My Top 5 Leaps of 2013

I enjoy putting together my annual leap list, mainly because it serves as a way of highlighting some of the places to which I've travelled and the things I have done. After a lack of leaps in the leap year last year, I jumped right back in this year and had plenty to choose from.

1. Paradise leaped. Tamarindo, Costa Rica. After several years of waiting and planning, I finally made it to Costa Rica this year and had an awesome time. And of course, there were plenty of great leaps. It was hard to choose just one (and this leap at the foot of the Arenal volcano came a close second), but the infinity pool at our hotel near Tamarindo was pretty paradisiacal.

2. The Game of Thrones leap. Dubrovnik, Croatia. With its stunning Mediterranean views and handy city walls, Dubrovnik proved a particularly lucrative place to leap. I just need to remember to wear better footwear next time. The things we do for art...

3. The arty leap. New York, USA. Speaking of art! I only managed one trip to New York this year, but it was a good one. In City Hall Park, there was a series of sculptures in the Lightness of Being series, which were just asking for a good leap. Naturally, I obliged.

4. The Dreaming Spires leap. Oxford, UK. So apparently my father was the last person to discover that all of those Oxford postcards featuring the gorgeous Dreaming Spires were taken from the top of South Park. It didn't stop us from taking a few celebratory leap photos.

5. The highest leap. London, UK. When I took a tour that allowed me to climb over the top of the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome), I was convinced that they wouldn't let me leap at the top, but apparently leaping is totes legit, as long as you don't go too close to the edge.

Runner-up: The coldest leap. London, UK. As all of the above leaps feature beautiful sunshine, I'm allowing myself a bonus entry on this year's list to remind me that London had a pretty horrific winter at the beginning of this year. The snow and the cold didn't keep some of the members of the nascent SoLoDo Running Club from running and, in my case, leaping, on a particularly inclement Saturday.

My Top 5 Books of 2013

With my longer commute to work, I've managed to up my reading volume again there, reading 139 books this year, a lot more than in 2012. This number includes the 14 I re-read as part of my resolution to revisit favourite books and films more often. Although the list as a whole is pretty varied, a number of themes recur in the top five and in some of the books that almost made my shortlist. And there are a lot of thrillers — especially legal and crime thrillers — on the list, a) because I enjoy the genre and b) because of the books available in the Southwark library system. So, here are my top five books:

1. The Heart Broke in by James Meek. I work for a major science journal and so part of the fun of The Heart Broke in for me was all of the references the UK scientific research. The protagonist, Bec, is a talented young malaria researcher and her brother Ritchie a former rock star turned TV producer who seems to be cheating on his wife with a young teenage girl. The novel tells the story of the dysfunctional relationship and rivalry between Bec and Ritchie, and is lively, engaging and touching.

2. How To Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman. A haunting and subtle work that tells the story of Marta, a housewife in an unnamed Scandinavian country, whose dark past seems to be coming back to haunt her. But can we trust her version of events given that she seems, at the very least, to be suffering from an intense form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which concerns her husband and son greatly? I do like dark mystery-thrillers like this (as evidenced by #4 and #5 on this list), but Chapman's writing is highly compelling.

3. The Darlings by Cristina Alger. Alger is hardly breaking new ground with her tale of Wall Street woes in the financial crisis, but her tightly plotted novel, which takes place over the Thanksgiving weekend of 2008, sees the titular Darling family — darlings only by name — facing a tragedy that threatens to make their seemingly enviable existences come crashing down around them. None of the characters is likeable, from the imperfect hedge-fund-manager patriarch Carter, to his trophy wife Ines, their elder daughter Merrill and her husband Paul, whose gratitude at being offered a job with Carter during the recession soon slips away as the family's downfall begins. Sometimes this is a problem, but I enjoyed Alger's novel, with its notes of McInerney and Easton Ellis. A good, solid, cautionary New York tale.

4. The Twins by Saskia Sarginson. This isn't the only book I've read this year which deals with a dark complex relationship between two sisters or friends who were once close but have been driven apart (Lucy Clarke's The Sea Sisters and Alex Marwood's The Wicked Girls both tread similar ground), but Sarginson's novel was the one that stayed with me the most. It tells the story of Viola and Isolde, twins raised in the 1970s by their hippy mother, who have since become estranged because of events that unfold gradually as the story progresses.

5. The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton. Morton's novels tend to follow the same structure: a present-day woman finds something that makes her realise that her mother or grandmother has been keeping a huge secret for many decades. But this doesn't make them all that predictable and she certainly spins a good yarn. The Secret Keeper sees middle-aged actress Laurel dipping back 50 years to a strange incident in her past and then digging deeper into the mystery of her now elderly and infirm mother's life during World War Two.

Token non-fiction: Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. I read so much science for my job that I only tend to read a handful of non-fiction books. This year, it turned out that most of them had a scientific bent, but Silver's book kept my inner stats geek happy and entertained. Spanning many disciplines, Silver highlights the power of prediction throughout everyday life. A fascinating and informative read.

And here is my full 2013 reading list:

• White Noise — Don DeLillo
• The Liar's Lullaby — Meg Gardiner
• In the Name of Honour — Richard North Patterson
• Arthur and George — Julian Barnes
• No Safe Place — Richard North Patterson
• The Periodic Tales — High Aldersey-Williams
• Mildred Pierce — James M. Cain
• 1974 — David Peace
• A Perfectly Good Family — Lionel Shriver
• Dark Lady — Richard North Patterson
• Miss Wyoming — Douglas Coupland
• Game Control — Lionel Shriver
• Human Traces — Sebastian Faulks
• The Darlings — Cristina Alger
• State of Wonder — Ann Patchett
• City of God — Paulo Lins
• This Is Paradise — Will Eaves
• A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapter — Julian Barnes
• What I Loved — Siri Hustvedt
• The Expats — Chris Pavone
• Gravity's Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon
• Brightness Falls — Jay McInerney
• Embassytown — China Miéville
• Underworld — Don DeLillo
• The Innocents — Francesca Segal
• The Book of Life — Stuart Nadler
• The Shoemaker's Wife — Adriana Trigiani
• Tuesday's Gone — Nicci French
• Run — Ann Patchett
• The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared — Jonas Jonasson
• How To Be a Woman — Caitlin Moran
• The Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
• I Capture the Castle — Dodie Smith
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower — Stephen Chbosky
• The Psychopath Test — Jon Ronson
• Prophecy — SJ Parris
• Life After Life — Kate Atkinson
• The Newlyweds — Nell Freudenberger
• When Christ and His Saints Slept — Sharon Kay Penman
• Best Kept Secret — Jeffrey Archer
• Accidents Happen — Louise Miller
• Night Watch — Linda Fairstein
• The Safest Place — Suzanne Bugler
• The Heart Broke in — James Meek
• Shine — Lauren Myracle
• Eyes of a Child — Richard North Patterson
• Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures — Emma Straub
• Alys, Always — Harriet Lane
• A Happy Marriage — Rafael Yglesias
• The Imperfectionists — Tom Rachman
• e — Matt Beaumont
• The Trouble with Alice — Olivia Glazebrook
• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel — Deborah Moggach
• The Shadow Dancer — Tom Bradby
• The Rules of Civility — Amor Towles
• The Day of the Lie — William Brodrick
• The Storyteller — Jodi Picoult
• The Lost Daughter — Lucretia Grindle
• The Chemistry of Tears — Peter Carey
• Little Children — Tom Perrotta
• Silent Witness — Richard North Patterson
• The Birth of Venus — Sarah Dunant
• The Palace of Illusions — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
• The Secret Keeper — Kate Morton
• The Technologists — Matthew Pearl
• The Red Book — Deborah Copaken Kogan
• The Soldier's Wife — Joanna Trollope
• The Sea Sisters — Lucy Clarke
• The Art of Leaving — Anna Stothard
• A Gathering Storm — Rachel Hore
• The House of the Wind — Titania Hardie
• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell
• When God Was a Rabbit — Sarah Winton
• The Night Circus — Erin Morgenstern
• Snow White Must Die — Nele Neuhaus
• The Deception Artist — Fayette Fox
• The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox — Fleet Street Fox
• The Bat — Jo Nesbo
• The Salt Road — Jane Johnson
• The Engagements — J. Courtney Sullivan
• The Princess Bride — William Goldman
• The Shining Girls — Lauren Beukes
• Five Days — Douglas Kennedy
• The Good Parents — Joan London
• Waiting for Wednesday — Nicci French
• How To Be a Good Wife — Emma Chapman
• Orange Is the New Black — Piper Kerman
• The Ice Princess — Camilla Lackberg
• The Song of Achilles — Madeline Miller
• 1977 — David Peace
• Final Jeopardy — Linda Fairstein
• The Silver Linings Playbook — Matthew Quick
• The White Princess — Philippa Gregory
• The Book of Summers — Emylia Hall
• The Preacher — Camilla Lackberg
• 1980 — David Peace
• 1983 — David Peace
• Summerland — Elin Hilderbrand
• Silent Mercy — Linda Fairstein
• The Stonecutter— Camilla Lackberg
• The Thousand Summers of Jacob De Zoet — David Mitchell
• The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver
• Almost English — Charlotte Mendelson
• The Racketeer — John Grisham
• House of Cards — Michael Dobbs
• Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore — Robin Sloan
• The Silent Wife — ASA Harrison
• Expo 58 — Jonathan Coe
• The Twins — Saskia Sarginson 
• Killer Heat — Linda Fairstein
• The Wicked Girls — Alex Marwood
• Revenge Wears Prada — Lauren Weisberger
• The Hidden Child — Camilla Lackberg
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — Michael Chabon
• The Bookstore — Deborah Meyler
• Burial Rites — Hannah Kent
• The Lost Boy — Camilla Lackberg
• The Emperor's Children — Claire Messud
• Brick Lane — Monica Ali
• Bleeding Edge — Thomas Pynchon
• MaddAddam — Margaret Atwood
• Death Dance — Linda Fairstein
• Against a Dark Background — Iain M. Banks
• The Stranger — Camilla Lackberg
• Black Chalk — Christopher J. Yates
• The Reunion — Amy Silver
• The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls — Anton DiSclafani
• Bird Sense — Tim Birkhead
• Time and Chance — Sharon Kay Penman
• Loss of Innocence — Richard North Patterson
• The View on the Way Down — Rebecca Wait
• The Drowning — Camilla Lackberg
• Under the Same Stars — Tim Lott
• Black Sheep — CJ Lyons
• Lethal Legacy — Linda Fairstein
• Into the Darkest Corner — Elizabeth Haynes
• The Distant Hours — Kate Morton
• The Chocolate Money — Ashley Prentice Norton

My Top 5 Movies of 2013

Like last year, I made a good start on the film front, helped by attending a preview day for journalists and bloggers, where I got to watch five films in a single day. Again, though, I faded fast and managed only to see 68 movies this year — only a little more than one per week. One of my resolutions for 2013 was to re-watch more of my favourite movies and seven of the films on the list are re-watches. My top five are all rather mainstream this year, partly due to my new South of the River location making visits to independent cinemas a little more long-winded. It was a pretty good year for films, and there are too many runners-up this year to list them all.

1. Gravity. As I noted when I reviewed Gravity, it quite literally took my breath away. I haven't spent as unsettling a 90 minutes at the cinema in a long time, and for once, I felt the 3D was completely justified. Gravity is beautifully shot and features a brilliant performance from Sandra Bullock.

2. Before Midnight. I've long been a fan of Richard Linklater's Before... series but was slightly nervous about whether the third film — which could have been called Before Middle Age — would live up to its predecessors. Darker and more intense than the first two films, Before Midnight is moving but still funny, and shows Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline as older but not any wiser than their younger selves.

3. Django Unchained. Yes, at almost three hours, Tarantino's latest effort could do with a bit of editing but Django Unchained is his best film in years. It's entertaining and worth watching to see Leo playing a bad guy alone. It's violent, it's bloody and it's bloody funny. Oh, and Christoph Waltz is fantastic.

4. Blue Jasmine. Without wishing to seem repetitive, Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen's best film in years. It is Cate Blanchett's performance as the titular Jasmine, a selfish, self-absorbed drama queen, that will be remembered. It is also a tightly edited film with a great script and cracking ensemble cast.

5. The Great Gatsby. I know, I know. You wait for ages for a good Leonardo DiCaprio and then two come along at once. I'd waited a long time for Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel to be released and it didn't disappoint. Big, loud and visually stunning, with great music, and some good performances, especially from Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton (Leo was fine, but not at his best). Watch it on as big a screen as possible.

Other films I watched this year (re-watches in italics):

• Die Hard (TV)
• The Impossible
• Catch Me If You Can
• Another Earth (TV)
• Hyde Park on Hudson
• A Late Quartet
• Lincoln
• Hitchcock
• Flight
• Les Misérables
• Zero Dark Thirty
• I Give It a Year
• No
• To the Wonder
• Amour (DVD)
• Lore
• Stoker
• Broken City
• Welcome to the Punch
• Side Effects
• One Day
• Compliance
• Goon (DVD)
• Trance
• Dans la Maison (In the House)
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower (plane)
• Arbitrage (plane)
• Star Trek Into Darkness
• Los amantes pasajeros (I'm So Excited)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Mud
• Behind the Candelabra
• Man of Steel
• The Internship
• The Bling Ring
• Midnight in Paris
• Breathe In (online)
• Dial M for Murder
• About Time
• The Way Way Back
• What Maisie Knew
• The Italian Job (1969)
• Rush
• Shifty (TV)
• Love Is All You Need (plane)
• In a World
• 360 (TV)
• Don Jon
• The Grandmaster
• Drinking Buddies
• Captain Phillips
• Café de Flore
• Wreckers (TV)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• Scream
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
• Now You See Me (TV)
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
• Elf (TV)
• Never Let Me Go
• Of Gods and Men (TV)
• American Hustle
• Iron Man (TV)

That '70s Showdown

I hadn't heard much about David O. Russell's new '70s caper American Hustle until a few weeks ago and now suddenly it's everywhere. Except that it isn't quite everywhere in the UK yet — it's only showing at the Vue in Leicester Square until its full release on New Year's Day. In a last-minute attempt to boost my somewhat poor cinema attendance this year, I braved the wilds of the West End and even forked out £14.50 for my ticket. As you can expect, my expectations were high, and luckily, I enjoyed American Hustle a great deal.

The film is based on a fictionalised version of the FBI's ABSCAM operation, an effort to crack down on US political corruption in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Some of these things actually happened," the title card reads. Tee hee. As the film opens, our two anti-heroes — small-time conman Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and enthusiastic, if unorthodox, FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) — are trying to bring down a popular New Jersey mayor, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) and an assortment of corrupt (or at least corruptible) Members of Congress.

The operation is the result of a deal forged after Richie catches Irving and his business partner Sydney (Amy Adams) in the act of fraud. If Irv and Sydney — usually known by the name of her fraudulent British alter ego, Lady Edith Greensly — can help Richie bring down some big fish, the pair can avoid jail time. Irving soon homes in on Carmine as a potential target and he, Sydney and Richie cook up a wacky sting operation, involving a fake sheikh and a kickstart to the regeneration of the Jersey shoreline, which will bring in plenty of new jobs for locals, as well as a healthy dollop of skimming and other corruption. Richie soon realises he can't succeed without Irving's advice. "That's the art," Irv says. "Becoming someone that people can pin their hopes and dreams on."

To complicate matters further, Sydney seems to be into Richie, when she is also Irving's lover. Meanwhile, Irving is married to Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), a trashy, sunbed-obsessed real housewife of Jersey Shore. Confused? Well, it is the '70s. Irv wants to leave Rosalyn but she threatens to report all of his dubious businesses to the authorities if he tries to divorce her, and she also uses her young son, whom Irv has adopted, as leverage.

And it's all a jolly entertaining caper. Although it has been billed as a drama comedy, I wouldn't say it's especially laugh-out-loud funny, but there are some great lines, such as when Irv describes Rosalyn as, "The Picasso of passive-aggressive karate," and of course there are plenty of tee hees when Carmine gives Irv a microwave, or a "science oven." Oh, and the scene where Richie and Sydney are talking on the phone, each wearing their own set of curlers. How '70s.

It's the performances that hold the film together, though, and as ever with David O. Russell, his old favourites are all reunited here. Bale, drawing on his role in The Fighter, perhaps, is excellent and almost unrecognisable as the overweight but confident Irv, whose elaborate combover takes ages to assemble each morning. Adams surely deserves an Oscar for best-supported actress given her character's penchant for v-neck dresses whose necklines dip down to her stomach. Until her character gets a perm, she also wins the award for best hair, although there isn't much competition. Lawrence's character doesn't appear much in the first half but comes into her own in the final act, effing and blinding and generally being the polar opposite of Katniss Everdean. Cooper was fine too, although didn't stand out as much as the other leads. American Hustle also has an impressive supporting cast, including Louis C.K. as Richie's long-suffering boss and an uncredited cameo by Robert De Niro as a Mafia boss.

Merry M40 Christmas

For the first time in several years — and for the first time intentionally for almost a decade — I'm spending this Christmas in the UK, but there has still been plenty of travelling, from London to Oxford and then up to the Black Country and back to see my extended family. Sunday night was spent in the Walsall Premier Inn — where you get a discount for a room with a 'view' — before spending yesterday, which would have been my grandfather's birthday, with my grandma.

We did manage a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant called Portobello in Aldridge. My rocket, mozzarella and prosciutto salad was great and the pizza was pretty decent too.

On the way home, we fought through the gales and made a stop at Bicester Village, where the heavens opened while I was in the process of buying a cheap Samsonite suitcase. I stand by my previous advice that pre-Christmas is the best time to go to Bicester, although the severely inclement weather may have helped to ward off the crowds yesterday.

This morning, though, it was gloriously sunny if still chilly and somewhat windy. Some of us made it out to Christchurch Meadow for a run, roping some Harry Potter fans who had hoped to see the Hogwarts Great Hall into taking endless leaping photos of us.

Later, we went to Blenheim Palace to work up an appetite for lunch. It was the perfect day for a brisk walk around the lake, before heading into Woodstock for a 'light bite' at the Star. My 'skinny' burger with avo, salad and sweet potato fries but no bun, was tasty, although probably not that skinny.

This evening, we will have our big family Christmas dinner at home in the Shire, before heading back up the M40 tomorrow for more Black Country festive celebrations. Bon Noël, tout le monde!

Bex's London Food and Drink Awards: 2013 Edition

With less than a fortnight of 2013 remaining, it's time for the first of my end-of-year round-ups. Today I've chosen my London food and drink favourites of the year. I've had some great culinary experiences in London this year — surprisingly, not all involved burgers! Like last year, these places are new to me this year although not all of them are new. I'm no foodie, so as usual, I've stuck mainly to my specialist subjects.

1. Best macchiato: Association Coffee (City)
I have just one problem with Association Coffee, on Creechurch Lane, near Aldgate station: its opening hours mean that I only get to visit on a somewhat long-winded journey into work. With coffee from a range of London suppliers, the macchiato is always excellent, and I've also had some great Aeropress brews. Plus, the decor is great and the staff are friendly and very knowledgeable, so it's a great place to hang out. Please start opening at the weekends, Association, or open a branch in King's Cross!
Runner-up: Allpress

2. Best brunch: Bea's Diner (Bermondsey)
Pancakes: check. Maple bacon with extra maple syrup: check. Bottomless coffee: check. Yes, Bea's Diner, under the arches of Druid Street, near Tower Bridge Road, really is the perfect venue for a cool brunch while the trains rumble overhead. They also do movie nights!
Runner-up: The Hangover Club

3. Best new street food: B.O.B.'s Lobster (check their website for current locations)
I visited B.O.B.'s a couple of times during their Borough Market residency over the summer. This year, London had an amazing summer, when the thought of scoffing a delicious lobster roll — served from a red VW van by the most cheerful staff London has ever seen — washed down with a glass of Prosecco is even more appealing than in today's wintry state. At £11, the lobster roll is also great value. The van has been at Hawker House, but the B.O.B.'s crew are also sheltering in a garage near St Paul's for the winter; check out their website for more info.

4. Best new cocktail: Little Bird's Perfect G and T (Bermondsey)
Nothing says hip London weekend brunch than a Perfect G and T at Little Bird Gin's Maltby Street outpost. Little Bird is a small-batch gin distiller based in Peckham, and their citrusy gin does indeed go perfectly with the pink grapefruit served with the Perfect G and T. Plus it looks so pretty, it's currently the lock screen photo on my iPad!

5. Best new burger: Patty & Bun (Marylebone)
A hotly fought contest, as always: I have eaten a lot of great burgers this year. I'd thought Bleecker St Burger was going to win, but I realised I actually discovered them last year. Still, with the Yanks trying their hand at the London burger market, in the form of Balthazar, Shake Shack and Five Guys, there were plenty of other places to choose from. In the end, though, the Brits had it. You often have to queue at Patty & Bun, but the burgers are awesome, especially the Smokey Robinson burger, which comes with caramelised onions and smokey mayo. They get bonus points for the peanut butter choc ices available on the pudding menu!
Runner-up: Dirty Burger — yes, good burgers crossed the Thames, eventually!

6. Best new restaurant: Grain Store (King's Cross)
Bruno Loubet's new-ish restaurant in King's Cross's Granary Square is the perfect place to celebrate a special birthday. Or an ordinary birthday. Or, you know, a Wednesday. The menu is creative and meticulously planned, the cocktails are top notch, the staff are friendly, and it has a buzzy, cool ambience.
Runner-up: Pizza Pilgrims — great pizza, great service, great prices.

Skating on Wet Ice

It has been dry in London for weeks, so of course it started to rain on the evening we had booked tickets for the Canary Wharf ice rink. It was, at least, quite a mild evening and we all managed without the ponchos offered by the rink staff. I've been to the Somerset House ice rink a few times, but had heard good things about ice skating at Canary Wharf; plus, it's just a short hop on the Jubilee line from Bermondsey. I don't think I've been to Canary Wharf before, and found the underground shopping centre/food court adjacent to the tube station to be a little confusing — I was expecting there to be at least one sign to the rink, but sadly not. But if you head for Waitrose, and then go out through the ground-level doors, the rink is just opposite.

If you've booked tickets online, you don't need to queue outside; just head straight to the skate-hire station. While I waited for the others to arrive, I perused the bling for sale in the shop. Sadly, even though this is Canary Wharf, you don't get to skate in the sparkly, rhinestoned ice skate they have on display; just the regular boring blue skates.

The rink itself is a fairly decent size and has a little 'track' you can follow that takes you under the sparkling trees. This is a nice idea but we were there during the 6.30 pm slot when there were a lot of kids, so the track quickly became bottle-necked.

Skating among the skyscrapers gave the rink a Manhattan feel, though. You could almost be in New York — at the Rockefeller ice rink, if not the Wollman Rink. Although it was pretty busy, it wasn't quite as crowded as some of the more central ice rinks in London can get — next time, I'd probably opt for a later slot.

The other good thing about skating in Canary Wharf is that a wealth of dining options are available when you need some post-skating nourishment. Having skated past Wahaca about 300 times, we couldn't not go there, and a number of refreshing margs and, in my case, some delicious fish tacos, we were ready to take the tube back South of the River.

Canary Wharf ice rink. Canada Square Park, Canary Wharf, E14 5AB (Tube: Canary Wharf). Tickets are £13.50 for adults and £9 for children (plus a 50p booking fee). Website.

Coffee Capsules for Coffee Connoisseurs

Almost six years ago, I put my faithful Gaggia espresso machine into semi-retirement after giving in to the convenience of a Nespresso machine. But when I started working in London, I got into making French press coffee at work, and then got the Aeropress bug, eventually getting a second Aeropress for my home last year. I love Aeopress coffee: it's flavoursome and strong, but has a clean taste. It does, however, take about ten minutes to make once you've ground the coffee, boiled the water, steeped, inverted and pressed. Some mornings — particularly when it's cold outside and still dark — even a coffee addict like me finds it difficult to resist the snooze button on my alarm clock.

Over time, though, I've gone off the taste of Nespresso coffee somewhat, so I was pleased to be contacted by a company called Big Cup Little Cup, who sent me some of their Nespresso-compatible capsules to try. Their name, of course, reflects the two varieties of Nespresso pod — the big cup (lungo) and the little cup (espresso), and they are "unapologetically picky about [their] coffee." Excellent!

I tried two of the little cup varieties: the Millers Yard espresso and the Sumatra Gayo Mountain. As someone who likes to choose coffee beans based on the origin and flavour notes, it's nice to have this information on the packaging, rather than just having to go on Nespresso's more abstract names, such as arpreggio and così, and it would go a long way towards helping me select the coffee I'm most likely to enjoy. I like the packaging too, which is cheery and colourful.

The individual capsules are foil wrapped and the first thing I noticed when I opened the first one was that I could actually smell the coffee. The pods are transparent so you can also see the coffee inside, which is nice. The fit of the capsules in my Nespresso machine is a little bit tight, so I had to push the top lever down firmly, but it didn't cause any problems.

I tried the Millers Yard blend first (in the royal blue cup below) and it was good, but I preferred the Sumatra coffee (in the turquoise cup), which had a richer, smoother taste. Just to be clear, if you are making coffee using a Nespresso machine, it won't be as good as a freshly-roasted, just-ground, custom-brewed espresso from a top independent espresso bar. However, I was impressed by the depth of flavour of the two Big Cup Little Cup varieties I tried. These are definitely coffee capsules for people who care about coffee. I won't be ditching my Aeropresses any time soon, it's nice to know that I have a tasty but convenient alternative for those occasions when brewed coffee is just too much faff.

Many other capsule varieties are available on the Big Cup Little Cup website (it's reassuring to see that some are"still roasting"), with prices starting at 23p per capsule.

Big Cup Little Cup are offering my readers a 15% discount off their next order. Just use the discount code BEX1112 when checking out (valid until 11 January 2014).

A Life Less Ordinary

Ben Stiller movies aren't normally a big draw for me, but when I saw the trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, of which Stiller is both star and director, I was somewhat amused, if slightly bemused. I'm not sure I would have paid to go and see it, but when I got a ticket to a free preview screening of the film last night, I decided to give it a try.

I haven't read the James Thurber short story of the same name on which the film is very loosely based, but it hardly matters. Stiller plays the titular Mitty, a "negative asset manager" for Life magazine. Yes, negative in the photographic sense, which seems to suit his meticulous, introspective personality. As the film opens, we watch him make careful notes in his personal ledger, and try to "wink" at his co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) on eHarmony (who must have paid a ton for all the product placements). His finger hovers over the "wink" button for minutes, but when he eventually tries to click, his computer won't let him.

As he waits for his subway train to work, he calls eHarmony's customer support and chats to a friendly guy called Todd (Patton Oswalt), who tries to help him out, suggesting that Walter fill in some more details on his profile: "you must have been somewhere or done something interesting." But Walter really hasn't. He has led a quiet, sensible life interrupted only by his occasional vivid daydreams, in which his alter-ego — a funnier, smarter, stronger version of himself — saves the day, gets the girl and otherwise kicks butt. All is not well at Life, however, because the management consultants are in the house, headed by Ted (Adam Scott), the "transition manager." The transition in question means turning Life into an online-only publication and firing as many people as possible, with hilarious consequences. After witnessing a couple of our hapless hero's daydreams, Ted sets his firing sights on Walter, but the latter has been charged with an important task by one of the magazine's top freelance photographers, Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn), making him indispensable. For now, at least.

Sean sent Walter a collection of negatives including the all-important number 25, which Sean thinks should appear on the front cover of Life's last ever print issue. It will give it just the right note of "quintessence." The only trouble is that number 25 is missing and because Sean travels across the globe, he is thus quite hard to track down. However, by looking at some of the surrounding negatives and securing the help of his new buddy Cheryl, Walter realises Sean has headed for Greenland, and jets off to find him. And funnily enough, the more crazy experiences he has, the less he finds himself day-dreaming. Soon, Walter is making even Todd jealous each time Todd calls to find out what he's up to (that's customer service!).

The chase begins as a hunt for the missing negative in order to save his job, but because this is a feel-good movie, Walter soon learns something more important: he needs to spend less time dreaming and more time living. And yes, that's very cheesy, but The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a corny film. I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to, and the scenes in Greenland and Iceland were both beautifully shot and much livelier than the rest of the film. The denouement went on too long (it starts winding down about 40 minutes from the end) and I think it would have helped if the film was either funnier or darker. As it was, there were plenty of chuckles, but no real ROFLs, and because the plot was so predictable, I found myself becoming less emotionally involved with the characters. Stiller was actually quite well cast (by himself?), playing a much straighter role than we're used to seeing him in, and of course Sean Penn did what he does as the elusive photographer. Oh, and Kathryn Hahn and Shirley MacLaine as Mitty's sister and mother are good fun too, if a little cookie-cutter kooky.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty isn't something you need to rush to see at the cinema when it's released — the small screen will do it justice — but if you're looking for something light-hearted, uplifting and more than a little quirky, you could definitely do worse than this film.

The Burger Bulletin: Big Dawgs Review

Update (2015): Big Dawgs didn't last long on Maltby Street, but The Woolpack is still going strong on Bermondsey Street.

The Maltby Street market is great and I'm there most weekends, even if just for a post-run doughnut. Sometimes, though, you're not in the mood for a big pancake breakfast and you can't face the queue for a salt beef sandwich. South London in general and Maltby Street in particular have been somewhat lacking on the burger front. Over the summer, The Woolpack had a grill out some weekends, but I hadn't seen it for a while. Last Sunday, however, I noticed a new player in the burger stakes: Big Dawgs, which offered burgers, hot dogs and even an indoor space to eat them in. Naturally, I had to go and check them out today.

It was a tough call between the Maverick burger (with Swiss cheese and maple bacon) and the Hog (with pulled pork and chipotle sauce), but in the end the former won out. While I was waiting for my burger to grilled, I was chatting to the staff and found out that Big Dawgs is, in fact, the new identity of the Woolpack's burger grill. The new name feels a lot more in keeping with the rest of Maltby Street and, of course, the name and the hipster-dog logo will go down well with the canine-cherishing clientèle of what may be London's hippest food market.

As with a lot of the other companies based in the arches under the train tracks on the Ropewalk, Big Dawgs' new space is kitted out with reclaimed furniture from LASSCO (also based in Maltby Street), in this case using a bathroom theme with black and white tiles, random taps and sinks, and a full-size bathtub — for the dawgs, perhaps?

When my burger arrived, it was big and meaty, and excellent value for £5. The beef was juicy and flavoursome and although I would have liked my bacon slightly more crispy, the sweet, maple taste was a nice touch.

I will be back, of course, to try the Hog, and they'll be adding new menu items next year, including a Philly cheese steak with a super-secret twist. Intriguing!

Big Dawgs. The Ropewalk (between Maltby Street, Druid Street and Millstream Road), London, SE1 3PA. Twitter.

Bex's 2013 Gift Guide: Stockings and Secret Santas

Last week, I revealed my Christmas gift picks for girls and for guys. Today it's time for my suggestions for stocking fillers and those often tricky Secret Santa presents. The price limit for all of these items is £15, but a few are under £10, in case your budget is a little tighter.

Stationery
1. Map and planner notebooks from Present & Correct. £7.50 each. I am a huge stationery geek, and thought that this pair of notebooks was really cool. One lets you plan out your week, simply and stylishly, while the other is divided into a grid section, where you can sketch out a map, and a section to mark in your itinerary. Yes, you could just use your Google Maps app, but there is something visually and nostalgically appealing about this low-tech option.

2. Pair of stripy notebooks from Quill London. £8.50. Quill London has great stationery and this pair of notebooks — one pale green, one pastel pink, both with metallic gold stripes on the cover — will look good on any desk or in any handbag.

3. Know-it-all pencils from Present & Correct. £11.75. I really liked this bright pink pencil set from Austique, but they were over my budget, so instead I'm recommending Present & Correct's know-it-all pencils, each of which highlights a useful fact. Perfect for the person with an answer for everything — or for the pub-quiz goer.

Food & drink
4. Custom-designed liqueurs from Alchemist Dreams. From £15. Alchemist Dreams lets you create your own liquer by selecting a combination of fruit flavours, herbs and spices. If you're uncertain, you can either pick one of their house blends or write a description of the recipient in a box and the Alchemists will seek inspiration from your words. You can also customise the labels, so this is a great personalised gift. A 200 ml bottle of your custom liqueur is £15.

5. Two-bag subscription to Pact Coffee. £13.90. I've sounded the praises on this blog before about Pact, a coffee subscription service that sends you a custom-selected bag of really good quality coffee for £6.95. As the coffee will usually arrive the next day, it's pretty convenient, and although I have a lot of other places to buy good coffee beans nearby, Pact does offer a great service. They will grind the beans for you, if you don't have a grinder, and their packs fit through most letter boxes (sadly not mine).

6. Clever Coffee Dripper from Clinton Coffee Company. £14.50. If the coffee lover in your life wants to take the next step towards coffee geekery, but isn't quite ready for an Aeropress, the coffee dripper could be a good choice. It makes a really good cup of filter coffee in three minutes — just add a paper filter, your coffee and some just-off-the-boil water, which filters through perfectly thanks to the ridged surface of the dripper. It will make an ever better cup of coffee if you use coffee from Pact, rather than a pre-packaged bag from your supermarket.

7. Christmassy treats from Hope & Greenwood: North Pole Party caramel-filled chocolates (£4.99) and Christmas Sweets Shaker (£6.99)*. In my family, no Christmas stocking is complete without a sweet treat (or five), and Hope & Greenwood have a great seasonal offering this year. The chocolate caramels are shaped like snowmen and Father Christmases, and the sweets in the shaker add a touch of retro that will go down well with the whole family: flying saucers, sugar mice, candy canes...well, you get the idea.

Accessories
8. Geometric leather purse from Luna & Curious. £14. A sleek, 10-by-15-cm leather purse with an embossed, geometric design. It comes in a range of colours: turquoise is my favourite, but the navy is also nice.

9. Happy Socks from Selfridges. £8. I like the idea of having socks in a Christmas stocking, and Happy Socks does have some lovely designs. Two pairs of socks in cute navy-and-red designs: one pair with big dots, the other with a contrasting toe and heel.

10. Arne Jabcobsen letter cup from Heal's. £13. I picked up one of these handle-less cups with the iconic, capital-letter design a few months ago, and use it to keep the pens on my stationery shelf in order. You could use it as a mug too, of course, as long as you weren't drinking anything too hot. You could also buy a few and spell out a word or a set of initials.


* I was sent these Hope & Greenwood products to try. The opinions stated here are, as always, honest and my own.

Varsity Blues

I read a lot of books and the confirmation bias means that I'm never too surprised when I read two books in a row that explore similar themes, as was the case with Christopher J. Yates's Black Chalk and Amy Silver's The Reunion. Both novels examine the way you think that the friends you have at university will be your best friends for life. The people you know best. The people who know you best. And yet in both novels, this idea is shown to be false, with dark and tragic consequences.

Black Chalk alternates between the story of a 30-something hermit, living in Manhattan but too afraid to leave home except to stock up on food and alcohol, and flashbacks to a group of lonely but intelligent young people who meet at the University of Oxford in the early 1990s. The present-day sections are dark, bleak and mysterious, yielding clues as to who the narrator is and exactly what happened in the past 13 years only gradually.

Chad, an American exchange student on his junior year abroad, is desperate to find friends. He is funny and clever but suffered from terrible acne as a teenager and lacks confidence. He targets and then becomes friends with Jolyon, a popular, sardonic bon viveur and they while away the hours making cocktails that seem exotic to university students in the 1990s. Don't be fooled: Brideshead Revisited this ain't. At the freshers' fair, Chad and Jolyon meet the mysterious Game Soc and put forward their proposal for a new game: a silly game of dares that are designed to humiliate, but not physically harm, the participants. The boys recruit four other students — Jack the joker, competitive Mark, dark Dee and beautiful Emilia — and the game begins. At stake is a prize of a few thousand pounds — at first, at least. The stakes soon begin to rise, though, as the dares get harder and Lady Luck seems to favour some players more than others. From the present-day instalments, we know something went horribly wrong during the course of the game and what started as something innocent — something that would allow the players to bond — became dangerous and overwhelming.

I really enjoyed Black Chalk and was gripped right up until the end, although I found the ending itself a little anti-climactic. I also greatly preferred the flashback scenes. It was fun working out the Oxford colleges, pubs and street names based on Yates's pseudonyms, for one thing, and the touches of Waugh and also of Donna Tartt's A Secret History worked well. I found myself skipping quickly through the present-day sections, which I felt sometimes tried too hard to be clever and complex, but I liked the achronological structure and the unreliability of the narration. Black Chalk is wickedly dark, highly compelling and well worth a read.

Amy Silver's The Reunion is aimed at quite a different audience — you can tell from the cover that you're in chick-lit city — but the overall plot structure is quite similar to Black Chalk. In the present day, Jen is trying to organise a gathering of her best friends from university at her family's house in the French Alps. However, as is revealed in a series of flashbacks, letters and emails — mostly in the mid-1990s — the group members are estranged because of tragic circumstances. There were six of them in the group at university: Jen, her boyfriend Conor, Conor's best friend Andrew, blonde bombshell/drama queen Lilah, Lilah's best friend Natalie, and Dan.

Almost 20 years later and Andrew and Natalie are married with kids, Lilah is a cougar, and Dan is a film director, whom the rest of the group hasn't really forgiven for making a movie about their friendships and their past. Jen hasn't seen any of them for years. "When a snowstorm descends, they find themselves trapped and forced to confront their unresolved issues, frustrated passions and broken friendships," the blurb notes (OK, I was struggling to find something new to read in my local library!). This isn't really true. Or, at least, the real confrontation takes place in the minds of each character as we flash back to see events from their perspective; the titular reunion is really just a narrative device. Each person remembers different things and remembers things differently, and slowly, through a drip-feed of little clues, the reader is able to piece together exactly what happened.

On paper, it sounds a little cheesy, but I enjoyed The Reunion. It's a page-turner and I ended up staying up later than I ought so that I could finish it. Although the characters seem at first to be clichés, the flashbacks and the epistolary component of the novel give them a greater depth, and I really wanted to know what happened. What went wrong. None of the characters is perfect, but I did sympathise with most of them, and although this set of characters is older than me and the circumstances are different to my own university experience, I do like the novel's exploration of the way life so often turns out differently to the future you pictured when you were an idealistic, optimistic 20-year-old. Not necessarily worse, of course, although the experience portrayed both in The Reunion and Black Chalk is sometimes (in the case of the former) or usually (in the case of the latter) bleak and devastating.