TV Series Review: Friends

For Christmas the year before last Mr Click bought me the complete box set of Friends, The One With All Ten Seasons. We've had it on the bookcase ever since, just waiting for the chance to sit down and watch it.

It used to be a staple part of Thursday night viewing, so what with watching ER on an evening it only seemed right that we should start watching Friends as well. It started off being our before bed viewing, watching two or four episodes while we drank tea or hot chocolate in bed, until our Blu-ray player decided to be a bit temperamental about playing the double-sided ER discs, so we swapped and made it our tea time viewing instead.

Some might say that this is a sensible move as ER isn't always particularly good viewing when you're wanting to eat your tea! Then again, it's not always brilliant right-before-bed viewing either!

I'll start with the box. It's perfect. All ten series are housed inside it and if they're lined up they spell out the Friends logo. Each series has three discs to it, which are double-sided so you have to flip them over when you get to the end.

On thing I did feel it was slightly lacking in were special features. For the first few series each disc has the music video on it (which I'd occasionally watch while I was waiting for Mr Click to come out of the kitchen) and the London episodes have a special feature about making Friends in London. Other than that there's nothing until you get to the final episode. Then you get a (hilarious) gag reel looking back over all ten series, watching every cast member completely flubbing their lines or corpsing. There's also a featurette on how Friends is dubbed in other countries, a Behind the Scenes on the creation of an episode (this originally aired right before the start of, I think, the sixth series, because I remember watching it on TV at the time) and also some interviews with series regulars which we've not gotten to yet.

I would've liked to have seen more behind the scenes stuff, as well as maybe some more features on how the series was received at first, grew in popularity, and how the cast felt as it drew to a close. Or perhaps some commentaries on some of the key episodes in the series.

Watching the episodes the way we did, two to four a night, meant that towards the end we were watching a series a week. Even when I was younger and used to marathon the series I never got through them all that quickly. It was kind of funny to watch the cast and characters growing up so quickly before my very eyes and even weirder to think that when I'd originally watched some of those episodes I'd been twelve, and now I was the same age as, or older than, the characters I was watching.

I've watched most of the series multiple times, when I was younger I had up to series seven on video and whenever my cousin came to stay we'd sit up late watching as many episodes as I could. I probably know the entire first series completely off by heart.

There's a sort of magic to those earlier episodes which I don't always feel with the later ones. Perhaps because I don't know them quite so well; I think I've only seen series ten a handful of times. I'm not about to start listing all of my favourite episodes because I could easily just turn this into a massive list of all the greatest Friends episodes, and besides, I think any Friends fan will have their own list and probably won't include all of the same episodes as any other fan.

I love the flashback episodes, I don't mean the ones which consist of clips from older episodes - those do get a little bit tiresome when you're marathoning the series the way that we did, because you know those jokes, you watched them two weeks ago! - I mean the ones where we see the gang in their youth or before the start of the show.

Monica and Chandler will probably always be two of my favourite characters on the show. I know it's all about the Ross and Rachel relationship, but at times they seem so immature and petty about things, whereas Monica and Chandler seem more real. This time around I probably felt a greater attachment to them as well for other reasons too.

Of course I have to mention Phoebe as well. I love how zany and random she is. The episode where she and Rachel go running in the park sums it up perfectly. She is who she is and she doesn't care what other people think about her. I always secretly wanted to be like her when I was a teen but wasn't really brave enough. Now I'm a lot happier about just being who I want to be, but I wish I'd stopped trying to be who other people wanted me to be when I was younger.

I think that on the whole it's aged pretty well. Aside from the fashions and hairstyles (and the grainer picture/harsher lighting) of the earlier episodes, there's very little which ties it to a particular era. Little things like Joey having an audition tape, Chandler getting a brand new computer with a whole twelve megabytes of RAM, and references to the Mayor of New York, which you can kind of gloss over.

Watching ER alongside Friends has helped me to appreciate how timeless Friends is by comparison. The early series of ER feel more like they're going to become Period Pieces because there's a lot more talk of technology and you see the medical and computer equipment changing. Unless we all suddenly start driving flying cars or wearing all silver jumpsuits all the time, Friends doesn't feel like it's going to change a huge amount. It'll be interesting to see if I can watch it in the same way in another ten years' time.

Of course, I'm not going to be waiting ten years to marathon the whole series again. The next time I've got the house all to myself I'll probably be watching the whole thing from beginning to end again, purely because I can!

Day Zero Project: Get my coffee table revarnished

This is probably one of my more random Day Zeroes. I have this coffee table which I have quite literally grown up with. It's been in my house for as long as I can remember. I have some very vivid early childhood memories of 'dancing' to Status Quo songs by skipping round this table.

I don't think I've actually got any photos of the table just on its own, being a table, but it's been the backdrop to numerous photos of smaller things. As you can see above.

This table was the family coffee table until I was about eleven or twelve when it became the table where my rats and hamster lived. In their cages, obviously, not just hanging out on the table. The hamster I had at the time liked to hang out in the wheel that stuck out the side of his house, it leaked and caused some damage to the top of the table which my Grampy sanded down and fixed for me. The table survived to live another day.

When we moved to Scotland, it came with us, finding a new home in a new house. Since then it's also lived in a flat in Glasgow and in a different living room in the new house. There have been several occasions when it's nearly been disposed of or replaced, but every time I've saved it.

Part of the reason for saving it is because it was made by my Great-Grandfather. I think that the story goes that a family member needed a new coffee table and he just whipped it up just like that. I can't bring myself to part with it.

Now it's in our house with us but it's sort of showing its age. It's got a couple of scratches on the stop and it's generally worn and tired looking. I really think that a bit of a polish and varnish will give it a new lease of life, and hopefully keep it going for another thirty years.

It sounds strange, but we're waiting until the weather is right so that we can take it to my father-in-law's greenhouse to give it the work up that it deserves. When I eventually get around to that, I'll post some before and after photos.

Wordless Wednesday: Shoots

Book 50 of 2013: The Sellamillion by A.R.R.R. Roberts

I like to pick up books that are related to Tolkien in any way, shape or form. This extends to parodies of Tolkien and so on my bookcase I have a little selection of parodies of his writing, the first of these being The Sellamillion.

In short, it's a parody of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Except that it kind of isn't because there are some bits at the end which parody other Tolkien-based works, like the book of his letters and some other things. Also, it would be very hard to actually parody The Silmarillion but this takes the gist of it, makes it funny and then just runs with that.

I did find it really funny. There were lots of bits that I kept on wanting to share with John and I could easily have copied out quotes from a large chunk of the book. In a way the jokes kind of reminded me of Terry Pratchett because he's another author where you get a throwaway comment on one page, then two or three pages later you get the punchline. It's really funny, but not the sort of thing you can read to someone else without reading them a large portion of the book, and it also makes it really hard to copy stuff into my book journal.

I think that it must have been quite a challenge to write because, let's face it, The Silmarillion isn't exactly light reading. I imagine that a parody of The Hobbit or even The Lord of the Rings had to be easier to write than this. That said, I think it shows how well he understood the source material in order to make jokes about it and to twist things to make them funny.

I'm fairly certain that I picked up this book on one of my many charity shop trawls. I know from at least one review online that it can be a bit tricky to pick up, though that may be easier now that you can get the Kindle version on Amazon. I imagine that writing it was a bit of a gamble because it had to have a very limited audience. I mean, I have read and enjoyed reading The Silmarillion but that's a much smaller group of people than who have read and enjoyed Tolkien's other books. Plus the number of people who have read, enjoyed, and want to see the book made fun of (in the nicest possible way) much be even smaller again!

This was written by the same person who wrote the Star Wars parody and as with that one of my favourite things were the creative names that he came up with. I'm sure anyone can come up with funny names, but I love the way that they link to the original but are funny in their setting as well. For example the opening has 'And the Holy Spirits that are called Valüpac, gathered about Emu and their names are Gion, Poll, Gorge, Thingo, and Moregothic.' There's also Lúthien's alternate, Lüthwoman, which I found funny. Tuoni Bleary took me a little longer to figure out, until he started talking politics, that is.

I've still got The Soddit and Bored of the Rings on my shelf to read as well so I'm looking forward to getting to those in the future.

Meet Oscar Oswald Octopus

Okay, so he's not quite finishing in this photo, but he's very nearly done and I like to get my blog posts scheduled on a Sunday for the following week. It's also very unlikely that I'll have anything halfway reasonable to share next Monday as I'll be frantically getting my latest OU assignment finished, so I can share a properly finished photo next week.

Please excuse my tea at his feet in the photo, I took this last night:


Oscar comes from a Jean Greenhowe toy octopus pattern. It's designed to be a football mascot (with socks, scarf and hat in your team's colours) but has modifications for making it into a plain toy. I decided to make him in the colours of Mr Click's temperature scarf.

I even went so far as to adapt his scarf into a little mini temperature scarf (hence the blocks of colour with the black dividers, just like on Mr Click's). I couldn't calculate just how long I needed each colour block to be, so I started with dark blue and worked through them in the order that I used for the real temperature scarf. Once I got to the dark red I worked back the way this time to purple and then repeated it in reverse again. It still seemed a little bit too short, but since it's garter stitch it's very stretchy, and after a couple of little stretches it was the perfect length.

Obviously at ten stitches wide it was too small to put any lettering on like onto the original temperature scarf, so I used my 'Paintbox' yarn to make the fringes. Funnily enough I'd wanted to use this yarn to make a fringe on the real scarf but Mr Click wasn't keen, so I'm glad I've got to make a fringe out of it now.

One thing I'm really impressed about is how he stands up on his own. Most of the photos of finished ones on Ravelry have him lying down, so it came as quite the surprise to me when I plonked him down on the bed as I pinned all his legs on and found that he didn't fall over. He's basically a tripod with an extra five legs! He'll stand on virtually any surface.

In the pictures in the pattern the legs are right the way round his head/body, but mine didn't work out like that. I think I seamed them a little too tightly in a couple of places, so I centred them along his back seam, four on each side. There's a row of purl stitches which is used to mark where the legs should be attached and as there's a gap between his two foremost legs you can see it. The scarf helps to cover it up. In future if I was to do this (if I ever mention doing it again somebody stop me, eight is a lot of legs!) I'd probably not do the purl row as a marker, I'd just stick a bunch of thread markers every so many stitches on that row so I wouldn't have to worry about that happening again.

And as for his name. There's something funny about knitting toys. It doesn't happen with hats and scarves and socks, they might feel special but they don't develop characters in the same way. When I embroidered on his eyes and mouth onto the egg shaped head/body, suddenly he needed a name. Both Mr Click and I were thinking Oscar.

So I kept on calling him Oscar Octopus while I was knitting his half a gazillion, uh, I mean eight, legs. But once they were attached he didn't look quite so Oscarish anymore. And with the scarf he looked more like an Oswald. So he's become Oscar Oswald Octopus, which suits him much better than just Oscar or Oswald on its own.

Yeah, it's weird, but that's just the kind of knitter I am!

Weekly Rundown

I've spent a good chunk of time this week working hard to get all caught up on my OU coursework. I thought that my next assignment was due on the 20th of February, giving me an extra week to get things done, and then looked stuff up online and realised I was a week behind myself. I know that there's always the option to get an extension, but I don't really need one. I'll get it all done, especially as pretty much all I have left to do is reading anyway.

I've spent the last week reading Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. It's seemed to take me forever to get through it. Although the book is 400 pages long, it's not actually that long because the text is quite big and there are some full page illustrations, for some reason I just haven't seemed to be able to read it very quickly.

In the end on Friday I decided that I wanted it done by the following day and read about fifty pages, then ploughed through the rest first thing the following morning, whilst watching the Back to the Future films, relaxing in the bath, and in bed last thing.

As soon as I finished I picked up Tom's Midnight Garden which I've read a lot more recently and I'm already over 50 pages through it. Again it's fairly large print with some big pictures are the beginnings of chapters, but it's only 200 pages long so I'm anticipating getting through it well before the end of the week.

This week we finally reached the end of Friends. It's not taken us that long to watch the whole series. A few weeks ago we started watching them four episodes at the time and as each series consists of three double-sided discs we've pretty much been able to watch one series a week. I'll do a bigger post on that later in the week. Tomorrow we'll start watching The Good Life, which I got for my birthday last year.

I mentioned earlier in the weeks that I'd got a clean bill of health at my eyeball freckle appointment. I'm inclined to be a bit of a baby about my eyes so Mr Click promised me a trip to the craft shop at Cardwell Garden Centre if I behaved myself.

I did, so I was treated to some lovely variegated yarn. It's King Cole so proper branded stuff as well. On the ferry on the way home I cast on for a hexipuff:


It's really pretty yarn, lime green plied with a multi-coloured strand. I have decided that as nice as it looks in a hexipuff, it really wants to be a dragon. The Cuddly Knitted Animals book that I won from Simply Knitting has a pattern for a dragon in it. It looks kind of complicated but I think it'll be really effective once it's finished.

And in the meantime I've been working on getting my octopus finished. This week I decided that I just had to get him finished and spent the last few days sewing on legs and weaving in scarf ends. Right now I'm just finishing off his hat.


I love the rainbow effect this stripe pattern has created. It fits him perfectly but I kind of want to scale it up and make one for myself. All that's left to do now is to take it off the needles, sew it up, and make a pom-pom to go on the top.

And then I need to settle 100% on what I'm going to knit next!

Clean Bill of Health

Last year I had to go to get my eyes looked at because at a routine eye appointment my optician found something a bit strange.



That's a freckle on the back of my eyeball.

I had to go get it checked out which involved horrible eye drops and a funky camera to photograph the thing so they can check if it's getting bigger.

Well on Wednesday I had to go for a check up. I'll admit, I put it off. I was in no hurry to get my pupils dilated and a flashy camera stuck in them, but I was a big brave girl and was promised a ball of yarn if I behaved, so I went.

And it was all fine. Absolutely no change. Just a reminder to keep going for regular optician appointments and the offer to go to Glasgow Caledonian University to get it photographed by a super-duper-inside-your-eyeball camera.

And I got a lovely ball of line green yarn with multicoloured strands plied through it. Definitely worth the stingy drops and flashy camera!