2025: Year in Review
I can’t say I enjoyed 2025 as much as I’ve enjoyed other years this decade. It seemed to be a year lived under a dark cloud. Perhaps it was something to do with spending the first days of it in the freezing gloom of snowy Sweden? A pathetic fallacy: beauty and joy all around us but also the undeniable severity of nature’s bleak potential? I loved our time in Sweden this January, but it got dark early there, and the roads were packed ice; slippery and dangerous underfoot. On New Year’s Day we watched two movies. The first, This Is Spinal Tap, was an unknowing portent. By the end of 2025 the director of this brilliant movie, and so many others, would be murdered by his own son in a heartbreaking tragedy. The second movie we watched, Civil War, was more on the nose as we awaited the inauguration of President Donald J Trump for his second term and what was presented as fantasy in the film — as fiction — seemed all too plausible.
It is still hard to believe, writing this now in December, that the man has not even been in office for a full year when I consider all the damage done and norms obliterated already. By summer his sickness had spread deep into the UK. 2025 will be sadly remembered here as the year of all those hostile and petty flags going up. Lamposts , roundabouts and motorway bridges all crowded out with flapping and over-compensating symbols of hate, cynically wrapped up in the guise of patriotism. A creeping fascism and insidious small-mindedness. Lines being drawn against small boats and hotels offering asylum seekers a place to stay. A stance being taken against decency and our interconnected flourishing.
We got meaner and less compassionate in 2025. The potholes didn’t get fixed, the hospitals remained overwhelmed, the cost of living continued to skyrocket, and as things got worse instead of better, people looked for enemies instead of solutions. We started the year in England hopeful, but already disappointed, with the first unkind months of a timid Labour government chasing the applause of the right-wing instead of the betterment of the people. We end the year in England looking at the very real possibility of those vile racists in Reform becoming the most likely party to become our next government. If the last few years have felt eerily like we’re sleepwalking into a repeat of 1930s Germany, 2025 will be remembered, in England, as the year far too many people woke up, saw exactly what was happening, and just kept on walking, knowingly now, in the very same direction, unbothered by the likely consequences.
Ultimately, 2025 was the year I found myself writing a song called The World’s Not Worth Saving Anymore. Perhaps it was glib, but it spoke to a very real sense of despair at the direction of travel 2025 gave us. And I haven’t even mentioned the appalling levels to which human creativity and intellectual engagement became outsourced to AI in 2025. How the large language models we once posed serious ethical questions about seemed to become — without any debate — the accepted first port of call for any task or question. Friends, even, for some, who share with them more than they do their real-life friends or loved ones. As a teenager I once wrote a song about the environment called Too Lazy To Live, but that was in the 1990s. I hadn’t seen anything close to the true levels of human laziness yet. My teenage self would be surprised.
But I guess maybe it’s hard to feel positive about the year that your sister got cancer. That same awful disease — if not quite the same variant — which already killed our mother and denied either of us the chance to know one of our grandfathers. A disease I myself suffered a brief medical scare about at the start of the year too, finding myself visiting the hospital more in the first few months of 2025 than I had hitherto visited one for myself in an entire lifetime. (2025 was also the year my wife had to get tested to see if she had inherited a genetic heart defect from her father — happily she hadn’t — and marked the first time in thirty-one years I vomited, or at least tried to, thanks to some food poisoning. Though, out of practice, my body only allowed me to uselessly dry heave into the toilet having not tried to expel things in this way since we were Too lazy To Live back in the early 1990s. Probably my wife spending my birthday night back in January with a bad case of food poisoning herself was a grim portent for the year ahead if what they say about spending your birthday around the vibes you will get for the rest of the year is true!)
Anyway, my sister caught the cancer early, had surgery swiftly, and is going through chemo now to eliminate any lurking cells after a generally positive prognosis. But the experience has been triggering, bringing back awful memories of mom fourteen Januaries ago when she was first hospitalised and given her terminal diagnosis. It’s been hard watching my sister going through all this — the fear, the anxiety, the brutal treatments — and living through all the uncertainty it brings. For a guy with perennial health anxiety disorder, the endless conversations around oncologists and symptoms can be taxing. The year will forever be symbolised by our spending Christmas shivering together in her back garden, unable to properly celebrate as we had originally planned because of her immunocompromised state and my wife having caught a bad cold she was worried about infecting her. Lessons learnt from Covid about social distancing and being outside allowed at least some festive interaction, but it was another trigger of a former plague year. The last time we failed to eat Christmas dinner together being the Christmas I had Covid, back before there was a vaccine. The Christmas I thought I might die.
We had a lovely time together for half an hour or so in the garden, but it hadn’t been the original plan for how we would spend our Christmas together. Then again, 2025 seemed to be a year of all plans going out the window. Friends getting unexpected divorces, colleagues going on unexpected long term absences, even having the school inspectors we’d been fretting about all year not show up until the final week before Christmas — when we’d finally let our guard down and least expected them — 2025 was a year I was glad to be trained in improvisation! Every day seemed to throw up a new unexpected mess to sort out or problem to solve.
At the same time, speaking of improv I am reminded that 2025 wasn’t all bad. Since January I have helped put on three hilarious improv shows with my students, training them in the dark arts of “yes, and…” every Friday afternoon and having such an enjoyable time that I ended 2025 by auditioning to join a local improv group again. The audition went well and I have been invited to join the group for rehearsals in January. My first foray into improv again since the pandemic shut everything down and my waning interest in Fat Penguin, after the sad collapse of the Kneejerks, finally fizzled out in 2020. I’m really excited about having some weekly improv back in my life in 2026 and had a blast at the audition. Historically, given my previous return to improv after my mother’s death, jumping into improv seems to be how I deal with cancer diagnoses.
2025 was also the year I wrote my Social Media Avoidance Project album. A creative outlet for how I was feeling each month of 2025 where I wrote, recorded and released a brand new song each month of the year. There is not a song on the album I’m not incredibly proud of. In 2026 I plan on writing more on the synthesiser now that I have embraced that kind of music into the Strangely Shaped By Fathers name (I re-released 2023’s Playing With Electricity as an SSBF album in December too) — though not to the strict regimen of a new song every month. It will be fun to just mess around and write what I want when I want. Some months of 2025 I was inspired to write more, but ended up holding fire for fear I’d have nothing left for the following month (which is why I ended up recording a cover of my old Academy Morticians song, There Must Be More Than This To Life one month). I will be unfettered from such rules and restrictions in 2026.
Experimenting with different sounds and genres across 2025 was really fun, and a much needed release from the stresses and troubles of the real world. 2025 also marked my return to a more familiar route of creative escapism as I embarked on writing a new novel for the first time in about ten years. Over 41,000 words in now, I really think that it’s heading somewhere good, and look forward to seeing if I can finish it in 2026. Maybe even get it published? 2025 was, after all, the year I saw some of my fiction get printed in the Hardcore Horror anthology (although some very dodgy copy-editing before publication seems to have unilaterally fucked up some of the grammar and made some passages of my story annoyingly unreadable!) Still, it was nice to have my first fiction publication since my days as resident horror writer for Artcore ‘zine, or my old story Of the Haves and Have Nots being published on a Clive Barker fan site as a teenager. a dull boy is an excellent story, with some great comedy easter eggs for fans of Stephen King, and even with the new grammatical errors which were not in my original submission copy, it’s well worth a read! Not only that, but it’s inspired me to keep on writing short horror stories too. As well as the novel I’m working on a handful of new little creepers.
I should probably also be proud that I managed to keep Philosophy Unleashed alive for another year in 2025, writing a new post there almost every Monday during term time since January. That said, I am finding this job harder and less rewarding every year. The site has been running since 2019 and has some great stuff on it, but I’m not really sure it’s worth all the effort (and money spent on its upkeep) just for its loyal but silent readership of about 300 people each week who don’t seem to comment on the posts or talk about or share them anywhere. I like to think philosophy students and teachers use it as always intended, as a place to see philosophical thinking applied to the everyday, beyond the limits of restrictive exam syllabi. But few teachers or students have ever told me that they do, and some weeks it feels a bit like throwing my thoughts out into a void. More like the obligation of a restless spirit doomed to mindlessly repeat the same patterns in death that they once lived in life than a meaningful obligation I actually want to fulfil anymore. I never post on there if I don’t think what I’ve written is worth posting, and having the weekly deadline forces the creative thinking…but the question remains: is it needed? And could the time be better spent on something else? My novel perhaps? Or more songs?
Perhaps it’s part of a growing realisation in 2025 of the limits of philosophy as a discipline in general? I find myself questioning philosophy’s worth more and more the older I get and looking more to art and poetry when I want answers than rational logical argument.
I am also happy in 2025 that I got to see some of my American friends and family at least one more time before Trump shuts all borders and denies even citizens like me, critical of him, entry back into the country. My wife and I decided to take a ludicrously expensive holiday we couldn’t really afford to New York at Easter as both a potential goodbye tour to the States for a while, and to fill ourselves up on as much nourishing culture as possible to get us through the rest of the year. The goodbye tour consisted of us seeing all of those we could on the East Coast (or those kind enough to fly up and visit from Florida!) and the trip was a real highlight of 2025. Every show we saw was excellent (most seemed to win Tonys later) and getting to see aging relatives and friends we don’t see enough of was a treat. Especially walking down Central Park West with my honorary aunt and uncle and enquiring in the buildings of my grandmother and my their parents if any of the doormen there remembered them, then getting to hear stories we hadn’t heard before about our much missed loved ones. It was worth being broke for the rest of the year to do something as special as that.
Indeed, 2025 was a year of being broke to pay for a lot of things we needed. Hot on the heels of getting the broken kitchen re-done at the end of 2024, this year saw necessary re-plastering done in the lounge, windows repaired at the front of the house, and a shed roof get replaced. Not to mention car repairs, thermostat problems, and guttering issues. Who’d own a home? Or a cat for that matter? Our sickly old thing needed a full CT scan this year on top of his expensive monthly thyroid meds to figure out what was going on with his chronic rhinitis and bronchial conditions. But we love him and, thankfully, the treatments seem to be making him much better now, even if our insurance premiums are through the roof. The things we do for love — and it’s still cheaper than having children.
Not that we didn’t get to enjoy the joys of childbirth this year. The frogs in our pond spent much of March croaking and copulating and, by April, our pond was more frogspawn than water in places. Unfortunately that just made the place a feasting ground for newts. But a few of the tadpoles must have survived because by summer we had a regular sum of about thirteen frogs living in the pond. In 2026, if the frog orgy happens again, we shall put the spawn in a separate trug to ward off the newts until they are big enough to fend for themselves. And though not our own child, 2025 also saw us spend a lot more time with my sister’s kid, our niece, now they live back in the Midlands again, which was really nice to do. She especially loved being introduced to the frogs this summer!
2025 was also good for watching sport. While the women’s Aston Villa team had a tough start to the year, the men’s success in Europe provided a lovely distraction until the women sorted a new manager and began finding their feet again. Since the new season started in September we’ve been inconsistent, but promising, and it’s been great following the team as season ticket holders for the forth year in a row while also expanding our interest now to the men’s game too. Hell, we even bought FIFA for ourselves to play this Christmas as a Christmas gift to ourselves, such is the growing football obsession. And when the Lionesses won the Euros this summer, my wife and I were there on the mall in London to wave on their homecoming bus in celebration, deciding to make the unexpected pilgrimage. Ah — remember when St George’s crosses flying across a city didn’t mean racist cunts lived there?
The weekend before Christmas there was even an unexpected and undocumented Academy Morticians reunion at our house (well, three out of four of us), made all the more unbelievable because Simon, Tom and I sat watching Aston Villa beat Manchester United as our main activity. We’ve never done such a thing together before. If only one of us had thought to take a photograph as proof that it even happened! My younger self would barely recognise me!
I also managed to see AEW live twice in 2025: Forbidden Door in London and Collision in Cardiff just the other week, both times with my wife and my old roommate from my university days, Rishi. Watching the wrestling is always fun, but being able to catch up with Rishi at these things is even better and makes the graps all the more joyous. Not only that, but 2025 saw me start up writing a wrestling column for Mass Movement again after several years away. Same old DaN — always writing!
But as well as writing, I read a lot in 2025 and saw a lot of films. Over 80 books and over 100 movies! The moral of the story is that when the world is burning all around you, take solace in art, literature, theatre, sport, and music…
If anyone’s interested some highlights I’d recommend are:
Movies:
This Is Spinal Tap
Civil War
A Real Pain
Anora
The Monkey
Will & Harper
Sinners
Heretic
The Ballad of Wallis Island
The Naked Gun
Weapons
Together
The Florida Project
Sword of Trust
Toni Erdmann
It’s a Wonderful Life
What’s Up Doc?
I Swear
Books:
The Drop - S.R Masters
Widow’s Point: The Complete Haunting - Richard and W.H Chizmar
Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
Deep Cuts - Holly Brickley
King of Nothing - Nathanael Lessore
Felony Juggler - Penn Jillette
The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert - Bob the Drag Queen
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Evenings and Weekends - Oisín McKenna
Batman: Resurrection - John Jackson Miller
Brainwyrms - Alison Rumfitt
I also gorged on good (and intentionally bad) TV. Highlights this year were:
Television:
The White Lotus
Four Seasons
Hacks
Etoile
Shrinking
IT - Welcome to Derry
The Rehearsal
Amandaland
The Studio
Taskmaster
RuPaul’s Drag Race (any iteration going)
Ultimately 2025 was a shitshow, but I was kept sane by a wonderful day-to-day existence with my wife and our cat, good music, good books, and good entertainment. I switched off the news alerts on my phone in January and made my relationship with the shitshow far more intentional and less intrusive into my every day existence. I tried to avoid social media as much as I could and realised, in the end, that I just have to make a choice to disconnect, and so end the year having sequestered the apps away in a folder at the back of my phone. My Kindle app is easier to get to than Instagram now, and I am reading more interesting things as a result. And I continued to recognise work as the necessary evil it is, doing my job well and giving it my all, but not giving it everything; maintaining a healthy work/life balance with an iron fist. Diligent about switching off and enjoying time away and not allowing it to dominate my life. I’ve taken more walks and smelt the roses and fresh air. I’ve gone on more day trips and mini breaks to get away and focus on living in the now. I’ve tried to prioritise the good things in life and give two middle fingers to all the bullshit.
As I approach 2026, therefore, I look ahead at the idea of a fresh start with some joy. A chance to shed more bad habits and re-emphasise the better ones. Continuing to prioritise life at home, with loved ones, over the lives of others online or the petty problems of the workplace. Continuing to write, make music, improvise and create. Continuing to continue in a world that seems determined to make you just want to give up.
2025 was some bullshit, but we’ve lived through bullshit before and will live through bullshit again. I have a tattoo on my leg of an alligator and a mermaid. It reminds me of the time my wife and I had terrible second night of a two night stay in the Florida Keys, our hotel room infested with flying termites and being forced to sleep in the hotel lobby, picking out crawling, de-winged bugs from our suitcases before we could. The hotel where it happened was named after a mermaid and an alligator, and I got the tattoo because, despite the terrible night there, all I remembered a few weeks later was all the good things we did on the Keys. The first night without termites, the cool places and people. The beautiful sights and delicious food. The bad shit fades eventually and you are left with only the good stuff. And so it will be with 2025. In 2013 my mom died and it was awful. But I remember going to WrestleMania in New York more. The Red Sox winning the world series. A friend’s wedding the night she died. Getting to see people at mom’s funeral and the lovely last visit we had with her the summer before her death. In 2010 my dad died and I started a teaching career that, that first term, felt like a terrible mistake. But I have fond memories of drinking coffee with friends earlier in the year, all the kindness people showed when they heard about his death, day trips we took that year to Kenilworth and Framlingham castles, our October trip to America for a friend’s wedding. Our first Christmas without dad and the beauty of our grief bringing us closer together.
2025 was a year like any other — full of good stuff and bad stuff. And it was all stuff to learn from, jettison, or cherish, depending on its use as the earth continues to spin and we make our way towards 2026.