Here I am by Kielder Water, the UK’s largest man made lake. It holds 200 billion litres of water – that’s more than 3 million times what the average person drinks in their lifetime!

Wendy and I had a lovely walk through Kielder Forest – Europe’s largest man made forest – which stands on the banks of Kielder Water. It was a bit chilly, though! We also had a look at the dam and hydroelectric plant, which were quite interesting to see!

Here’s me with Crimbo, the smallest of the Metrocentre’s oversized reindeer! It’s almost twelfth night, so I guess they’ll have to be dismantled soon!

Here, I’m outside the Wolfson Building at Durham University’s Queen’s Campus in Thornaby – just a short hop across the river from Stockton.

This is a very important building. It is not only home to the North East Public Health Observatory, it’s also the building where an informal reception for new medical students was held (at least in my day!). It was at that very reception in this very building that Wendy remembers first seeing me across a crowded room… although we didn’t formally meet until a couple of days later.

The rest, as they say, is history!

This week’s article is one of Jon Ronson’s for The Guardian, looking at the disappearance of cruise ship workers, and Rebecca Coriam’s case in particular. It’s an article that asks more questions than it answers, and is really quite harrowing.

This week’s Pod Delusion is out now! In it, you can hear me wittering on about Captain Scarlet, and lots of really interesting stuff, too: an interview with the wonderful Gia Milinovich, the latest on the bizarre CBeebies Get Well Soon row, a bit of public health discussion of the census by Sean Davidson, and loads more good stuff besides. So why not make listening every week your new year resolution?

This is me recording a bit for the Pod Delusion. If you haven’t listened to it before, you should start: it’s a brilliant weekly podcast about interesting things, presented and edited by James O’Malley. The next edition is out tomorrow, but you can listen to the End of the World special (featuring yours truly!) right now!

I’ve previously enjoyed a lot of Iain Banks’s work. His first novel, The Wasp Factory, is a work of gothic brilliance that I loved even before I went on to study it at A-Level. And it’s possibly the only book I’ve ever studied that I haven’t ended up hating as a result!

That said, I’m not a fan of science fiction, and so I don’t enjoy his Iain M Banks science fiction, and didn’t like his cross-over book Transition. I think Banks excels in coming-of-age novels of self-discovery, like the aforementioned Wasp Factory, Whit (which I always want to call Isis), and The Crow Road. If we’re going to get all A-Level English about it, I enjoy his bildungsroman. Or possibly his entwicklungsroman. I’ve forgetten the difference.

Whichever it is I enjoy, Stonemouth happily nestles within the genre. It’s a simple story of coming home, facing demons, and growing. Stewart Gilmore returns to Stonemouth, the small Scottish town of his birth, for a funeral. He’s previously been run out of town by a local gang following an incident revealed only late in the novel, and possibly not entirely deserving of the lengthy build-up and sense of forboding.

This is Banks at his best, so there’s plenty of darkness, and dark humour in spades. The strength of this novel is the relative mundanity of the darkness: nobody explodes, nobody floats away with a bunch of balloons, and nobody’s brain is eaten by maggots. Granted, there is a little defaecation on a golf-course, but there’s nothing in this novel that pushes the boundaries of plausability too far. As with some of Banks’s previous novels, the strength is in the evocation of gothic themes within contemporary life.

The story is engaging, and the characterisation is great, with that uniquely evocative description which is a hallmark of Banks’s work. In fact, the characterisation here is so deep even amongst the minor characters that I could readily enjoy a return to Stonemouth at some point in the future, with a plot centered around some of those other characters.

Normally, Banks’s prose pours from the page. I don’t know of any other writer that pulls off the same trick. Sentences are so carefully constructed that they rarely need to be re-read. The dialogue is natural and flowing. There’s simply no effort to reading his novels. However, in this book, I kept ‘tripping over’ the pop culture references littered through the book. I have no idea why Banks feels the need to discuss iPhones, MacBooks, Family Guy, Cee Lo Green and the like so often. They don’t add to the characterisation, and don’t sit comfortably with Banks’s prose, and their inclusion feels like an odd decision which will serve only to make the book date very quickly. It’s a relatively minor quibble, but it is a little irritating.

All things considered, I thought Stonemouth was great. Other reviewers have criticised it for retreading old ground. That’s probably fair, but I can’t honestly say that it affected my enjoyment. This is the first novel I’ve read in quite some time that I’ve felt a little disappointed to have finished. As such, it comes highly recommended.

Stonemouth is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

This is a branch of an estate agency in Gosforth which specialises in “rare” properties, in the sense of properties that are in someway unusual and hence infrequently available on the property market. Wendy, as someone from Northern Ireland, finds the name particularly amusing, as the word “rare” has negative colloquial connotations in Northern Ireland: somebody dressed in an unusual and inappropriate way, for example, might be described as looking a bit “rare”.

You may think that this long-winded explanation removes any scintilla of humour that might exist about an agency advertising itself as listing only unpleasant properties, but I’m sure we’ll continue to smile as we walk past. And maybe, occasionally, we might continue to tease one another with the line: “That’s the shop where I found you!”

Last night, I went with mum, dad and Wendy to a New Year’s Eve party at the Hilton in Gateshead (or Newcastle Gateshead, as the hotel calls it…!) We had a lovely time, and walked across to Newcastle Quayside to enjoy the midnight fireworks. We’d also been to the Winter Festival Carnival earlier in the evening, so certainly can’t be accused of failing to celebrate the New Year!

Who knows what 2013 will hold? It’s the first year since I was two years old that there’s been no repeating digit in the year. I don’t know what relevance that has to anything, but I thought it was interesting!

Happy new year!

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”!