No man, woman or fanged baboon steps in the same river twice. Why? Because the water’s not the same – as Seneca might have written had he too watched Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, then Gladiator II nearly a quarter of a century later, instead of living out his days in actual Ancient Rome 2,000 years before.

The water’s different. Don’t go catching the late show in your nearest cinema like I did if you expect to re-experience the winter-soldier thrill of army-on-tribe at the Battle of Vindobona. But do settle down with a bucket of popcorn if a summertime amphibious assault mounted by Roman galleys, worthy of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, lights your arrows.

A Gladiator sequel cannot cut it without memorable fights and the baboon encounter is as startling as anything in the original but a simple duel fought waist-high in an actual river may stay with you even longer after the credits have rolled, not least because of its cathartic symbolism compared with a very different scene on the River Styx.

Russell Crowe’s sword is in safe hands with Paul Mescal who only bows here to Denzel Washington as the gladiators’ master with his speech on the death of an emperor which is, well, positively head-turning. When Washington goes in one ear, he does not go out the other.

If there are flaws in the sequel, they may lie in a script unlikely to rest in the mind like Crowe’s great line, “Are you not entertained?” Anything else is probably covered by cinematic licence. The large audience watching with me in the cinema into the early hours of Sunday, most of them young and as diverse a crowd as you’d find, seemed happy to the end.

It’s good to know that in his eighties, Sir Ridley can still exhilarate and transport film-goers with a new film as he did, you imagine, back in the 1970s when he first put “strength and honour” on the screen with The Duellists.

My work attachment in Singapore is nearly over and already I can see myself missing this place when I get back to England.

For nearly four months I have been working BBC digital news night editor shifts, mostly international but quite often domestic too, while keeping more or less normal office hours – Singapore is seven hours ahead of the UK. The wee small hours of the morning in London are bright daylight over here and it’s a smart move by our managers to have someone on who, theoretically, is rested and fresh in a different time zone. Colleagues in the New Broadcasting House newsroom were amused to see me on the screen during planning meetings in short-sleeved shirts with blue sky in the office window behind me while chilly drizzle presumably comes down on Portland Place in the dark.

Finally, too, I’ve been able to meet all my Singapore Bureau colleagues properly and get to understand the work they do on our Asian and Business coverage.

I’ve spent my time off exploring the island, which could not be easier because of the public transport network.

While 04:00 starts don’t allow for much night life I’ve enjoyed the local culture and just being around such friendly people. You can read about my experiences here.

But I did do a lot of work including many days of overtime, which came up in a conversation with a local cabbie recently. “You’re working six days this week? So you’re half-Asian now.” We had a good laugh then.

Just back from an early walk out along the city’s Green Corridor, a former railway line. You can hear the birdsong on this time lapse I made just after dawn. The corridor passes several canals.

For railway buffs, some cute bridges have been preserved and also some stations like the one below.

This orange was given to me by the receptionist at the hotel into which I’ve just checked in Singapore. It’s a traditional gift for the Lunar New Year, which falls today.

On the cab ride in from the airport we passed people out celebrating under festive dragons.

I am here for a few months, in the same editor role I had back in London, but I also aim to record my impressions of Singapore in my spare time.

As the new year sets in I think again of making more active use of social media rather than just treating it as a news source, which my work as a journalist entails.

The problem is that I don’t quite know what to post let alone where.

For more than a year I have been working in the London newsroom solely as a digital news editor, specifically a night (GMT) editor, most of the time in World news, occasionally covering the UK (ooh that by-election result buzz). While I love the work (I offer the heavy parts up for my many sins) I have little to show for it. What is there to say, really, about keeping the news seam invisible? It is demanding, intense work that leaves no space for sharing on social media. My “sharing” in work hours is basically sending out BBC push notifications to the world and possibly the occasional breaking news tweet.

Outside work I still have the odd bit of content I want to share which mainly comes down to things that interest me on my travels, modest as they may be. In September I spent a week holidaying in eastern France and wrote, for instance, this private account of my trip over from England and experience of a street opera: My Saturday with the salamanders. But where do I share?

Twitter was my obvious medium of choice as a journalist but since it became X it is more birdcage than bird in my experience. For some reason the algorithm strangles my posts. I suspect it has nothing to do with lack of subscription and is probably down to factors like muting (I imagine I annoyed a few people back in 2022 by tweeting that the number one priority regarding the new war in Europe was to keep it contained because any direct fight between Nato and Russia would spell the end of all of us – that is still my personal conviction). In any case, my X account may as well be locked as open for all the circulation my posts get. I am ready to try other social media but lost interest when my attempt at a Threads account failed to get any traction.

My main issue with X is the algorithm which butchers the tweeting experience – don’t you love AI, people? Almost as bad, however, is the way the sewer which always ran just underneath – out of sight until, for instance, you searched for #Lesbos for a migration crisis story and came up with porn – now contaminates the stream. At one point I got to hate the churn of pub bore rubbish and snuff videos so much that I began deleting my timeline, not wanting to be associated with Zombie Twitter (I stopped at 2019, remembering there were published BBC stories linking to some of my tweets in the preceding years such as a Moment on election time in a French no-go zone).

My workaround for now is to post more on my actual blog, here on WordPress, and share links to Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully you won’t find anything resembling a political opinion and may actually like some of the stuff I write or film.