Hello. When I was a teenager I used to really hate this time of year; in the early years I’d only see Mum for a few hours because she wasn’t well enough to go through more than cooking and eating Christmas lunch, and then the people I ended up with after she died approached it with an almost alien sense of joy, with their own strange traditions that I didn’t want to take part in. I was proud to be a bit Scroogey.
These days, if I’m asked, I’ll ramble on about Christmas being a moment of light in darkness — how it’s a time for us to see family (however that looks for us), to get a little rest and share good food and company and count our blessings in a world gone mad. And goodness, what a mad year this has been; the background stink of things are getting worse has been harder to ignore, as the world lurches rightwards, gets covered in AI-generated slop, and turns a blind eye to horrors in the Middle East.
Every time I sit down to write this little annual good-content-year-in-review thing the weirder it feels to do; the miserable world outside is a stark contrast to the new friends, new activies, proper holiday, love, support and service of my own year. I wake up every day and get through it, intact, despite everything, because I live in a “safe” part of the world in comfort and with luxuries, even though things feel darker than ever. And yet at Christmas, we face the dark world around us and dare, just for a couple days, to surround ourselves with the light we have — and what a lovely thing that is.
I hope you and yours have found some light this Christmas, and you have a peaceful 2025.
Stuff of the Year
This year was a weird one for me, in that for the first time in a very long time my film-watching and book-reading outdid my TV-watching and game-playing.
With that in mind, my Game of the Year is Balatro. Like with Vampire Survivors at the end of 2022, I came to this cheap, endlessly replayable indie late, and like Vampire Survivors it is immensely satisfying when all the pieces come together and you make the numbers go brrrr. Honourable mentions go to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (a very well put-together bit of fun, and a latecomer to this list), Astro Bot (ditto), Thank Goodness You’re Here! (like playing a copy of the Beano), Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (silly, short and very cute) and Persona 3 Reload (an incredible remake, albeit one that massively outstays its welcome).
This really has been a fantastic year for film, especially if you ignored the stuff that made a shitload of money. I Saw The TV Glow is my film of the year, both for how it resonated emotionally and for how it was both creepy and surprisingly hopeful. I adored All Of Us Strangers (and by adored I mean I cried like a baby in the cinema), Monkey Man (Dev Patel the man you are!!!!), Challengers (Luca Guadagnino can do no wrong imo and I am super excited to see Queer), and Love Lies Bleeding — but honestly if you see a 4-star or higher review on my Letterboxd I had a great time.
Brat is my album of the year, both for its cultural omnipresence (we heard 360 inbetween two acts of a They Might Be Giants concert and weren’t sure if the venue was trolling the crowd or if one of the Johns had decided this was an important track for their year, too) and for its showcasing of an artist in her prime, with all the joy and chaos and sadness and existentialism that brings. I also loved Kendrick Lamar’s fantastic surprise drop GNX (he’s an incredible artist and he knows it, and he’s elevated by Jack Antonoff’s production), Jamie xx’s incredible In Waves (though I’m sad it missed the summer entirely), Tyler, The Creator’s Chromakopia (DON’T STOP!), Sabrina Carpenter’s Short and Sweet (of the two non-Charli, gay-friendly pop girlies in the ascendancy this year I felt Sabrina had less filler on the album than Chappell Roan, whose album came out last year), and Yard Act’s solid sophomore album Where’s My Utopia? Long-time readers (all three of you) may be surprised to not see Cowboy Carter in this list, especially in the post-Renaissance World Tour afterglow; it’s a good album, but I think it’s Beyoncé’s weakest work of the last decade or so and I don’t feel inclined to go back to it.
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I genuinely enjoyed basically every book I touched this year, but my fiction highlights were Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (I replaced video games with books about them instead! Go figure!) and Casey McQuiston’s The Pairing (I started reading this right after Trump won the election, and it was like an emotional balm). I was also horrified by some non-fiction; Anna Funder’s Stasiland was such an incredibly engaging piece about the horrors of life in East Germany’s surveillance bureaucracy, and Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died was a pretty haunting memoir that was largely an account of decades of emotional abuse.
My thanks of the year go to Tracey, Tom, Kyle, Dan, Jack, my team and countless other Monzonauts — it has been a really fun year and you have all made it more fun; Jay, Anna, Charlie, Freddie, James, Cam, Tony, Joy, Aaron, Rob, and the rest of my community at St Nicks, for handling the change and hurdles of this year with loving grace; Meghan, for (among your many talents) putting up with The Football with me; Ilya, for your wise counsel; Cory, for persisting and existing and showing that you care even when it’s hard; Dad and Jan, for being there for all of us; and Markus — you have grown so much this year even if you don’t always notice it, and I love you so much.
