The Crotchety Man blog is now two years old and, as you can see, the boy is beginning to find his voice. According to mumsnet.com, a two year old will be “behaving increasingly like adults do”. That site goes on to say, “About one in five children of this age has at least one tantrum a day”. (Why does that remind me of a certain Donald J. Trump?) Of more relevance, though, is the milestone listed on bounty.com that a two year old will be constructing sentences of three words or more. I hope you are ready for the quantum leap in literary prowess that this new ability will surely bring in 2017.

But, first, let’s look back on the posts of 2016.

To my shame I find that there were only two posts in the Band/Artist category last year: those on Bob Dylan and The Kinks. I had intended to make Simon and Garfunkel my band of the year for 1966 but writing about that duo proved too daunting a prospect and that item remains in the section of the calendar labelled “someday soon”. Appropriately, though, Sound of Silence did feature as a Track of the Week.

Partially making up for the dearth of band/artist posts I seem to have written 13 posts about albums in 2016: 12 were tagged Album of the Month and there was a bonus item on Kate Tempest’s live performance of her Let Them Eat Chaos album.

With the Track of the Week I hit the bull’s eye: 52 posts over the year covering a motley collection of songs and instrumentals.

I added two new categories this year: Gig (one post) and Playlist (also one post). There were also a few uncategorised posts including: an announcement of the dedicated Internet domain for the blog, a teaser for my most exciting discovery of the year (the Archipelago album by Hidden Orchestra) and last year’s summary of 2015 on Crotchety Man. That’s 72 posts all together, slightly down on the 76 for the year before.

Before I provide the summary tables I’d like to give a special mention to a few tracks and artists that were new to me. The following individual tracks stood out:

• All Flowers In Time (Bend Towards The Sun) by Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser
• Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez

Radiohead produced a terrific video for their Burn the Witch single.

And I particularly enjoyed being introduced to The Pineapple Thief (Magnolia, Fend For Yourself), Kate Tempest (Let Them Eat Chaos) and Hidden Orchestra (Archipelago).

Finally, the summary tables for 2016 can be found here as a PDF document (with all the links).