of saying “Brad Chap (30, witty, criminal)” they write a hundred words about his tortured backstory that we will never see and producers will never finish reading. It was also particularly personal to me because it includes a lesson I was taught by the late Alan Plater.

9. How to start writing on bad days (27 June 2013)
This became a really key section in my book The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers. Even in this slightly shorter, earlier version, it was all about those times when either you are overwhelmed with how much you have to do or, frankly, you’re having such a crappy day that writing anything is an impossible mountain. If you ask me, on days like that, you’re never going to read a piece about coping with days like that so it begins with a very quick, even brutal, do this and do that section. And then suggests that you read on when you’re having a better day.

8. The most successful thing I’ve ever written (8 March 2013)
It isn’t The Blank Screen, though that is heading up the charts gorgeously quickly. It isn’t my Beiderbecke book, it isn’t Doctor Who. It isn’t actually fiction. Nor is it non-fiction. It’s not even journalism. Instead, it is a Microsoft Word macro that I wrote for myself to solve a problem and it went viral across BBC Worldwide and out in to other companies. No one needs it any more so I really wrote this entry to remind myself what it was and what I did but I’m surprised how many people enjoyed it – and how many had written similar macros themselves.

7. Star Trek: Don’t Give Away the Goods Too Soon (6 June 2013)
I did some work in prisons in 2013 and during the various steps of the process to get the work and get clearance to do it, I got to meet Patrice Lawrence of Clinks.org. She’s very nice but freaked me out a bit when the first thing she said was “Hello, you’re right about Star Trek Into Darkness”. You mean people can see us?

I adored the 2009 movie: it was such an exciting ride that when Into Darkness came out, I actually took the afternoon off to go see it in a Giant Screen in 3D. Big mistake. But a fascinating one because aside from the film’s biggest problem – it is a remake of an old movie and rather relies on you knowing the original for it to have any emotional punch – there were some interesting writing decisions. You completely understand why they made them, yet you also see how chopping off this multi-million-dollar scene or the other would have improved the movie.

6. Self Distract book – get off your backside and write (3 October 2013)
I regret the title now because I use Self Distract here with you and I also later made it the title of another book: “Self Distract – from Doctor Who fan to Radio Times and Big Finish“. I need a new title.

But this one was possibly the biggest news of 2013 for me: it was about how my The Blank Screen book was officially on sale. It really went on sale at the Birmingham Literature Festival a few days later but I’d got my author copies then. This post was also about how I’d been particularly productive writing a book about productive writers: how an idle idea on a bus trip had become a whole book fewer than a hundred days later.

You wrecked my productivity that day: I posted this entry to you and intended to head off on a job but instead spent the entire Friday talking on twitter and Facebook about the blog and the book. I had a blast.

5. Dear diary… (11 October 2013)
I really see this as a couple of entries in one. The main point of it was that the night before I’d run my first Blank Screen workshop so naturally I was buzzing but also one of the attendees told me a great idea that I am stealing and having for my very own. You’ll need to read the post to see what it is but I promise it’s a good idea.

But I was also in a bit of a general buzzing tizzy because I’d also just begun leading a Writing Squad in Burton on Trent. I still do that and it’s now got about a dozen school-age kids and write together once a month. Love it. I especially love it because when I was in school, I was positively discouraged from writing as a career. To see talent being encouraged and to get to contribute, it’s a privilege and a joy and a so-there-see to my old school. Writing West Midlands organises many such squads: read more about them all here.

And if that But wasn’t enough, I had another one. But I was also in a bit of a tizzy because around this time I’d written I’m calling from the Trib… which was one of those blog entries where something just burst out of me and I had to tell you even though I reckoned you had better things to do. It was about how I had become a writer because of a TV show called Lou Grant and I actually named the people who had created that, who had therefore made me the man I am. Before the month was out, two of those people had got in touch with me. April Smith and Seth Freeman, two names so much a part of my growing up that I can close my eyes and see their names written in the font they were on the show’s credits. Do have a peek at that one: it meant a lot to me, it apparently meant quite a bit to them, and that fact meant a lot to me too. (And check out April’s own website: she’s now a prolific novelist and has a new book out now.)

4. Pencils vs keyboards – 2B or not 2B (4 April 2013)
This was half a muse about handwriting and notebooks but really half a piece about a little thing I did, a little piece of handwriting I did. Take a look at that post for the secret thing that I did and which I only told you about. And then let me tell you that the fella has yet to notice. (If you don’t happen to nip off to read what that is all about, let me reassure you now that what I did was a nice thing. And that it was designed so that if he finds it at all, it won’t be for some time.)

3. Dollars to doughnuts: the end of BBC Television Centre (22 March 2013)
I’m still too upset to talk about that closure. But I had to tell you, I had to open up to you, and I did there. Can’t read it now. Too upsetting.

2. I wish I’d written Veronica Mars (15 March 2013)
I do. I always have done, right from when I first got hooked on that show and right from when it seemed I spent each year’s holiday with my fingers crossed that this TV show would get renewed for another season. And certainly right from when I was crushed because it didn’t. Three seasons and out, that was what we had. But I wrote about this then because, miraculously, the show is coming back. Veronica Mars is now famously a movie that was funded by Kickstarter and one reason to boom at you about it then was that I wanted you to contribute to the movie just as I did. That reminds me: I swear I didn’t ask for any Kickstarter reward. Initially I specified that I didn’t want anything at all, I only wanted my money to go toward getting the film made. Then I thought about it and realised that the movie might not get a big release here in the UK, so I upped my original contribution and asked for a digital download.

But I still didn’t ask for anything else. So it was a surprise when a teeny-tiny Veronica Mars teeshirt arrived in the post. You will never see me wear it. My teeshirt days are gone. But if I had a meeting with you in the last two months and it was an especially cold day, you may have been in the same room as the garment and a couple of others on top of it.

Incidentally, I wrote that about Veronica Mars in March 2013 and it turns out that the film will be released in March 2014.

1. Lie to me (15 November 2013)
Head and shoulders over anything else I wrote in Self Distract in 2013, this was about lying. Specifically: if you are running a drama and you tell me spoilers about it, I want you to be lying to me. Lie to me a lot, lie to me good. The alternative is that I know everything in advance – like you do with soaps – and there are no gasps. It was a general point about how much is revealed in advance and how much that hurts dramas, but it was prompted by a particular Doctor Who issue: a story point that was quite small but if you didn’t know it in advance, was rather delightfully huge and happy.

Also, by the way, I’m lying.

That blog entry wasn’t the most popular of the year.

Not by a long way.

The actual, real, honest-to-goodness top one was actually Have you been telling people about us? from 3 January 2013. It was the one where I told you about the most popular blog posts of 2012. I can’t decide if that’s a good or a bad thing, but I know it’s remarkable to see the figures.

I hope all of those lovely people join you and me in Self Distract’s new 2014 home of williamgallagher.com.

Thanks for reading. Also, happy new year.

You might not be able to tell. I still have shelves upon shelves of DVDs and for Christmas we got the sixth season of The Big Bang Theory, we got the complete A Very Peculiar Practice and we have the Crackerjack Silents. All on shiny disc.

(Just as an aside, The Big Bang Theory disc comes with Ultraviolet, which should let you get a download version of the series too. But instead Ultraviolet is the quite hilarious work of companies who don’t like working with Apple’s iTunes Store yet seemingly can’t quite work with each other, either. And definitely don’t like working for you or I. It’s only hilarious in retrospect. Last year I spent an evening trying to get the fifth season Big Bang Theory’s Ultraviolet to do anything. Eventually I emailed all the companies and asked them to please use a grown-up system in future. Clearly, I have influence.)

But last night, Angela fancied watching Groundhog Day – and I couldn’t find it.

I’ve actually got it on DVD twice as some anniversary edition came out some time with some extras on it or something, and I couldn’t find either of them. The film is on my Mac and it looks slappingly better on that 27in iMac screen than it ever did on our ancient TV, but that’s in my office. I’m sure I’ve watched Groundhog Day on my iPad; I think I’ve even watched on our TV set via my iPad. I used to stream a lot from my Mac to my iPad and then over a cable to the really ancient TV set.

It’s a CRT television. It may have been the last CRT television set ever sold in the world. I knew that salesman looked extra happy when we were leaving.

But I can’t stream to it any more as the cable won’t fit newer iPads.

So all the bits are in place to mean I never need to play a DVD again and yet they aren’t all in the right place, aren’t all in the right row, all the time. My once quite substantial DVD collection has been pruned away over the years but still there are times when I need the disc and so that’s what I grab off the shelf.

Until last night.

We watched another movie we found during the hunt but it felt like the end of DVD for me. Which is a bigger deal than average because DVD became a very validating part of my career. Somewhere around 1999 I persuaded BBC Ceefax to take a column about weekly DVD releases and that became the most popular page in the entertainment section. I think I then did it for BBC News Online too or perhaps they just took those Ceefax pages. But for some years, that’s where you’d see my byline every week: Ceefax and BBC News.

I enjoyed it so much that when I stopped working for them, I took the column away with me and made it into a podcast. I still remember the drive home from London to Birmingham in which I thought of it. I’d read an article about this newfangled podcasting lark by Andy Inhatkho and, sitting at Oxford Service Station, I thought I’ll do that.

For five years and I don’t know how many episodes, I wrote and presented and produced UK DVD Review on iTunes from 2005. Doubtlessly because I was one of the earliest podcasters, it charted. UK DVD Review was in the top ten of all podcasts, in all categories and genres, across the entire world.

It wasn’t entirely a statistical chance of my being early. There really were listeners around the world. I actually was big in Japan. The second greatest time in each year was my Christmas special when I’d pick my top ten DVDs and then the next week would get everyone else’s. At least ten listeners on the phone, on the show, it was an utter blast and the sole reason I stopped was because that blast took a hell of a lot of time to produce.

I’ve often thought about returning to it and I get a gorgeous shiver whenever someone asks me – the idea that they would even remember it after all these years, it’s fantastic – but I’ve also been aware that it does take so much time. I couldn’t guarantee to have that time every week and coming back only to fade away again didn’t appeal.

Now, though, I think the choice has been taken from me because DVDs are going away. I know they’ve been declining for years, I know there is a very good argument that download movies lack extras like commentaries – and I love, utterly adoringly love a good commentary – and I know that Blu-ray is doing okay. But I’ve not bought a Blu-ray player. I’d have to get a newer TV set in order to physically connect one in.

And if I did that, I think I’d be far more likely to buy an Apple TV so that I could stream direct from my Mac again. So I could buy TV shows from iTunes directly on it. I don’t think Apple TV is a fraction as useful here in the UK as it is in the States where you can get various and many channels on it, but it’s far higher up my wish list than a Blu-ray player is.

I’ll miss DVDs. But last night was the first time I actually missed having a specific DVD.

There is this thing called a lagrange point. Usually when it’s mentioned it is specifically the one of these that lies between the Earth and its Moon. You know that the Earth is big and its Moon is comparatively quite small so one of them is hefting a bit of a gravity tug where the other, not so much.

But they do both tug and there is this one point between the two bodies where the big pull of the Earth is exactly and precisely matched by the little pull of the Moon.

If you’re in that point, it’s as if there is no pull at all, not in either direction. And I imagine this to be a peaceful place. Floating. All the pressures and all the gravity and all the worries and problems are still there, every last one of them, but you are somehow at peace.

Welcome to my ideal Christmas Eve.

I don’t know why I like Christmas Eve better than Christmas, I don’t know how I can call it a peaceful time and somehow associate that with not working when I am of course working. But I do like it best and I do call it a peaceful time.

I do call it a lagrange point.

And I hope you get these too.