Simone Reddington

Happy Easter everyone! The sun is shining, we’re enjoying a four day weekend and the clocks have gone forward so that we can spend more hours in daylight from next week. It seems a perfect time to look back at what I’ve been enjoying this past month.

1. Cowboy Carter- Like everyone else, I’ve been listening to Beyonce’s new album on repeat since she released it on Good Friday.  As one of the most culturally significant artists of the 21^st century, Beyonce has established her musical versatility throughout her 20 year solo career and with Cowboy Carter (act ii) she has now showed that she is also a country queen while paying tribute to the often forgotten black pioneers of the genre.  I don’t think there’s any bad tracks on it to be honest, but my favourites are Flamenco, Bodyguard and 16 Carriages.  

2. One Day- I’ve not yet watched the new Netflix adaption as I always prefer to read the book first, but David Nicholls’ 2010 novel has been on my TBR pile for a while and I started to read it a couple of weeks ago and was not able to put it down. The novel tells the story of two friends who sleep together on their graduation night in 1988 and how their lives and relationship with each other changes over the next 19 years. Nicholls is a master storyteller; both characters’ narratives feels so authentic and captures the spirit of Britain in the turn of the 21st century perfectly.

3. Celebrity Big Brother– A lot of my spare time this month was spent watching the revival of Celebrity Big Brother on ITV. In today’s abundance of reality TV and its celebrity spin-offs, I do think Big Brother still stays relevant as its essentially just watching human beings interact with each other from an outsiders’ lens which we, as as a species, will always find interesting. This short series (it was only on for just over a fortnight) started off strong with Sharon Osbourne’s showbiz exposes and Ekin-Su’s villainous fall-out but I must admit that I did start to get bored of it after the start of the second week.

4. Hot Cross Buns- When I was a child, I used to look forward to Easter because of the chocolate eggs but now I’ve grown up its all about the hot cross buns. And what a time to be alive, as the supermarkets now sell the classic Easter staple in a range of different flavours.