Stuff I Find Quite Interesting
Welcome to my SIFQI page! This is the part of the website where I let my hair down a bit. It’s where I talk about things I’ve recently read / watched / eaten / drunk / visited that I found quite interesting.
The categories are shown on the right and entries are grouped by month, from the most recent.
Hope you enjoy the page!
Drop me a line with your feedback and suggestions!
Credits: All category icons are from The Noun Project. “Books” icon by Hawraa Alsalman. “Films & TV” icon by Frey Wazza. “Food & Drink” icon by Tamiko Young. “Exhibitions” icon by Tithy. “Theatre” icon by bmijnlieff.
Books
Films & TV
Food & Drink
Exhibitions
Theatre
OCTOBER 2025
John Candy. I Like Me – 2025
John Candy. I Like Me was one of the best biographical documentaries I’ve watched for a while. All the right ingredients are there: it was well-made; the director let friends do most of the talking; it was emotional without straying into mawkishness; and the subject seemed to be a genuine good guy. For all these reasons, I think it will appeal to a wide audience. As a Brit, I only knew Candy as a comedy actor. I was oblivious to the outsized impact he’d made on popular culture in Canada: so great in fact that he was only the third person, after a president and a pope, that the city of Toronto honoured by GOOD TRY BUT THAT DOESN’T WORK! HEHE. No spoilers here!
Film page on Amazon Prime ↗ Official trailer on YouTubeube↗ Review on Rotten Tomatoes ↗ Review on IMDB ↗ Review on MetaCritic ↗
The Echo Chamber – John Boyne – 2021
The Echo Chamber is a hilarious novel that tackles one of the worst aspects of modern times: cancel culture. It’s the first book by John Boyne I’ve read and I plan to read many more. (In fact, I have a copy of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, his breakout novel, on my bookshelf that’s been gathering dust for way too long — it’s hard to carve out reading time sometimes!)
From the official blurb:
Powered by John Boyne’s characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satirical helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. To err is maybe to be human but to really foul things up you only need a phone.
Book page on the author’s website ↗ Review on Goodreads ↗ Buy it on bookshop.org (a UK-based online bookseller that supports local independent bookshops) ↗ Buy it on Amazon ↗
Pictograms: Iconic Japanese Designs
I’m a ‘word person’ first and foremost but I also take a keen interest in graphic design. Which is why I took myself to the free exhibition Pictograms: Iconic Japanese Designs in London. The exhibition room is small but dense with information. I’m sharing a few photos of the many pictograms that were on display.
Photo 1: The 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo were the first Games to use a coordinated system of sports pictograms for the various disciplines. The 20 icons shown were designed by Yamashita Yoshirō from the newly established Nippon Design Centre.
Photo 2: Behold the humble beginnings of emoji! These are a few of the 176 emojis launched in 1999 by NTT DOCOMO in Japan.
Photo 3: I took this photo of noodles but I forgot to take a photo of the legend to see who designed them and where they are used. I love it when food and pictograms are taken this seriously!
Photo 4: One of the winning designs in a competition for 7–16 year olds to design an original pictogram representing London. Just for the record: batterless fish does not constitute an acceptable variant of fish and chips! :-)
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SEPTEMBER 2025
Emily Explains the Swiss – Emily Engkent – 2024
If you’re planning a trip or a move to Switzerland or, like me, you enjoy learning about other cultures for the sake of it, I recommend this book by Canadian expat Emily Engkent. It’s laid out in alphabetical order with each entry covering a different aspect of Swiss life. The tone is light and humorous, with topics such as the tongue-in-cheek dialect Français fédéral and warring supermarket tribes Coopkind and Migroskind.
Review on Goodreads ↗ Buy it on Amazon ↗
And also…
As I mentioned above, I enjoy reading about other places and other cultures even if I’m not planning to travel there. Here’s another book I've read and highly recommend if you really want to get to know the Swiss: The Naked Swiss: A Nation Behind 10 Myths by Irish journalist Clare O’Dea. In contrast to Emily Explains the Swiss, the tone is much more serious here, covering topics in greater depth including weightier ones such as xenophobia and sexism. I found the chapter on direct democracy particularly interesting.
Abyssinia – Ethiopian restaurant
On a friend’s recommendation I went to the Ethiopian restaurant Abyssinia in Barcelona (Gràcia neighbourhood).
What a great tip! The food was exquisite! I can’t judge its authenticity but judging from the (Ethiopian) owner-chef’s pride and passion in her cooking, I’d say it’s probably as close as you can get to the real thing on a different continent!
The particularity of Ethiopian cuisine is that you use your hands. The way it works is this: you cut off a piece of the flat bread base, you fold it in half and then pinch the piece around a bit of food. It sounds awkward and messy but it was neither! There must be a real art to making sure every pile of food has just the right consistency.
