millionreasons

Until recently, I thought autistic people was either non-verbal, unable to lead normal lives or were weird, nerdy trainspotting men, and I believed ADHD was just something annoying children had. It was only when I started to read about neurodivergence that I spotted a lot of those traits in myself and others*. When I think about ADHD or autistic traits, it feels as if pretty much everyone I know is on the spectrum of one or the other of these neurodivergences and the normal people are those who live in the suburbs and do what everybody else does: watching Love Island, voting Tory, talking about getting a new kitchen put in. Ms Greta T said that her autism gave her the chutzpah to do her one woman skolstrejk**, to not care what people thought of her when she was Napoléon Dynamiteing outside of her school. Society changes (or vibes shift in modern vernacular) because people who aren't tied down by societal approval make it change (one example of vibe shift/societal change is (fourth wave) feminism. Back in 2007, Maggie Gyllenhaal said that she and her husband had "a traditional marriage", where he makes the decisions. This info is no longer on the internet, presumably because Mags had it wiped because there was a vibe shift to feminism and  the domestic goddess stuff no longer flew). Of course, we're all influenced by the society around us - even if we think we are independent-minded and impervious to trends - and sometimes it's important to move with society rather than against it as I pointed out to Brett from Suede and John Lydon (I'm pretty sure they will have read my post). But without the people who are prepared to stand out then what would change? As an example, it's now thought that Isaac Newton was autistic and you only have to google "musicians with ADHD" to find a list of creatives who are perhaps easily bored and want to create something new.

* I definitely have bluntness, unwillingness to leave comfort zone, obsessive interests, anxiety, love of lists, over-sensitivity to sensory stimulants, meltdowns when things go wrong, resistance to hints etc.

** As an aside, I wonder if a whole country could have ADHD or autistic tendencies. Some of the stereotypical characteristics of a nation often have some truth in them: Germans being direct and unemotional, the Spanish never being on time and disorganised. Given that neurodivergence is hereditary and given that when nations were being formed, people didn't move around as much as they do now, is it possible that people have bred autistics and ADHDers?

My general theory of everything is that there's no general theory of everything. In the olden times, the sun came out and people thought it was God shining his light on them and thus it was important to smite the unbelievers. Later on, people espoused political beliefs that everything that was happening could be explained by the capitalist system. Feminism states that the world is how it is because men are in charge and a femocracy would be different. However, socio-politics doesn't take psychology into account (you can be very privileged financially but not emotionally stable) just as hardcore Freudian beliefs don't admit that someone on the bottom rung of the ladder might be depressed by their economic status rather than that their father didn't love them enough. Both the state of the world and people's personalities are a mixture of things. As an example, when Raoul Moat went on his rampage in 2010, Jane Moore from The Sun said it was toxic male behaviour, the fault of the patriarchy. Ken Livingstone was on the same TV programme saying it was because of lack of manufacturing jobs in the North-east. I guess a die-hard misogynist would have said it was the fault of his partner for leaving him. When anything happens, it just proves our ingrained thoughts, but it's usually more complicated than that.

There are various theories of personality. At the daftest end of the scale there are horoscopes, but I don't really think that when you were born has more effect on you than your genetic inheritance or socio-economic status. There are other theories of personality such as the Colour Theory or Reich Theory or Myers Briggs which are all much the same (I am Blue, Poet-warrior, INFJ for reference) and I find these theories useful for explaining people. My mother is overbearing because she is a Superwoman, or a Red, or an ENTJ and knowing (or at least intuiting) these things makes me less inclined to bop her over the head with a blunt instrument.

As another example, I used to think my partner wasn't listening to me because of sexism, not that he is particularly sexist himself but the way men are trained by a sexist society to listen to other men and not women. I've realised now it's because he has a touch of ADHD. I thought I was blunt because I am from the north and that's just how we talk but now think I am somewhere on the autistic spectrum, if fairly functional and able to deal with normal life about 85% of the time. I am aware that I'm throwing these terms around quite casually without anything like a medical diagnosis but I think it is possible to see these things in people because autism and ADHD have specific attributes.

But neurodivergence can't explain everything. My life would've been different if I'd been born into either an arty, champagne-socialist kind of place rather than Doncaster, or on the other hand if both my parents had lost their public sector jobs in the Thatcherite '80s*** and we'd been reliant on the state.

*** As it is, my mother had a difficult time getting a job after she returned to work after an elongated maternity break, so whilst we had the trappings and aspirations of a middle class existence - Barrett home, two cars, lots of books, not allowed to watch ITV - we didn't have the money for it, at least until my mother retrained as a special needs teacher when I was a teenager. On top of this, I lived in a middle class part of working class Doncaster. I am obviously obsessed with class.

So, in conclusion: theories of everything don't explain everything, both sociology and psychology are important, and don't get mad at me if I appear to be rude, it's just I process communication literally and not intuitively, ok?

I joined Goodreads.com in 2011 in order to add books that I wanted to read so that I didn't forget them and to catalogue books I had already read so that I didn't read them twice (half way through Other Voices, Other Rooms, I realised that I'd already read it). I got a bit over-enthusiastic and added a lot - a lot - of books, which is why I spent five months in 2024 reading a an academic text about wells in England and Ireland.

During the pandemic, not being a big fan of either banana bread or Joe Wicks, I started to add every book I'd ever read (Enid Blyton excepted). For several books, I could remember the general plot or details but not the title, so I did a lot of internet-based reseach. Some of this was successful: I googled "American female writer travelogue India" and got Holy Cow by the actual Australian writer Sarah Macdonald, some less successful -  I still can't remember the title of a comedy book I read about a father taking his kids to France in the 1970s. I can remember the Tom Sharpe-esque cover of a cartoon family with the cartoon man saying: "What to do when you’re a leg man but your wife starts wearing bell-bottoms?!", but nothing else. ChatGPT suggests it was by Alan Coren, but this may just be based on the sexism.

Anyway, Goodreads has recently added a new feature called Did Not Finish. I thought this was a bit pointless as I usually complete a book, even Gravity's Rainbow, but when I came to think about it, there were a few I gave up on.

Here then are my DNFs.

Amsterdam - Ian McEwan. This was about people who had done very well out of Thatcherite economics but hated Thatcherism. I read the first page and really could not be bothered. I liked Ian McEwan when he's writing fucked up stories about men and women's relationships but when he started taking on society, I went off him.

The Painted Bird - Jerry Kozinski. I read the first chapter in which a woman is raped with a broken bottle and thought: I'm not going to enjoy this. I skipped through to the last chapter and it seemed to have got even worse. Tragedy-porn is not pour moi.

Little Men - Louisa May Alcott. Loved Little Women, quite liked Good Wives, but by the time LMA got onto the men, I'd lost interest.

For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway. Read the first page and was so bored, I abandoned. I also really hated To Have and Have Not, but loved The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. Perhaps it's when Hemingway is being all macho and war that I dislike him and when he's more touchy-feely, I warm to him. I also tried watching the film and gave up.

Free Fall - William Golding. I read the first page of this as part of my first year English Lit BA and managed to write an essay on it in the end of year exam. So I never bothered with the rest, although I liked both Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors.

Murder In the Cathedral - T.S. Elliot. Another first year English text that I was too busy to read.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabakov. I loved Lolita, despite everything. Tried to read this one afterwards, failed.

Underworld - Don Delillo. Again, read one book by him (White Noise) that I loved, tried another but couldn't get past the first chapter.

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan. Him again. I did not actually start this book, but having read an extract in The Guardian, I was put off by it as the heroine felt very "female character written by man." Also it was a comedy. Ian, no.

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson. The Boyf suggested I read this. I managed the first couple of pages but hard sci-fi is not my bag.

Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau. When i finished my studies, I was worried that after 4 years of constantly reading books, I'd just stop, so I got this (in English) and Bonjour Tristesse out of the library. Loved Bonjour, hated Enfants and so just returned it, unfinished.

Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason - Helen Fielding. I read the eponymous diary in one evening whilst staying at someone else's house and considered that it was alright as a Pride 'n' Prejudice rip-off. Started on this one and thought: there's no point to reading another one.

One Day - David Nicolls. I got this for free as part of World Book Night. Tried the first chapter, could see what was coming, didn't think it was worth the time. I did enjoy his divorcing couple on holiday novel, Us though.

Flowers In the Attic - V.C. Andrews. Every adolescent girl in the '70s and '80s started this novel for the rude bits. The dirty bits weren't that dirty and the rest was just ludicrous.

Five Things I Did In Ibiza (none of which was going to a foam party):



1. Stayed in Eivissa. It took me a few days to realise that Eivissa = Ibiza in Catalan; Ibiza Town to everybody else. We stayed by the harbour above a cocktail bar that was fortunately shut for the winter. It was nice to step outside and the first thing you see in the morning is the sea, at night we walked to the end of the jetty to the lighhouse, it flashing red to illuminate the fisher-boys below.

And then the second part of the week in a micro-apartment hewn into the walls of the old town (said to be mediaeval but the garrison was built in the 16th century, which makes it Tudorbethan at best), like staying in a cave, with the attendant damp. The apartment was not great but I enjoyed walking through the winding streets in the old town/dalt vila at night, the sodium glare on the tawny walls making everything feel slightly unreal, as if a 16th century solder could be around the next corner. It was also - unlike the similar quarter in Naples - vehicle free, so we could walk around unmolested by moped drivers.



2. Ate lots of food, some bad (a noodle place that just plonked some cabbage into my "Kichi ramen" and whose noodles were spaghetti) to the delicious miso cauliflower at a Mexican place, which was a Turkish/Mexican/Japanese flavour bomb. We also visited the same coffee shop near the bus-station several times that turned out to be accidentally vegetarian and where the manager started greeting us with "hola chicos" after a while.

3. Took a ferry to Formenterra, a cheaper but very much smaller island with only one town, which in common with Eivissa was mostly shut. We went day drinking wine tasting - I had a glass of Grenache/Garnatxa called Secret de Mar (purely for the name), which was a steal at €5 a glass and ate a pretty good lunch at a bistro where I availed myself of a cafe bonbon. Starbucks take note.



4. Visited some museums: the modern art, with its Ibza 59 exhibition, the Museu Puget that had old photos of pre-party town Ibiza, and Casa Broner, the modernist house of a Jewish artist who escaped Germany when Hitler came to power. We also went to the nunnery where we bought very cheap coca (cake) and orelletes (biscuits), so moins cher that David left the change as a tip. I told him that his €1,50 will fund lawyers for priests accused of choir boy crimes but he thought it'd go towards the nuns' easter eggs instead.



5. Took a day trip to San Antoni, the party place. There are no parties going on as a) it's daytime and b) it's March, which counts as winter as far as tourism is concened. The place feels like a rundown seaside town, closed shops, few people, lots of construction work going on. I thought it might be Benidom-y with gangs of roving lads, but there are very few ingles around or even about. But it hardly seems the place where a whole dance culture was born. Even the Cafe Del Mar is having work done so you can't go in, and there is no sun to set, as it's permanently behind thick grey clouds.

We get the bus back around school kicking-out time but the kids are less noisy than the OAPs yapping away on their mobiles with the phone's speaker turned on. Some of them are doing their homework or even reading. A book! In 2026!

As it's International Women's Day, I thought I'd write about some local* women, with a little bit of help from Wikipedia.

Anna Kingsford. Born in Maryland in 1846, she was one of the first women to take a medical degree. She was an anti-vivisectionist and campaigned against the treatment of animals in studying medicine and in post-graduate medical experiments and drug trials. She died, as a lot of Victorian ladies seemed to do, after being caught in the rain and developing pneumonia, although she's probably the only Victorian lady to have done so whilst on her way to visit Louis Pasteur. I guess she wouldn't have taken any drugs for her illness that had been tested on animals.

Hannah Dads. The first female tube driver in 1978. Given that TfL is a very inclusive, diverse organisation, it seems shocking that it took the Sex Equality Act of 1975 for the ban on female train drivers to be lifted. What did they think would happen - the tunnels would ruin their wombs?.Dads was born in Forest Gate, although worked at Upton Park and drove trains on the district line.



Shirley Ann Field. Born Forest Gate, 1936. Part of the new wave of British cinema in the early '60s, she starred in The Entertainer, Beat Girl, and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. I can remember her in My Beautiful Launderette as the lover of Hassan, the owner of the launderette. She only died a couple of years ago, aged 87.

Maureen Duffy. She was born in Worthing in 1933, but moved to Stratford after the war. She is une femme de lettres, becoming a poet, novelist, TV writer, and playwright. She came out in the 1960s, and was the first British woman in the public eye to be open about her same-sex love life. She was also the first president of the Gay Humanist Society. She's another vegetarian and animal rights campaigner, and is still alive! (aged 92).



Mary Renault. Born in Forest Gate at Dacre Lodge, near West Ham Park (the building is now a council office). She went to boarding school and then Oxford and became a classicist, writing about ancient Greece. She also wrote novels, many of which had a (male) gay theme. She lived with a woman (Julie Mullard) she met whilst working as a nurse, and continued working in a hospital until she could afford to live by her writing. At which point she and Julie went to South Africa as they felt their sexuality was less of an issue there. She died in 1983.

Nina Layard. Another classicist, although born earlier than Mary, in 1853 in Stratford. She was one of the first women to be admitted to be a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She directed archaeological digs, the first in 1898. There's a road named after her in the Olympic park (between Westfield and the London stadium). She lived with her girlfriend, Mary, in Essex, then Suffolk, and they died together too in the same year (1935) and are buried in the same grave.



Edith Thompson was born in Dalston in 1893, but married in Manor Park and then lived in Ilford with her husband. She began an affair with her 18 year old lodger, Frederick Bywater, who ended up murdering her husband Percy, but Edith was also tried, found guilty and executed for the crime although Bywater acted alone. Her story was fictionalised in A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse, who moved the action to West London, and in the 1973 BBC TV series of the same name. Almost a hundred years after her death, her remains were exhumed and moved to City of London Cemetery, Manor Park, where she is interred with the body of her mother, who died 25 years after her daughter.

Jane Rebecca Yorke. She was a medium from Forest Gate and the last woman to be convicted under the Witchcraft Act (1735) in 1944 due to her morale-lowering activities during the war years (she wasn't a very good medium: she claimed the war would end in October 1944). She wasn't imprisoned but instead fined £5 (£194 in today's money) and bound over to keep the peace (i.e. no more seances). The act was repealed in 1951.

Elizabeth Fry. Probably the most famous person on the list. She was part of the Gurney family, who owned a lot of Forest Gate until their bank went bust and they started selling off parcels of land for housing and the many cemeteries in the area. She lived for a while in East Ham and then Portway, now part of West Ham Park. Gurney road is named after them, as well as Norwich road and Earlham Grove (their family seat in Norfolk) in Forest Gate. Anyway, she's most well known as Quaker, prison reformer, £5 note model, and all round good egg. You probably learned about her in school.



Marlene Siddaway. She was born in North Yorkshire but moved to Newham in 1983 when she was in her 40s. She is an actress, playing the wheelchair-bound and mostly silent Maureen in Mum, Curly's girlfriend's mother in Coronation St, the housekeeper in 1995's Pride and Prejudice, various dead people in Midsomer Murders and many more. I briefly got to know her when we both attended the same Pilates class in Forest Gate. She was very charming and not at all actressy: when she said she "did acting", I thought she meant in the same way my mother does (am-dram) until someone came in to class one day and said: "I saw you being murdered last night, Marlene!" and then I did a little research on her. What she didn't say is that her partner fought in the Spanish civil war and she was President of the International Brigades Memorial Trust. I don't attend the Pilates class any more as it closed during lockdown and haven't seen Marlene in the 'hood, but she's still going at the age of 89 and still working (her latest appearance was in Doctors).

* local to me, that is.

Recently, two popstars of yesteryear made comments on society that were somewhat enervating. The first was Brett "Bert" Anderson, saying that he thought society was becoming over-medicalised and doctors were diagnosing everyone with a personality disorder and then drugging them up to the eyeballs. He didn't accept the interviewer's point that he had medicalised himself with heroin and crack in the '90s and it felt very much like "we didn't have personality disorders/autism/ADHD/the menopause/Covid in our day". The millennials may spend all their time banging on about their mental health but isn't this in the end, a good thing? To analyse, accept oneself rather than being one of those people who are barely holding it together, then going out and get wrecked and ending up a crying mess in the niteclub toilets? That's how life was when I was young (NB I wasn't always the one drunkenly sobbing in the ladies' loos). Surely it's belter to be on fluoxetine than heroin? Addicted to Ritalin rather than cigarettes and alcohol? I think the openness about mental health and neurodivergence is a good thing - if we can all understand each other better, there will be less crying in nightclubs and more empathy. There has been, in millennial terms, a vibe shift to looking after one's mental health, rather than saying "Oh, I'm so fucked up."

People who consider themselves counter-cultural, rather than a decrepit pursed-lip person sitting in their Shackleton high seat chair complaining about the youth of today, don't seem to realise that they too are old, that they too are saying "youngsters don't know they're born". And people who were left wing and have seen their ideas become mainstream still want to feel rebellious, be outside of the norm, so they start to go the other way and slag off the establishment, which is now more liberal than when they were young. Graham Linehan is an extreme example, but he doesn't seem to realise that what he's now saying about trans people (I'm not going to reproduce it here) is what unpleasant people said about gay people in the '80s, and I think he'd have been anti-homophobic in the 1980s - he was a feminist liberal before he decided to pivot to terfdom.



The other person was John Lydon, who's gone from épater l'établissment to being the establishment. A tale as old as time, but he recently said at a talk that there were no rapes or thefts in his community growing up; that all the immigrants at the time were ‘legal’. Lydon is from an immigrant (Irish) background and would have been on the tail end of the "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" time. But everything was just dandy when he was growing up. Everyone looked out for each other and no-one locked their doors.

Mr Rotten is hardly alone in having the view that everything was better when they were coming of age, indeed it seems a universal thing. My parents claim the 60s were the best decade for music*, which is coincidentally when they were teenagers/young adults but there's a more dangerous part of this thinking. I have argued with a Brexit-voting friend who said that there's too much immigration nowadays. I pointed out that people have been saying this since the early 1900s, but he feels the right amount of immigration was in the '70s, which is coincidentally when he was a teenager/young adult.

* This is obviously wrong as the best decade for music was the 1980s.

When they get to their 50s, a majority of people think that people, politics, life in general was better in the decade when they were 18-24. It doesn't even have to be that your best years are behind you, you haven't succeeded in your career, you've got divorced and you feel bitter. You can feel absolutely fine about your life, but there is something genetic or [insert science stuff] about it, that when you get to middle age, young people seem awful, their music is just noise, they have no attention span (which people have been saying since the novel was invented in the 18th century) and so forth. I mean, I hate young people with their skibidi and their mullets and their obsession with the fairly mediocre Taylor Swift, but we in turn were disliked by the olds for our grungy jeans and our scruffy hair and our obsession with (what the boomers perceived as the mediocre) Morrissey/Robert Smith/Kurt Cobain etc. I wonder too if an accelerated culture has increased nostalgia and so that we feel like we're living all ages all at once? When we can still see the bands we saw in our youth, listen to any song on Spotify, watch forgotten kids' TV programmes on youtube, it's all there.

I'm sure the millennials will be looking down on Gen A very soon. But maybe their interest in mental health and self-awareness will stop them. Doubtful, but maybe.

The book I am currently reading Anna Karenin, although I am taking a book break half way through.

The book that changed my life
Generation X by Douglas Coupland.

The book I wish I’d written
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

The book that had the greatest influence on me
The Bell Jar.

The book I think is most underrated
The Book of Clouds by Chloe Ardijis, a brilliant Berlin novel.

The book that changed my mind
Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway made me want to go see a bullfight, despite being an avid vegetarian (I haven't gone to see a bullfight, but I have been to Pamplona and walked the bull run).

The last book that made me cry
The End of The Story by Lydia Davis.

The last book that made me laugh
Herr Lehmann by Sven Regener. Specifically the chapter in which the protagonist speaks on the phone to his parents.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
See first question. I bought it about 30 years ago!

The book I give as a gift
It depends on the person, but Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a hit with davidnottingham.

My earliest reading memory
James and The Giant Peach was apparently the first book I read by myself (i.e. without parents reading to me) when I was about 6.

My comfort read
I've re-read A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble quite a few times.

What did you do in 2025 that you'd never done before?
Got married.
Did a day trip to France on the Eurostar (I've been for the day on a ferry, but not on the €*).
Had a PET scan (horrible as I couldn't eat for 6 hours beforehand and was faint, tearful and weak by the time it came to the scan. I would not survive a famine, despite my ample fat resources).

Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Since 2022, it's been to stay out of hospital.
My book resolutions were to get my TR list down to under 300 (it's currently 284) and to finish Rebecca West's overly long tome (1300 pages) about (the former) Yugoslavia as I'd already been reading it for 2 years.

Did anyone close to you give birth?
No.

Did anyone close to you die?
Yes, Sarah, in an awful and possibly avoidable way.

What countries did you visit?
Spain (Menorca)
Italy (Naples)
France (Lille)
Scotland (Aberdeen)



What would you like to have in 2026 that you lacked in 2025?
Energy. Motivation.

What date from 2025 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
23rd April (wedding).

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Keeping reasonably healthy.

What was your biggest failure?
Lack of exercise.

Did you suffer illness or injury?
I had a CT scan, an MRI scan and a PET scan for an elevated pancreatic tumour marker. They decided it wasn't anything. Hospitals/doctors are either: This need to be seen to now!, or: It's nothing, please leave now. Oh and a minor (local anaesthetic) surgery for a Bartholin's cyst.

What was the best thing you bought?
A new bed, meant to be bought in the January sales, in the end purchased on Black Friday.

Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
The stupid, flag-shagging, Reform-voting, ignoramus racists.

Where did most of your money go?
Food.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Seeing the first day of the Tour de France in Lille. Geraint Thomas cycled up and parked right next to us.

Seeing David Sedaris as part of a Radio 4 recording. Foolishly, I forgot to take books for him to sign.
Getting tickets for the launch of the new Black Mirror series at Bloomsbury Curzon and sitting three feet away from Charlie B.

What song(s) will always remind you of 2025?

See other post.

Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) Happier or sadder?
A bit of both.

b) Bigger or smaller?
Fatter. I don't weigh myself but I've probably busted the 12 stone marker now.

c) Richer or poorer?
Richer as I took on a side job, which I mostly hate, but the £400 extra hits my bank account at the time of the month when I used to be panicking about having £30 until payday.

What do you wish you'd done more of?
Exercise. Same answer every year.

What do you wish you'd done less of?
Traipsing to Newham, Royal London and Barts hospitals

How did you spend Christmas?
Chez nous.


Did you fall in love in 2025?
Nope.

How many one-night stands?
Nope.

What was your favourite TV program(me)?
Peacemaker
also enjoyed:
Gen V - going to University in the age of Trump
Mythic Quest - It's Always Sunny in a Gaming Company.
Pluribus - grumpy gal has to cope with invasion by happy aliens who only want to make her life better.


Black Mirror S7 - particularly Eulogy.
The Beast in Me - Clare Danes on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Dark Winds - like a cross between Fargo and Reservation Dogs.
The Residence - a White House murder mystery.
and on the BBC:
Film Club
Amandaland
Riot Women - with the caveat that I would rather have watched a programme just about women forming a band rather than one featuring misogyny, child abuse, domestic violence, misogynistic violence, ungrateful children and police corruption.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
About the same.

What was the best book you read?
King of A Rainy Country - Brigid Brophy. It's about a young woman in the 1950s who moves in with a young man in a platonic way. They start stalking a girl the protaganist knew at school who has posed for pornographic pictures and has nonetheless become a mainstream actress. She's appearing at the Venice film festival so they take jobs as tour guides in Italy for some Americans (the funniest part of the book) and track her down. It's very funny and stylish and a bit sad.
More books here.

What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Pill, Arxx, Nation of Language.

What did you want and get?
To get married. Not the ceremony, not the party, not the forever after bit, just to get the fucking thing done so I didn't have to think about it any more. I enjoyed both the ceremony and the do a few weeks later, but the stress of it all means I can never get divorced.

What did you want and didn´t get?
Holiday to Turkey.

What was your favourite film of this year?
Materialists

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?..
52. Went to Sorento on a rickety-rolly old train.

What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Trump's death. Labour party being an actual left wing party. Racist wankers not being racist wankers.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2025?
Comfortable.

What kept you sane?
The Boyf and the cat.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Quite keen on Sepp "Seppy" Kuss.

What political issue stirred you the most?
The racist wankers (is it going to be every Summer now?). NYC Mayoral election.

Who did you miss?
People far away.

Who was the best new person you met?
Sheila and Tim of St Leonard's.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2025:
It doesn't matter if you like things aged 52 (shopping at M&S, going to bed before 10 p.m., valuing comfort over excitement) that the 22 year old you would've despised.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Keep on Keeping on.

Did you wrong or hurt somebody in 2025?
Oh, probably.

Is there some new place you are planning to visit in 2026?
Santiago de Compostelo, Istanbul (not Constantinople).

Where would you have wanted to go and did not in 2025?
See above

Did you learn any new life skill in 2025?
I started doing two days in the office, so the skill is looking like I'm working when I'm not.

Any new food or drink preferences developed in 2025?
I tried Columbian coffee, which is espresso with cloves and lemon slices.

What is your greatest fear for 2026?
That Farage gets even more of a toehold in political life.

Did you follow any sports event in 2025?
Tour de France, Vuelta de Espana, Giro d'Italia.

Which social media occupied most of your time in 2025?
Instagram. I don't follow any cat accounts or cycling accounts, yet all I get is cat videos and cycling videos, which I then scroll through forever.

Is there somebody you feel particularly grateful to this year?
davidnottingham for making me an honest woman (hahahaha).

Name a hope you have for 2026
World peace. Lol.

As usual, the first few songs are bands I saw at Rockaway Beach in Bognor, the festival that basically carries on New Year's celebrations for a few more days.

The Pill - Woman Driver. Often I find that bands that play Rockaway are 6Music-famous by the end of the year, Self Esteem, Fat Dog, Fontaines DC. Ditto this band who've been on permanent play on the indier of the 6M shows. This song is a lot of sarcastic fun.

Arxx - Crying In The Car Wash. Fun fact, Brighton's Arxx wrote the songs for the BBC's Riot Women. This one is electro clashing with indie with a bit of a Robyn vibe.

Fontaines DC - It's Amazing To Be Young. In which Grian sings. Not necessarily successfully but let's give points for effort. I like the jangletastic semi-shoegaze of the backing. Can't really empathise with the sentiment, obvs, although "sometimes I wake up and it's dark" rings some bells.



Wet Leg - Catch These Fists. They're back! with a second album! We went to the launch event where we didn't get to meet the band (and anyway, we already met Josh (keyboards, guitar) outside Purezza in Brighton back in 2021) but did meet the Goblin on the album cover. Anyway, Catch These Fists is Rhian being a fighter not a lover as some loser tries to chat her up, with a bit of Franz Ferdinand's Do You Want To thrown in.

Pulp - Spike Island. They're back! It seemed obvious after their triumphant return to live gigs in '24 that they'd want a bit more Arabacus Pulpy action. I had thought they'd squeezed everything they could out of pop, but i surprised myself by humming this a lot back in April. I was wrestling with the coat-hanger, can you guess who won? is classique Jarv.

Chuck D - New Gens. He's back! Damn, he's weird. I loved this track, which I assumed was about Gen X loving the Zs. Makes a fucking change for an elder statesman to celebrate the younger generation. Rest in place and cowabunga.

D Meletis - Niamos. I got bored during the second series of Andor, but I liked the wedding episode which was basically the characters dancing to this song for 50 mins. We both liked it so much that we had it at our wedding (party), but not for 50 minutes straight.



Erika Vikman - Ich Komme. Erika was robbed. This saucy seaside postcard of a song should've beaten that Austrian simp.

Sissal - Hallucination. The second best sing at Euroviz.

Pulp - Got To Have Love. As above but more electro-gospely.

The Pill - Posh. More from the Isle of Wight's second best band. Proving that youngsters aren't all sitting at home drinking kombucha and talking about #fitnessgoals. "Red wine, red lips, sore tummy and a bag of chips. I've lost my drink!"

Wet Leg - CPR. Is it love or suicide? Rhian falls in love. I worry if she falls out of love there's going to be a car crash of a break up album.

Suede - Disintegrate. I heard this song on 6Music and was like, who is this? Then Brett's whine came in. Given that I spent much of the early '90s with a dislike of Suede that was only mollified when Oasis came on the scene, I was surprised that i liked it - probably because it's sounds like early '80s Cure.



CMAT - Take A Sexy Picture Of Me. We've had country, alt-country, folk-country, and now Welsh-country. This was pretty much Ciara's year and it's good that popstars can still come up through the OG gig economy rather than the Simon Cowell route.

Bater Dury - Schadenfruede. Like the Suede song, I heard this on the radio and was all kindsa excited until I Baxter's nasal drone kicked in, but i ended up really liking it, despite the mispronunciation of schadenfreude. After all, It's my favourite emotion, I know how to pronounce it.



Wig Wam - Do You Wanna Taste It? I wrote last year that once upon a time I got to know music from adverts, now it's theme tunes frm TV programmes. This was the theme tune from S1 of Peacemaker, my fave TV show of the year. I don't usually like '80s themed hair metal but combined with the awkward dancing form the cast, it was a grower.

Foxy Shazam - Oh Lord. I didn't think the theme tune to S2 could be better but I ended up with a permanent earworm. Keep on. Keeping on!

Coach Party - Disco Dream. Pretty much like The Pill: loud guitars, shouty vocals, like being 21 again. Another from the Isle of Wight - Wet Leg has started a Solent revolution! The music. The dancefloor. The lights.

Humour - Plagiarist. Like the 2000s never happened, I like the way it goes from 1991 style industrial hardcore to indie-melodic grunge.

Nation of Language - The Wall and I. picosgemeos and I saw these in November and given that I only knew one song (2017's Fractured Mind), I really loved them. They came off somewhere between The Postal Service and OMD, but unlike '80s electro bands they were active, not static behind synths and were very entertaining with some Napoleon Dynamite-esque boogieing. Also we had seats, which always helps.

Adrien Noelle, Nancy Wang - Sharevari. They also played this, which is a cover of the first techno song by A Number of Names from 1981. I prefer the cover.

Sleaford Mods & Big Special - The Good life. The Sleaford Mods mad-person-on-the-bus ranting broken up by the soulful crooning of Big Special.

Just Mustard - Endless Deathless. Let's finish the year with something that sounds like the Nightblooms why don't we?

The Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7rjWB3CLBP9280WDhH159b?si=ZPUEp87XS6Gvr1ACjGvJnw

Riding on city buses for a hobby is sad

We fly to Glasgow from City airport, where our fellow travellers are sensible looking German families rather than hen parties. It's 24°C in London, yet, as when we went to Norway last November, we are dressed for colder climes. After an hour, we touch down at GLA; after another hour, we are still meandering through the streets of Paisley as the bus driver pootles along at 10 mph, waiting at each bus stop for 5 minutes. Top tip, never eschew the airport bus for the no. 77 - you will regret it, especially as we're then wandering the cold, rainy streets at 10 p.m and I'm vowing to never go on holiday again.

In a rain town, rain town, rain down

It's still raining but I cheer up when we find a brunch place, Spitfire, in Merchant City that we patronised the last time we were here in 2022. We have a moment of disorientation when we (or rather David) can remember where it is located, but google maps shows it on an entirely different street. Turns out, when we question the waiter, is that they moved round the corner when the rent went up. I always expect to find cities the same and of course, they change and then they change again. Anyway we have a Full Scottish and a vegan breakfast bun (veggie haggis, avocado, tattie scone, chilli sauce) and a decent coffee. I didn't sleep well as I kept hearing cars, voices, seagulls, and sirens and it's only when I woke up that I realised the window had been open all night in our hotel room and so my furious imaginary email about the cold room had to be deleted from my head.



We set off on the next leg of our trip, to Aberdeen from Queen St. I love the compactness of Glasgow, how you can walk to the station, get a bus to the west end, take the Clockwork Orange to Partick (should you wish to). Small cities are the best thing. Before 10 minutes have gone, we're in the countryside, swollen green hills and smoky skies, Monet haystacks in the rolling blond fields. The train is quiet apart from the noise of it, they seem to have bought EMR's old diesel rolling stock and it's so old that there are paper reservations rather than electronic ones. It's great, though, to have a unified transport system (ScotRail), with one app for buying and holding tickets, checking disruption, claiming refunds. The train is on time and then we're in an even smaller city, one of silver streets, awe-inspiring buildings and vegetarian brunch places. We walk out through the docks and industrial estates to the Footdees, (or Fitties) in a rupture of sunshine, to where fisherfolk cottages have been colonised by artists and artisans. We only have 10 mins to look around as another burst of rain is a-coming in and we have to race back to the city to take shelter in the Fierce brewery, where a Saturday afternoon crowd is soberly drinking. Everywhere feels quiet: on the train, there's a low hum of conversation, in the pubs no-one is shouting or peacocking, people are friendly, but not all up in your face. There is very little homelessness and we only see one over flowing bin - it feels as if they used the oil money wisely. This is my kinda place and I could live here if it wasn't for October to March.



It's a sunny Sunday so we walk out through the docks again, across the river (Dee or Don that gives Aberdeen (Obar Dheathain) its name) to Torry, which is definitely the wrong side of the tracks, to the Battery, an old fort, now a sort of tourist attraction, with a cafe selling buttery (a kind of salty biscuity-scone) and empire biscuits (basically an iced jammy dodger), and seals bobbing in the harbour.

Sunday evening is surprisingly lively with Smoke and Soul tap room, where I teach Dave to play whist and, despite complaining about the game's difficulty (Me: "It's only got three rules! I could play it when i was 8!"), he promptly beats me, and a Turkish restaurant in a sort of 1980s outdoor shopping centre with free hummus.



Monday is back to rain so we visit the three museums in Aberdeen, the Provost Skeyne's house, a 16th century dwelling now dedicated to famous Aberdonians, the art gallery, and the maritime museum, which is part modern building and part in the Provost Ross's olde house (nice of him to donate it), all of them free. It feels like Scotland never gave up on municipal socialism.

Back in Glasgow (and more rain) we have our dinner in the delightful Stereo in the Blythswood district, which does indie music and hearty vegan food (haggis balls, mash, sauce; mushroom steak, mash, broccoli). Autumn is here already.



The sun comes out for our final day so we do a three mile river walk along the Clyde, where Dave once swam on New Year's Day (good for a hangover cure, apparently), past BBC Scotland and the Hydro arena, where I imagine Lewis Capaldi has a residency, to the Riverside museum, a modern jag of a building next to an old ship on the river. There are the usual olde buses and trams and history of the docks and whatnot, but what interests me is the replication of not only old grocery shops and apothecaries but an '80/'90s record shop with videos to watch from Scottish indie luminaries such as Teenage fanclub, The Bluebells, Orange Juice and His Latest Flame, one of whose members bears a passing resemblance to me. Given that I always claim to have Scottish roots (my maternal great-grandma was from Fife and Stevenson is a lowlands Scots name), it's possible that we're 8th cousins, or something.

My country, the home of the free, such miserable weather

We then cross the river (on the new! Govan-Partick bridge) to Govan, which I always thought was like the last stage of hell, where no-one eats a vegetable and all the children have rickets (possibly because of Rab C Nesbitt) but it's cute and old fashioned. We eat in a cafe where the prices are like before Liz Truss fucked the economy and made a frothy coffee cost £4 (£3.50 a soup, £8 a big salad) and they play The Sundays whilst a pink haired girl walks across the square opposite, through the pigeons, like she's in an '80s film about a disaffected teen. We take the metro back to the city centre, which is ridiculously cheap (one flat fare of £1.85), clean, quiet (no endless announcements, no seeitsayitsorted, no mind the gap) and swanky looking  - it has been refurbed since the last time we were here, although still doesn't run after 6 p.m on Sundays.

And then these wee Sassenachs go back down the road to south of the border.

A refutation of every town mentioned in the Guardian's Happiest Place to Live in Britain article.

1. Beriwck upon Tweed. Still at war with Russia. Dangerous.
2. Evesham. Where?
3. Caenafon. Wales. No.
4. Durham. Full of public school students going punting.
5. York. Full of boomers eating scones.
6. Padiham. Rain.
7. Devizes. Tories.
8. Lewes. Full of boomers going antiquing.
9. Newport. Too near Portsmouth.
10. Exeter. The most boring places I've ever visited and I've been to Peterborough.
11. Penzance. Not near anywhere else.
12. Chichester. See 7.
13. Cirencester. Full of boomers wearing wax jackets.
14. Aylesbury. Well, you might as well live in London.
15. Chesterfield. Come on! Be serious.
16. Shrewsbury. Only an hour from Birmingham. Nuff said.
17. Worcester. Once spent an afternoon there trying to find something to eat. Failed.
18. Perth. Cold.
19. Haddington Cold.
20. Aberystwyth. Probably the worst places I've been to in Wales and that includes Swansea.
21. Enfield. What??
22. Surbiton. Fuck off.
23. Clapham Junction. A railway station that got out of hand. Dapper Laughs.
24. Bounds Green. I have never met anyone who lives in Bounds Green.
25. Bromley. I'd rather kill myself.