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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Congratulations to alexdecampi on the Eisner nomination.