So, how are things? For me, I can’t say that 2025 was a vast improvement on 2024, but I’m keeping on keeping on. I tend towards incoherent rage in relation to the (in)actions of the UK Government – as I said before they were elected, I’m not enamoured of the current iteration of the UK Labour Party, so I didn’t have high expectations of what they would get up to in power, but the lack of imagination, ambition, and basic human decency has nonetheless been dispiriting. I hope that they get thoroughly trounced in the local elections in May (*notwithstanding the worry about who exactly will be the beneficiary of that collapse), although they will probably fail to learn the appropriate lessons and continue to tack right, following the Tories into electoral irrelevance.

On the more positive side of events in 2025, I’ve continued growing plants from seed and progressed with learning French (anything remotely constructive counts as being life-enhancing in the current climate). I completed the InnerFrench ‘Build Your Strong Core‘ course I mentioned in last year’s round-up (recommended) and although I didn’t continue with formal courses in the second half of the year, I kept up practice by using the Lingvist app (kind of a flashcard app, but requiring you to fill in missing words in sentences), and listening to a lot of contemporary French music (stand-out discoveries: Grand Corps Malade; Solann; and Barbara Pravi). And I read a whole book in French (not a study book)! I’ve still got the second half of the intermediate course to do on StoryLearning, and I have also paid for a couple more courses on InnerFrench – I just need to get a bit organised and plan time in to do them regularly.

Books:

As a total, 69 books read in a year doesn’t seem too bad, unless you know that 62 of them were read before the end of July and the other 7 spread across the remainder of the year. I may get to 70 before the end of 2025 as I’ve got a couple of books that I’ve been dipping in and out of, but then again I might not. I just haven’t been feeling like reading in the second half of the year. I’ll try to make a new start in 2026 with some classic crime fiction – I’ve now only got two of Margery Allingham’s Campion books left, so I may start with one of those.

I’m not going to do a books-of-the-year list, but my discovery of the year was Anthony Price, who I hadn’t heard of before two of his books were re-issued by Penguin in their Crime and Espionage series – he’s in a similar vein to John le Carré and Len Deighton (I wouldn’t quite put him in their league in terms of what I’ve read so far, but he’s close), which is pretty good company to keep. I’m working my way through his Dr David Audley series (which the re-issues are part of). Along with Margery Allingham, I’m still looking for other good Golden Age crime authors – the British Library Crime Classics continues to offer good finds in relation to that.

I also want to continue trying to read in French, and with that in mind I’ve been buying different forms of literature: poetry; bande-dessinées; short fiction; cinema-focussed non-fiction. I like the StoryLearning technique and how they structure their courses, but the stories themselves are a bit slow and basic, so I need to expand my horizons. When I was learning Spanish, I had to be able to read it because I was researching Spanish cinema and wanted to know how the films I was writing about were perceived in Spain. I don’t have that necessity with French – although being able to follow French subtitles would help with watching French films that don’t have any English options – but I thought that finding some cinema-focussed texts would probably be a good place to start. So I’ve got some books on actors who feature in the cinematic era that I’ve mainly been watching (Gabin, Darrieux, Jouvet), some on the cinema made in the post-war era, and a few that are similar to the BFI Film Classics series in that they’re shortish books about a single film. Poetry has arisen because Grand Corps Malade is a slam poet who sets his words to music – being able to read his lyrics (found online) while listening to him has been a good comprehension exercise – but I’ve also bought some of Jacques Prévert’s poetry (another cinematic connection).

Viewing:

I’m tempted to just draw a line under the above and move on. I have not followed film releases this year and just had little appetite for engaging.

More than a third of the films above were watched with my niece and nephew in school holidays, and I’m not sure that they really ‘count’ as having been watched (if asked to explain the plot of Paddington in Peru, I’d have to rewatch it as my then-4yo niece talked through most of it). Wake Up Dead Man was my Christmas Day film (better than Glass Onion but still not as good as Knives Out – it was a bit too long for me) and I spent Boxing Day watching Rebecca Miller’s 5-hour portrait of Scorsese (so it’s not that I find 2hrs 24mins too long in general – if the material warrants it, fine – just that WUDM took too long to get where it was going, and there wasn’t enough Benoit Blanc). I was intrigued by the new Jurassic Park film being a complete reset, and thought that I’d rewatch the earlier ones (or watch them for the first time – I’ve only seen the middle one of the Jurassic World films) with the intention of then watching the new one, but discovered that I had a strong aversion to rewatching Jurassic Park 2 (some part of my brain just said “Nope, once was enough”), so that ground to a halt.

Conclave was ok (MVP: Isabella Rossellini – I can’t remember where I read someone referring to her “fuck-off curtsey”, but yes) – my viewing was somewhat stymied by my Mum continually asking who was who (“I can’t tell them apart because they’re all dressed the same”). I still have a stack of French films related to the Tavernier documentaries, but the Sacha Guitry trio were all that I watched this year (first two were funny, last one wasn’t a comedy, which wrong-footed me because the clip I’d seen beforehand played like a comedy). I have renewed my subscription to BFI Player and there are a lot of recent French films on there that I’d like to watch, so I’ll make a stab at watching old and new(er) French films in 2026. I read Sight & Sound‘s winter issue over Christmas, so I’ve made a note of some films I should try to catch up with, but I’m not making viewing plans or targets for 2026 – I’ll just see what happens.

So, I think that’s about it for the 2025 round-up. Thanks for reading – I wish you and yours health and happiness in 2026.