I watched a film a long time ago set in a post-apocalyptic London populated by people living out cruel parodies of their lives before the bomb dropped. I can’t remember what it was called. It was one of those British films from the Sixties and Seventies that had a huge cast (that usually included at least two out of Graham Chapman, Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan) and not much in the way of a narrative. Somebody rides around in an underground train on an eternal loop. Somebody wears a bowler hat. Nobody mentions the attack. I think it is a comedy of sorts. It might be great, or possibly awful. I can’t remember.

OK. I looked it up – The Bed Sitting Room, 1969. (featuring Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, for the record.)

Anyway. Forget the details. Don’t worry about whether the film is good or not. Just think about a man in a bowler hat riding the tube through a post-apocalyptic landscape, forever, not getting anywhere, never admitting to himself that there hasn’t been a where to get to for a very long time. That’s me on Twitter. Lost. Sitting on a seat that has rusted underneath me. Staring out the windows at things that make me sad. 

[There is a missing paragraph here. I have written about twenty different things to try to bridge the gap between that introduction and the nub of this post but I scrapped them all because they brought the mood down too much. It would help me enormously if you would just pretend that instead of this explanation, there was something beautiful. Cheers, friend.]

So, I’ve decided to return to the blog. As you may have noticed, I have changed the name.

Welcome to Benjamin Judge’s All Year End-of-Year Lists. The concept is so simple that this introduction is largely superfluous – three posts a week, each of which celebrates some stuff I liked during the previous twelve months. That’s it.

Well not quite.

I’ve freed the concept of the end-of-year-list from the shackles of the Gregorian calendar so why stop there? If time means nothing, why limit myself to things created or released in the last year? What is stopping me do a list of, say, five films from the nineteen thirties that I watched in the last twelve months? Nothing at all. In fact, let’s do that on Friday.

And, because I’m doing lists every week, it gives me a chance to cover more than just films, books and music. Do you fancy a top three lowbrow cheeses? Cool. I’ll see you on Wednesday.