'It’s in colour,” is my opening salvo. I’m trying to convince the other half to watch a new film with me. New to us, anyway. It’s the 1959 Hammer production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes. “It’s supposed to be a good version.” My suggestion is met with a groan. OK, I possess three other film or TV adaptations of the story, plus the Radio 4 dramatisation with Clive Merrison, which I love and play endlessly. Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous – a bit of a role model – once insisted that “you can never have enough hats, bags and shoes”. I feel the same way about representations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Dartmoor mystery. Well, almost the same. There’s a new version that I’ve not seen, and never will. Steven Moffat’s regeneration of the Holmes stories, including the Hound, was met with adulation over Christmas, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch. I’m sure his screenplay is wonderful, and it’s great that new readers may find their way to ACD through Mr Moffat’s work, but I don’t want to watch it.

In fact, increasingly, I find I don’t want to watch, read or listen to anything that came into being after the late-Eighties/early Nineties. Partly this is age, isn’t it? Popular music ceased to make sense to me some time after Duran Duran. As my physical arteries sclerotise, slowly choking the flow of blood to my brain (life: a diminishing function of fluid dynamics), so my cultural ones have already closed through disuse. I distinctly remember queuing in the rain outside the Glasgow Film Theatre in 1990 to watch Gerard Depardieu’s Cyrano de Bergerac for the third time. Un Coeur en Hiver, The Double Life of Veronique, Jamón, jamón – foreign language films were a badge of honour. Even films theoretically in English – what on earth did you mean by A Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway? – were prioritised on the basis of how hard they were to follow. But now I read about people becoming addicted to Scandinavian crime dramas and know, without consideration, that there’s no chance I’ll ever settle down in the evening to watch a programme with subtitles.

Not when Amazon have just delivered Peter Cushing (again) in the 1957 “masterpiece” The Abominable Snowman. Reading remains the last faculty to have not entirely retro-fit itself; but even there, on the train in the mornings, I open the new Edmund White with a heavy heart, and struggle through the pages. target blackout curtains smellEvery sentence reminds me, like a sighing temptress, that I’d much rather be reading his Boy’s Own Story from 1982 again. toile de jouy fabric definitionOr rather, I want to be in my teens again, reading the book for the first time. target blackout curtains smellI want to be watching Basil Rathbone in his ridiculous disguise on the moor, and not know how the story will end; debenhams curtains eyelet

I’d give anything to be back in my parents’ porch that sunny afternoon after school, listening to the Jupiter symphony on a creaky old tape recorder, having no idea even that the piece was by Mozart, let alone what a companion it would become in life. When we talk about my mother-in-law, who had a bit of a health scare over Christmas, we use the language of shrinking horizons: we want her to keep active, to get back to the bingo, because the worst thing for an old person is to have their world shrink from a town, to a house, to a room, to a chair. patrick jaeger curtainsCulturally, I’m slumped in the chair already, staring vacantly at daytime telly. ready made curtains 140cm dropIt was, therefore, pleasing to read in the Telegraph this week about research which has found that going back to stories, films or music that you love isn’t (just) a sign of giving up on life. target botanical bird shower curtain

“Even though people are already familiar with… the stories, re-consuming brings new or renewed appreciation of both the object of consumption and their self,” says the report. I suppose that’s what those memories of youthful discovery are doing: they remind me of that young, innocent, curious man, who sometimes feels like a stranger. I watch Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce for the nth time and, like a bite of Proust’s madeleine (no, of course I haven’t read it, much too long), the fortysomething bloke – the one worn down by the commute, the office life, the hundred and one bits of stress that make up being an adult – dissolves, and at least for a time becomes again a person with the energy and desire to know what other people make of existence. Empathy, I suppose – it’s a muscle. Use it or lose it. The trick would be to use that renewal to strike out a bit more back in 2012. It’s too late for me to get into rap, I suspect, and I’ve no interest in the Scandinavian detectives, since P D James’s Dalgleish attends to complex puzzles while speaking beautiful English, but there’s always music.

A friend is sorting out tickets for the Proms this year. I’ll ask him to make sure we don’t only hear Mozart. So firstly, there's the birch tree wall that was so easy and worked out so well. You can find the tutorial for that here. He's got his little gallery wall, and you can read all about that here. And lastly, I have this lovely sign that my mother did for him (same as she did for Emilia here) and I can't decide what to do with it. I was thinking maybe attached to the front of the cot, it'd look like an old-fashioned circus cage! Here's a quick overview of how to install blinds and other window treatments. There will be variations depending on your specific product, but nearly all categories of window coverings follow these same basic steps. This is blinds installation at its most basic. Certain categories of products will have notable differences (such as shutters), and some will require additional parts. For more-detailed instructions on how to install blinds, shades, shutters, and/or draperies, please select the appropriate category below.