Happy new year to everyone reading this!

Yesterday, I finished my year-long photo-a-day project, and promised to come up with something new for 2013.

Several people – Wendy among them – have been strongly encouraging me to continue with photo-a-day, but I feel like I’ve run out of things to feature! So, we’ve come up with a somewhat vain compromise – a photo of me every day!

I don’t know if I’ll manage to keep this one up for the whole year, and I don’t think I’ll be quite as assiduous about making up the numbers if I forget on any given day, but I’ll try my best to do it as often as I can. The first photo will come later today, when I’ve finished designing a new template for the posts… I’m calling it my “scrapbook”!

My last photo-a-day picture shows Tynemouth Priory this morning. It seems remarkable that Tynemouth hasn’t featured before now!

So that’s 366 photos posted… plus a few for the days when I posted several, like the Tyne Pedestrian Tunnel back in May). I’ll have to come up with a new challenge for 2013… I haven’t left myself long to come up with that!

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing my photos, and thanks for all your comments!

I’ve just noticed today that on the refurbished Tyne and Wear Metros, the map is wrong… it fails to show the stop at Monument between Manors and St James. Oops!

I’ve only one more photo left in this series of 366… I’ll have to find something especially worthy to top it off!

Mum and Dad are currently visiting Wendy and I in Newcastle for the New Year, so this evening we went to see Life of Pi – although without Wendy, as she’s on a nightshift tonight. These are my 3D glasses.

It was quite a good film – better than I expected – though it was a bit long in parts. Still, neither of my parents fell asleep, so it can’t have gone on too long!

Tomorrow’s the last day of my year of photos, and yet I’m one behind where I should be! I’ll have to keep an extra keen eye out tomorrow to find two things to picture!

I surely can’t be the only person who finds it irritating when supermarkets decide to turn themselves into obstacle courses by bringing out every roll cage, pallet and cleaning trolley from their warehouse and abandoning them in the aisles…! It’s especially annoying when they line pallets along one side of an aisle, blocking access to all of the shelves on that side.

In an apparently litigious culture, it’s a wonder these retailers aren’t sued every five minutes by shoppers tripping over the unattended cardboard boxes that are frequently found littering the aisles.

Wendy bought me the second season of The Killing on DVD for Christmas, and I’m already fairly well into it…! I loved the first season; it was truly superlative TV. If you haven’t seen it yet, then you really should find the time! I’m very much enjoying this second season too.

I came late to The Killing, only catching up with it a couple of months ago when it appeared on Netflix… which meant that I devoured the whole series in no time at all! I then got such strong withdrawal symptoms that I started watching the US remake… which was truly awful!

Iain Dale blogged about Borgen earlier today, which is another series I’ve heard consistently brilliant things about, but haven’t yet found the time to watch. Perhaps it should be my next box set…!

My brother and sister in law kindly bought Wendy and me some Pizza Express espresso cups for Christmas, and this was my attempt at a homemade espresso macchiato. It was really rather tasty, even if I do say so myself!

As Wendy was working yesterday, we had our Christmas dinner today. This was our almost fully-prepared table!

Here are some presents, under our tree! Merry Christmas everyone… I hope you have a brilliant day!

I attempted a 6.30am trip to M&S for Christmas food this morning, reasoning that I might avoid the crowds. Unfortunately, it seems the crowds had the same idea…! I can’t believe how busy it was at that time in the morning! I’m now recovering in the cafe.