I wrote that 2024 was great personally, and less good globally. 2025 has been less totally amazing, personally – by no means a bad year, but it’s hard to top a honeymoon and a new kitchen – and has managed to feel worse, globally. But it’s not been without it’s bright spots.

I sort of made cooking a focus of my year, looking to generally improve. I can confidently say that I cooked over 100 dishes that I’d never cooked before. And yes, started fat-washing booze to make cocktails with fromt time to time. In February, I went on a blacksmithing course, and made a chef’s knife. It’s not going to replace the proper ones made by more skilled people that I actually use in the kitchen, but it was interesting to learn about the process. On the eating out front, well represented here, March, birthday month for Miranda and I both, saw us eating at one of London’s hottest spots, The Devonshire. It was excellent, if very crowded. (My actual pick for restaurant experience of the year is not recorded in these picks, a specific meal at Ibai.)

Saw a reasonable amount of theatre, represented here by the stage for Othello in November, and in fact, closed the year with the best thing I saw: Kenrex – a one-performer (plus live musical accompaniment) true crime show in rural Missouri in the seventies.

On the gaming front, May’s picture shows the heap of destroyed materials from out game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Legacy edition. Genuinely great fun – as has all the other gaming of the year – City of Mists, Root, Vaesen and others.

Been a bit short of holiday trips, other than Norn Irn as usual, but we did manage a lovely long weekend in York for a wedding.

I should also note that while I have no pics, Miranda started doing stand up this year, and made it to the final of a contest before she’d done ten shows. (Her tenth show was the final.). So looking ahead, if nothing else, it’s looking like a trip to Edinburgh is on the cards in August this coming year. Not the full festival, or anything mad like that, but a few days visiting so Miranda can perform in a showcase – something I’m incredibly proud of, and cannot wait to see her do more with this.

So that was 2025. While no-one ever really has an unmixed year, I hope you can look back on at least as many bright spots in yours as I can, and that we all can look forward to even more in 2026.

Well, the two really big things this year have their own posts – a honeymoon and a new kitchen. Both amazing. I started doing a one photo a month thing on Facebook last year, and have just put 12 photos on there, and I’ll stick them on the end of this post, too.

2024 was pretty great, all told. A year I’ll look back on with more or less unalloyed delight. Sadly, 2025 is looking less promising, personally and more globally. I’ve had some (minor, treatable, more-or-less to be expected) warning signs around blood pressure and cholesterol that mean diet and exercise need to be a bit of a focus for next year. Globally, well, Trump takes office again in January, and I expect that to render things broadly worse, and let’s be real: they’re pretty shit already on the broad view.

Still, we’ve a roof over our heads, and things to look forward to already in the diary, so it’s not all bad. I hope 2025 treats us all as well as possible.

(January: Wassailing. February: Matt Smith in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People at the theatre. March: Dopamine Land for Miranda’s birthday. April: New Orleans. May: Disney World. June: QI Party. July: ???. August: Outdoor Shrimp Boil while the kitchen was re-done. September: Kitchen was finished. October: Visting the new Sorted Food studio. November: a proper Cajun food pop-up for our first anniversary. December: a particularly well mise-en-placed meal in the new kitchen.)

We went on Honeymoon. My first proper leave-the-country-for-an-extended-period holiday in about a decade. (I’m not a natural traveller.). We took ourselves off to New Orleans and Disney World for slightly over two weeks, and it was exactly what a Honeymoon is supposed to be – the holiday of a lifetime.

We picked two incredibly touristy places, but I don’t regard that as bad, in as much as an alternate definition of touristy might be said to be “incredibly good at turning money into fun”. Because they both are, in different ways.

In New Orleans, we ate amazing food, listened to jazz, toured cemeteries and bayous, visited museums, art galleries and churches, and yes, drank bad overpriced “hurricanes” on Bourbon Street, and generally experienced culture in all sorts of ways. At Disney we, well, we did Disney things. Rides, merchandise, shows, and meeting disney characters. A bit of me wishes I’d kept a diary, but I’ve got hundreds of photos, quite a lot of them of food, and it was all basically stunning.

Having had the “holiday of a lifetime”, we’ve naturally immediately started working out how we might afford to do it all again.

Someone please arrange for me to get one for Christmas. Or sooner.

One of Sun Ra’s business cards, and a mantra for life.

I believe I have mentioned this before, but just in case I have not: Antony Johnston has a frankly superb new book coming out, called The Coldest City.

If you enjoyed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Queen and Country, or The Sandbaggers, then you need to acquire this as soon as it comes out. A youtube trailer for the book is embedded below.

Go forth and buy it at once. All of you.

This one’s all the in the subject matter, not the photo, but it still makes me smile. It did the rounds a little bit on Tumblr, after I blogged it there the other day. Thought I’d share it here, too. Before you ask: no, I haven’t tried it. Which makes me a little sad.

This has made my morning 382% better. Absolutely superb editing.

Here’s a salutary little lesson for me. Snapped this on a whim the other day, ran it through the plastic bullets randomiser for 365 bullets, saw it on the iphone screen, filled it under “eh, it’ll do”, and got around to blogging it today. Thought no more of it – really hadn’t thought it was anything more than a just-about-acceptable shot – until a nice person on Tumblr reblogged it. And then I came to look at it on a decent sized screen, and realised that it was much better than it looked on the iphone screen, or at least, I liked it much more.

Seriously, folks, if you like this, click through to flickr and view it at the largest size you can.

I don’t usually do this, but today’s Diesel Sweeties is just very, very me…
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