Hello!

Hi! Somehow at some point I convinced myself that doing a Big End Of Year List was something I did every December, and so I had to do one this year, but then I went to look back on what I published a year ago and it was, huh, pretty threadbare, all things considered.

This, then, I guess, is the inaugural Big End Of Year List. It is free to everyone because I love all my children equally. I hope you find something you like in there! It actually took me ages to compile it! Farewell.

Newsletters

Another good year for newsletter writer Marie Le Conte, in my opinion! I was at a party recently and people kept asking me what I wrote about and I had to basically go “errrr” and “hmmm” and maybe I’ll just send people this list if they start asking again. It’s a bit of everything! Fun for all the family!

an accidentally huge guide to Marrakech

Westminster? I barely knew ‘er!

why the elites love and fear the far right

11 things I hate about AI

A Pro-Human Manifesto

Young Vulgarian: the indie sleaze years

Oh and obviously I started European Dips, the (originally monthly but now “whenever I have both time and money”) feature where I go to a European capital for a few days and try to figure out what the vibe is like over there. The first two were so nice to work on! I absolutely want to do another one hopefully in January!

a despatch from Budapest

notes on a Scandisaster

Pieces

Honestly I didn’t pitch a whole lot this year? Mostly I stuck to the New World, because they’re nice to me and I like them. Of the work I did for the paper, I would say that my favourites were:

• this review of Giorgia Meloni’s mental autobiography

• this column on French politics

• this profile of Robert Jenrick

• this report from the NYC mayoral election/NJ gubernatorial race

Elsewhere, I also really enjoyed my Good Sport column for the Observer. If you missed the announcement at the time, the concept is both straightforward and very stupid. Once a month, I go watch a sport I know nothing about, by myself, without googling the rules first, and I have to essentially figure out what’s happening in real time, and also maybe chat to fans to ask them why they enjoy that sport.

I feel really lucky that I get to do it because truly: what a jammy way to make a living. If you would like to read the first eight columns, you can start with cricket then work your way across the year via the medium of my author page. You’ll also encounter a few other stray pieces I wrote for them, all of which were, in my objective opinion, also groovy.

Books

Once again I had a terrific time reading books this year! There were definitely a few lulls, and months when somehow I felt I’d never be able to find an enjoyable novel again, but mostly it was good. Started off well, and finished nicely. Won’t say a whole lot about each because you know. Life is short. Also: finished 45 of them! Best ever reading year, possibly in my entire life. Wahoo!

Imperium - Ryszard Kapuściński

Terrific literary non-fiction; basically inspired me to start European Dips. Enchantingly well-written.

Against Venice - Régis Debray

Unexpectedly very funny, also very short, especially enjoyable if you love Venice.

Appointment in Samarra - John O’Hara

Sort of didn’t think I would enjoy this when I started but also couldn’t stop reading? Very glad I finished it - was devouring it by the end.

Maud Martha - Gwendolyn Brooks

Glorious, glorious prose; not a single word wasted. You can really tell she was a poet. Says so much in so few pages!

The Queen’s Necklace - Antal Szerb

My man Antal! Non-fiction so readable, of such skill and so rich in incredible details, that it feels better than most novels out there. Adored it.

The Border - Erika Fatland

Longest book I read this year, at nearly 700 pages. Basically a political and historical travelogue written by quite a grumpy Norwegian woman. Terrific.

Out Of Sheer Rage - Geoff Dyer

Ah! So funny! So entertaining! So clever! A book that’s about something but actually about something else but no, really, it’s about the first thing after all. Unlike anything else I’ve read.

The Door - Magda Szabó

Honestly I have nothing to say? It’s such a remarkable piece of writing that it feels odd to place it alongside other, regular good novels. Will almost certainly stay with me forever. Remarkable remarkable remarkable.

French Exit - Patrick DeWitt

He’s probably my favourite contemporary author so I’ve been trying hard to ration his books, and I was so pleased that this lived up to expectations. Funny, dry, poetic and deliciously mean.

Honourable mention to Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, which goes in the category of “literary classics everyone knew were good but which for some reason took me an age to get to”. Can now confirm, though! It’s a classic for a reason.

Cinema

Honestly a real mixed bag this year! On the one hand I went to the cinema 21 times, the highest number of times since records began in 2022 but also probably the highest number in my whole life.

On the other: I just didn’t enjoy most of what I went to see! Some of it was just fine, some of it I actively despised, and all in all I was very rarely satisfied. What a shame, right? There’s always next year, I guess. I don’t feel daunted by this. If I keep trying I will Win At The Cinema.

A Real Pain

I mean Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg could have just read the phone book to each other for an hour and a half and I would have probably put that in my top 3 anyway. I just love them both so much. That they played mismatched cousins going on an emotionally charged trip to Europe together partially to figure out their relationship with each other and what adulthood and life has done to them? Sign me up! No-one has ever been more signed up to anything! Also man alive, that very last scene. Man alive.

Babygirl

Justice for Babygirl! I think a lot of people either just went ohhhhhh a movie about shagging or uuuuuuugh a movie about shagging but I just really enjoyed it. I thought it was sexy, sure, but also it was fun and occasionally funny and it had some interesting things to say about desire in general. It made me think Big Thoughts About Being Alive afterwards and obviously we love those. I wrote about it at the time and the piece mostly flopped which I think was a shame as, objectively, I thought it was pretty good, but well. You can’t have it all.

Dinner In America

What a funky little movie that is! Came out a few years ago to no attention at all, Prince Charles put it back on at some point in 2025 for some reason, and I went to see it because I had a spare afternoon. Left with a big stupid grin on my face. It’s a punk rock romcom! It’s very stupid and funny! I really enjoyed it!

Pillion

Now that’s just A Movie About Shagging. No “ooooh but actually maybe it’s about the things people want in their lives and how that influences what they want in the bedroom, blah blah blah” here, thank you so much. I loved it it! Neither actor is particularly attractive to me and leather doesn’t really do it for me either so it wasn’t a titillating film in any way, I just had a good time watching it. Reckon the last five or ten minutes really make it - made me mentally move it from “good” to “great”.

Now You See Me 3: Now You Don’t

Preemptively: fuck you I don’t care what you think. I love the Now You See Me franchise and there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re my emotional support Magicians Who Do Crimes. I’ve seen the first one like four times and even though the second one is appalling I’ve watched it twice, and do you know how happy it made me that the third one was actually a return to form? It made me so, so happy.

Honourable mentions, also, to Thunderbolts*, which was an entirely serviceable superhero movie, to Caught Stealing, which I would have enjoyed a lot more if it’d been 40% less violent, and to Wake Up Dead Man, which did its job by pleasantly distracting me for two and a half hours.

Video games

I mean this section feels a bit silly because I’ve mostly played acclaimed and quite famous or at least trendy games this year. I tried a bunch of other games but couldn’t get into any of them. “Ooooh, good things are good, aren’t they” is basically my angle here. Still, I guess I’ve started now? So I may as well keep going?

Balatro

Technically bought it in late December last year but that does mean that I mostly played it in 2025. I really respect how addictive it is. What if poker but with magic powers? What if numbers go big when you do things good? What if it never stopped? What if you lost your entire mind playing Balatro? What a perfect game.

Inscryption

Hmmm. Quite hard to write about Inscryption. It’s by some distance the weirdest game I’ve played this year, or indeed in general. It starts out as a roguelike deck-builder (this is so unsexy of me but I simply love a roguelike deck-builder) and then it becomes…hmmm. Inscryption will make you question your sanity but mostly in fun ways. A little bit creepy but even I, the world’s biggest scaredy cat, still enjoyed it.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

So interestingly I always liked but didn’t love Hollow Knight, and only really got stoked about Silksong coming out because everyone else was excited and I find enthusiasm incredibly contagious. In the end, though? I loved it! It was so tough and knowingly punishing but I did it, I finished Act II, and I had a really good time doing it. I just love Hornet, my small scary wife.

Hades II

I mean…do I have to? Do I have to explain why I loved it? I wrote so much about the first one. I wrote about the second one for this very newsletter literally earlier this month. I just love the Hades games. I love hanging out with my chthonic friends :)

That is all! Thanks for playing! See you next year!

Hi!

Hello! This is my last working day of 2025. My brain feels like it’s been kicked by a horse every hour of every day since roughly December 11. I don’t get paid holidays meaning that at the end of every year I have to work like a madman to be able to afford all this festive time off. Wahoo!

What this means in practice is that I’ve just not been reading all that much recently, or indeed doing anything worthy of mention in this introduction. I did, however, recently stumble upon this extremely charming etymology blog which I’ve been devouring whenever I’ve had a moment.

I’d recommend this piece on the origins of yes and no and this one on the origins of oui to get you started. I will now get packing as I am going to France tomorrow. See you next week!

A column

I had no idea what to expect when I quit nicotine six months ago. I started smoking at 13, and I was 33 when I stopped - would you know what to expect if you suddenly decided to quit drinking water? Some people have a handle on their addiction but I never did. When I was a teenager and I had no money I’d pick up half-finished cigarettes on the pavement and from ashtrays. I’d either smoke the stubs one by one or take all the non-charred tobacco and roll myself one harrowing little fag.

As an adult I vaped on flights and trains; in the office and in every toilet I could find. For a while, my cravings were at their worst when I was out and about and would go to the bathroom somewhere. I was so used to just sitting on the bowl, still clothed, vaping for a while. I was so entirely addicted to nicotine that it defined my life for two decades. It defined the rhythm of my days, and decided, for me, where I’d sit in restaurants, whether I’d leave the house, who I’d hang out with.

If there is such a thing as a “social smoker” then I was the precise opposite: I had a bond with nicotine that was stronger than basically anything else in my life. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit and it’s annoying when people tell you that you shouldn’t be embarrassed. “It’s been proven to be more addictive than even heroin!”, people say, hoping to comfort you, but it just doesn’t work. I still think there’s something quite gently mortifying and self-important about discussing “my addiction” when I wasn’t snorting, drinking or injecting anything. It never threatened my life or livelihood even a little bit! At its worst, it nearly got me kicked out of the audience of a comedy club. It is what it is.

At some point in June - I can’t remember when, purposely didn’t mark the date, didn’t want it to feel special in case I failed - I woke up and took a hit of my vape and I realised I was ready. I threw it under my bed, where it stayed for a week, as a “break glass in case of emergency” sort of measure, but I just didn’t consume any nicotine after that last morning puff.

It’s now December and - I have to admit I didn’t see this coming - I start getting itchy if I’ve not been to the cinema for a while. Every week I google, in quick succession: “clapham picturehouse”, “brixton picturehouse”, “prince charles cinema”, “vue west end”, “vue islington”, and I hope, with each search, to find a showing for something I’d like to see, at a time when I’m free.

If those don’t work then my spell continues, and I type “bfi cinema”, “norwood picturehouse”, “richmix”, “genesis cinema”, “finsbury park picturehouse” into the search bar. It doesn’t matter that those places show exactly the same movies as my A-list of cinemas. I just need to make sure there definitely isn’t one little convenient flick hiding behind the sofa, which I’ll only find by searching and searching and searching.

Most of the time I get frustrated because there just aren’t that many films showing at any given point. It also annoys me that clearly both studios and audiences love horror movies, and violent movies, and rom-coms, and animated movies, because I don’t want to watch any of those. I try to watch arthouse cinema sometimes, when I’m feeling up to it, but deep down I just don’t enjoy it. I can read a difficult novel once in a while and feel my brain whirring and have a good time but I go to the big dark room to be entertained, maybe lightly challenged. I don’t want to have a complicated time in there.

Still: I yearn for that big dark room. I do that little google dance at least once a week, every single week - sometimes two or three times. If things are especially dire, I’ll try to find a list of every single cinema in London, zone 1 to 3, and I’ll go through all their listings. It’s never worked, as a hail mary. Amazingly, the cinemas of west London show the same damn movies as the ones in my neighbourhood.

There’s a world in which you could look at this and identify it, probably correctly, as obsessive behaviour, but I think it has to do with tobacco smoke, and the fact that it’s now lacking from my lungs. I always enjoyed going to the cinema before I quit nicotine but I liked it the normal amount, I think. I went when I had a moment and spotted something I thought I’d enjoy; didn’t when I didn’t.

What has happened since then is that I have found myself in a constant pleasure deficit. If you’ve never spent any meaningful amount of time looking into what nicotine does to the human body, then let me enlighten you, in a grossly oversimplistic fashion. When nicotine enters your brain, some happy chemicals are released! These disappear over time, but can be produced again when more nicotine is ingested.

Whenever you smoke a fag, some dopamine floods the inside of your skull and it makes you feel happier, more motivated and alert. More broadly, it gives you this little jolt of pure delight, which I still remember so vividly but would find impossible to explain using words. To shorten it even further: smoke goes in, pleasure bursts out. This is something I did every few seconds from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep, in the seven years or so during which I used a vape.

Because I like picturing things to make sense of them, I’ve grown to see my brain as a vat of water sitting in an exceedingly warm environment. The fuller the vat is, the happier I am to be alive. The desert-like conditions of the experiment means that the water evaporates quickly, and must be topped up as often as possible. Each cigarette I smoked and each time I inhaled from my vape added some more water to the vat, negating much of the evaporation.

Neither action ever succeeded in suddenly filling the vat to the brim, but the topping up was constant.

Of course, things would sometimes get so dire that even the nicotine couldn’t prevent the levels of water in the vat from getting dangerously low, but that only happened rarely, and the fall would never be sudden.

Things are different now. The container is still there and it’s still dangerously hot outside, and I still need it to be as full of water as possible so I can go about my day. I just don’t get those constant little top-ups anymore. There’s one thing you learn when you spend too much time reading about smoking cessation, and it is that nicotine addicts fail to feel the full potential of life’s highs, seeing as they give themselves dozens - hundreds - of micro-highs as they go about their day.

Quitting means being able to finally feel your feelings in all their glory. It means being happier than you ever thought you could be. It is, I suppose, as a reasoning, not a million miles away from what happens in econ 101. A product becoming rarer will become more expensive; a sensation becoming scarcer will be felt more intensely. That’s my understanding anyway. I’m sure it all gets more complex the closer you look at it, but I’m happy with my rough outlines. If nothing else, they help explain the past few months of my life.

I mean, it is weird, right? I’ve always been enthusiastic by nature but no-one wants to go to the cinema that much. Similarly, I’ve always enjoyed reading but only recently did I become the sort of person who feels physically on edge if their to-read pile falls below a certain number. It apparently doesn’t matter that, though I tend to prefer second-hand books, London is a city full of bona fide bookshops.

If I’m enjoying a novel but don’t have a clear idea of what I’ll be starting on immediately afterwards, then all life must stop until I’ve gone to Skoob, in Bloomsbury, or to the Oxfam bookshop by the British Museum, and found myself something promising. As with movies, not any book will do: I don’t like thrillers or romances or contemporary novels with very thin women and even thinner prose. I don’t want books set in any world war and I don’t like science fiction most of the time. Novels that solely sell themselves on how funny they are rarely tend to elicit a single laugh from me. If it sounds like a book will be violent, terribly sad or both, I will not be buying it.

Again, the purpose of the exercise is clear: I must gain pleasure from reading, at least for now. It’s rare for people not to have a type at all and to choose to go on dates with just about anyone, especially if they’re trying to settle down. Similarly, I read for a singular reason, and can only be guided by my physical needs.

You’ve hopefully got the point by now, meaning that I don’t need to go into any superfluous details about how the relationship I have with my film camera has changed this year. Once upon a time it was this nice hobby I had on the side but could forget about for months at a time; now the thought of being left without the ability to take pictures fills me with dread, and I have seen the little old men at the photography shop in Pimlico more than I’ve seen some of my best friends. Yadda yadda yadda.

I could also get into how my ability to refuse getting one last drink in the pub has now become somewhat blunted, or at least requires an amount of effort I’d not previously noticed. I could tell you about the fact that I somehow go to galleries and museums at the very least once a week, and feel the itch crawl up my skin if I haven’t seen any good art in seven or eight days. I could keep going for a long time but the point would remain the same.

For a long time I had these cancer sticks in my pocket or on a table somewhere near me and now I have this thirst for pleasure that will never be quenched. I wish I could say that it’s made my life richer and it’s been, as we say in French, un mal pour un bien, but honestly I’m just quite tired. Refilling the vat again and again, carrying these heavy buckets of water one after the other in the extreme heat and throwing them in and hoping they’ll be enough to last for a while: it’s exhausting.

The only silver lining, I guess, is that this all happened after the pandemic so, oddly, I knew what to expect. At some point during the first lockdown, when I was living in my very small basement flat and crying every single day, I had this big revelation. I’d kept wondering why I was so sad and devoid of joy when really, I’d always seen myself as a pretty jolly person by nature, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s not that I’m naturally happy: I just know how to squeeze the largest possible amount of happiness out of whatever’s in front of me.

We were quite skint when growing up and mum was always brilliant at opening the fridge, sighing, then turning half an aubergine, two thirds of a yoghurt, one sausage and some wilting spinach into a wonderful meal for three. I’d always been brilliant at doing the same thing with life: seeing a nice dog in the street and letting that glee course through me for hours, savouring the sweet intimacy that flowed through a drink with a friend in the way that you’d keep a boiled sweet in your cheek like a chipmunk.

None of that happiness was homemade, though, that was the point. Being told by the state to stay indoors and by myself meant that I was no longer able to be given an inch and hungrily grab a mile. Left without anything at all, I wept and wept.

Luckily, things aren’t anywhere near as dire now as they were in those months. I wake up every day and I live, and I’m thankful that it’s a thing I get to do. I just wonder about the rest of my years, and whether I will have to keep seeing pleasure as a duty. I wonder if there are people out there who are merely content, in the way I was when I consumed industrial amounts of nicotine at every moment of every day and the government didn’t prevent me from leaving the house. I wonder if I’d like to be them.

The search takes up so much of my time and my energy now, but I suppose it pushes me as well. In an ideal world it wouldn’t feel as conscious and forced and relentless, but I guess everything has a price. Some years ago I stopped getting drunk out of my mind every weekend and so suddenly I realised that I had these two mornings and these two afternoons every single week, which I could use to do things.

It was both good and daunting because having all that free time as a single person can, more often than not, simply turn into an excuse to wallow and do nothing and feel sorry for yourself. Gradually, I forced myself to go out and do things and - obviously, tediously, predictably - that was great. I manage to cram whole lifetimes into my weekends these days. I don’t regret it one bit.

Hopefully this is what will happen to my post-nicotine life. For a long time I was so unused to having to find things to do on, say, a Sunday at 3pm, but eventually I got used to it. I’ve now spent six months trying to get my grubby, desperate little mitts on every ounce of pleasure I could seek and it was weird and intense because I’d never had to do that before. Maybe at some point, in a few years, I’ll be able to look back and say: ah, fucking fine, the thirst is a joy and it is useful to me. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that be grand? I guess I’ll see you then.