Recommended Play of the Week: So Far, So Good – Rowena Moreno (amazon e-book out now)

Recommended Book of the Week: Metamorphosis and other stories – Franz Kafka (bizarre)

Recommended Film of the Week: A Good Year – Ridley Scott (with a bottle of wine handy)

Recommended TV of the Week: The Killing III (gotta love those jumpers)

Recommended ‘Animal to talk about’ of the week – The Blue Footed Boobie

Recommended ‘Twitterer to follow’ of the week -  Jewish Comedians

After spending 36yrs enjoying the varying complexities of the British weather and, in some of its extremist forms, that of the South Wales valleys (the valleys? No, not the MTV ‘concept’. I refer to the hundreds of square miles of beautiful countryside that you’d discover if you hopped on a bus after skidding through the greasy pit that is chip alley, Cardiff.) I have become used to the so-called inconveniences of said weather.

As human beings we either adapt, or adapt to, the environment around us. So why oh why does the government and the media constantly lament the winters of the last few years. Simple investment of a few million pounds taken from, oh I don’t know, from a military budget of billions for a country with ‘no discernible threat’ (Foreign Office), to shore up the poorly constructed flood defence systems, or maybe to move homeowners, even entire towns, geographically to higher ground as people have done for thousands of years when weather has disrupted lives.

Global warming due to industrial and to some extent domestic pollution has undoubtedly played its part and I recycle everything I can.

However, I believe the main panic comes from the fact that, rather than the weather getting worse (I remember the Blizzard of Jan 1982; the storms and hurricanes of 1987 and Pulp playing Newport in 1996), people are getting too busy and too impatient. With fast broadband, Ipads/pods/pids and squids, kindles, kobos, kibble and dibble androids, MP3 players, robotic vacuum cleaners, cyber online worlds, and DVD players, and other such pointless crap that I’m constantly told I should have to make my life more ‘convenient’ and ‘enjoyable’, people expect to be able to get to other locations at the stoke of a button. A train should travel at 180mph, a bus should shunt along at 90mph and cyclists should be branded and taken from the roads.

This is not the world I want to live in or raise my kids in. I don’t want gadgets to make my life more ‘convenient’ and ‘enjoyable’. Who the hell wants to read a book or watch a play by an author/play write who is 1. Happy (define happy) and 2. Has a convenient and enjoyable life?

Please don’t read me as being a miserable sod. I enjoy life as much as the next misanthrope and find enjoyment in many of the same things that you the reader do. However, let’s all try for 1 year, 1 month, 1 week, 1 day (?) to put all the gadgets and their tentacles of chargers into a big drawer, shut the draw and look at the world around us. Walk out into the snow and rain and wind, not naked of course, and listen to people talking, the birds a twittering and kids being screamed at by their mothers in supermarkets, all those little things that make life truly wonderful.

Take your head out of the kindle/kobo/ipad (no one's impressed) and open that hardback book again, the dusty one you used to love to hold, smell and read, devour every word, devour every inch of that countryside that trundles past on our gloriously slow British trains. Smell the rich smells of the food made by our neighbours from other countries who have added to the richness of our population and culture.

And after a week of avoiding charged up images from your ereader and Youtube, reward yourself with a visit to the theatre from between £3-£12, and watch and wonder at a performance being performed for you, in the same room as you, as the wind and rain and snow blow and burl their merry way past in the hopefully one day pointless-gadget free world outside.

p.s. Check out Macilroy Chronicles on Amazon.co.uk for only 75p by Dean Scurlock (Me!)