Ducks at the Lego House museum in Denmark

You know the drill - here’s my annual round-up of my year in music, films and books. Let me know if you’ve got some good recommendations. It’s been a zoom of a year. You can meander through my past here: 2009 // 2012 // 2013 // 2014 // 2017 // 2018 // 2019 // 2020 // 2021 // 2022 // 2023 // 2024

Music

Following last year’s success, I’ve tried so hard to listen to music this year and not just have the same old stuff on repeat… I’ve blogged a little list every month and it’s been a lot of fun. Check them out: January // February // March // April // May // June // July // August // September // October // November // December 

  • Bleachers - Live At Radio City Music Hall & Bleachers: I said this last year… Modern Girl will go down as one of the decade’s best songs

  • Jon Hopkins - Ritual: such a lush soundscape

  • Last Dinner Party - Prelude To Ecstasy: a brilliant album with some proper bangers that really started the year off

  • Lawrence - Family Business:  an album full of amazing tunes but especially Whatcha Want and Guy I Used To Be 

  • Philip Glass - Glass: Études & Tales From The Loop (Solo Piano Version): totally beautiful and something I can see people studying in generations

  • Look Mum No Computer - PortaKosmo Vol 1 At The Lengths & Cloud Inversions: Sam at his best

  • Fishboy - Waitsgiving: absolute genius of a concept album

  • Raymond Scott - Manhattan Research, Inc.: Slipping this in the middle of the list to make sure you’re reading… Sprite makes the melon ball bounce!

  • Margaret Glaspby - Echo The Diamond: Get Back stands as one of the rawest most beautiful songs of the year

  • Lauren Maybury - Vicious Creature: It was a long wait but the album is the a proper reward

  • Alas de Liona - Gravity of Gold & For Forever: You’ll get that I like synths and pretty vocals

  • Earth May Your Vanquished Be Saved from the Bondage of their Sins (Robert Hampson Remix): Bonus final, almost album-length track - pop it on when the sounds in your head are too loud!

Podcasts

More of the same this year:

  • 99% Invisible

  • This American Life

  • 60 Songs That Explain The 90s

  • Darknet Diaries

Top TV

  • Season 2 of Ghosts US - Who’d have thought that a US version of a UK comedy could hit so well? ;)

  • Traitors Season 2 - Enthralling

  • Dead Boy Detectives - Gutted for the cast that this isn’t continuing as it was such a good watch 

  • The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning - How can something so serious and difficult be made jovial and entertaining? Mix the US sense of humour with some Swedes. 

  • Race Across The World (Celebs second season) - Celebs not coming over as terrible people is always a good thing, and RATW is such a great show concept

  • The Gentlemen - Some seriously slow points in this but it really does get going

  • Hilda Season 3 - A hilarious shaming of Netflix for cancelling it by just trying to smush the entire 4th season rollercoaster into a single episode!

  • Ghosts UK Final season and Christmas episode - So sad that this is over - it was so good! 

  • Extraordinary - So rude, so hilarious!

  • Culinary Class Wars - A totally new take on competitive cooking (and eating!)

  • Stacey Solomon Sort Your Life Out - We’ve watched a lot of these as a family… and it maybe had the opposite effect from the intended one!

  • 3 Body Problem - So bleak!

  • Dark season 2 & 3 - This show is a work of art - how all of the threads were kept organised is INSANE.

  • Fallout - Meh… some great bits

  • Only Murders In The Building (Season 4) - Not as good as the first three seasons but I’m still here for more

Top New Movies

  • Bullet Train - Coordinated action with a strong story and a great cast

  • In The Heights - Gorgeous movie musical

  • The Edge Of Tomorrow - Turns out that I’d never seen this and holy mackerel it’s good

  • Eras Tour - Capturing the world’s hardest working performer at a peak moment - loved watching this with the kid

  • Ready Or Not - I had not expected this to be so good!

  • Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands - All the better for watching it in Cromarty cinema with the family

  • The Marvels - This was fun and did not deserve the level of crap it’s received

  • Page Eight - Ooft. A spy thriller that hits hard

  • Deadpool Vs Wolverine - The saviour of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

  • Top Gun: Maverick - Better than expected 

  • Radical - A terrible movie to take the kid to on the night before school term restarts cinema trip… but great all the same 

  • The Babysitter - Cheesy but fun

  • The Babysitter: Killer Queen - Cheesy and almost as fun 

  • Bodies Bodies Bodies - Really well done take on the tropes

  • Violent Night - A fun watch but WTF was with Bristol?

Top Movie Rewatches

  • God Help The Girl - I think this gets better with time

  • Anna - Really great level of story complexity mixed with a lot of great action

  • Goldeneye - The best Bond movie?

  • Demolition Man - The best Stallone movie?

  • Beetlejuice - Has aged well and was still hilarious

  • White House Down - Like many, I’d forgotten that White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen were not, in fact, the same movie

  • Live Free Or Die Hard - Silly but I’d forgotten how well the plot worked

  • Addams Family Values - Still awesome

  • WALL-E - One of my favourite Disney movies

  • Die Hard with a Vengeance - Has aged not too badly

  • Legally Blonde - Has aged surprisingly well

  • Elf & The Grinch (animated) - ‘tis the season

Worst Movies

I promise that I try to be discerning… 

  • Godzilla Minus One - Richard Ayoade asked why any film-maker thinks that they can make a good Godzilla movie and this once again proved this true

  • Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - I had high hopes but somehow the path of being neither fully biographic nor spoof wasn’t quite right

  • The Gray Man - I’ve already seen this. It came out in 2022 and I’ve already forgotten everything about it. :(

  • Plane - Not worth watching

  • Uglies - Not worth watching

  • The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - Not worth watching

  • Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw - Not worth watching

  • Family Pack - Not worth watching

  • Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore - really not worth watching

Books

  • Alan Moore - Jerusalem: So much of my year has been spent with this book. It’s a work of art, love, dedication and memory. It covers Northampton in a way that truly makes me feel like I’ve been there. 

  • Richard Osman - The Bullet That Missed Twice: far from formulaic, it feels like this series is really getting going. 

  • Elizabeth Acevedo - The Poet X: one of the kid’s books and absolutely loved the details of the author’s teenage life.

  • Erskine Childers - The Riddle of the Sands: This was a hard read - almost floridly wordy compared to today’s speech, but also a spy thriller that stands the test of time. 

  • Crom - Birdking: The worldbuilding in this story is gorgeously rich. 

  • Bella Mackie - How to Kill Your Family: I’m still annoyed by the ending but the fact that I was so invested probably says a lot.

  • Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time: This book got me through jury duty. What’s better than a novel about space colonisation? Spiders in space!

  • Terry Pratchett - Night Watch: A re-read and it’s still so good. 

  • Travis Elborough - Atlas of Improbable Places: I’ve not read so many travelly things this year but I’d recommend this one.

  • David McCloskey - Moscow X: This one was recommended as one of the best modern CIA/spy novels and whilst it was good not amazing, it was definitely a romp.

  • Christine Platt - The Afrominimalist’s Guide: A great guide to the relative importance of “stuff” in our lives and a brilliant alternative to The Minimalists view on the world.

  • Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilå - Notes from an Island: a weird little book that is poetic, sparsely a novel and hardly a story but perfect in its scenery.

Games

  • Arkham Horror - so many fab evenings spent with Kev and Dan this year. After 2 years of playing not quite monthly I feel like we’re beginning to get the grip of the game! The game is all-consuming, and we’re here for it.

Websites, Newsletters & Apps

All the usuals - watching things via YouTube, Netflix & Disney+ (but not Amazon Prime because the ads-inside-movies is the worst viewing experience hell), keeping the to-do list on the 2Do app, keeping the language learning going on Duolingo, always not getting lost using Google Maps, always messaging via WhatsApp, always listening to Spotify (especially now that it has audiobooks), emailing via Proton & Gmail. Glitch.com is one of the best sites ever made - it’s today’s GeoCities.. Huge usage of Google Drive and GitHub (and one Google Sheet+script that lets me post blog posts to GitHub Pages). Still using - and not loving -  InoReader (RIP Google Reader). 

Big newcomers to my morning routine this year are The Edinburgh Minute and Minute Cryptic. Attempting to be more locally aware and smarter before 7:30am! DuckDuckGo has almost replaced Google searches for me and Perplexity is becoming increasingly useful (and the only AI tool of note that I’ve been making use of). None of the social networks are making me happy but I guess Instagram and Threads are the least worst and my slow move to Mastodon is somewhat slower than I’d hoped seeing as fewer people are there than I’d like. In terms of the Emacsification of browsers, almost everything I need is inside browsers now. I’m still a Chrome kid (Android and Chrome password sync is the 🧑‍🍳 but I have to say that I make use of Opera occasionally, mostly to VPN Radio.garden. Code editor of choice is VS Code. And I’ll close this section with what may be my biggest achievement of the year - I got our SysAdmin to add Maccy! If you don’t know it, it’s a copy-paste tool which lets you paste things from your history of copying and not just your most recently copied thing. Gamechanger.

Gigs

A much better year for gigs: Delores Forever (the kid’s first Glasgow gig), Carla J. Easton (always a fan of Sneaky’s), Underneath The Stars, Tide Lines (“acoustic” was still pretty rocking) and BLEACHERS! Bleachers was easily in the top 5 gigs I’ve ever been to. It was a triumph.

Places

I’ve just looked back on my 2023 favourite places and I’m still a simple being when it comes to my go-to favourite places:

  • Visiting family and friends be it in houses, gardens, on walks, at events or staying away (this year CentreParcs was a big staying-away with family highlight)

  • Beaches and mudlarking (it’s not the finding but the possibility of finding… and doing it in solitude can be wonderful)

  • Walks in cities, on beaches and over hills

  • Free time spent writing or making

  • The gym, rowing, running and especially the pool

  • The cabin (despite its manufacturing problems) which facilitates the beaches and the hills

  • Team lunches and pub drinks with friends - the Leith Distillery is a particularly magical new find this year but every catchup has been a decadent pleasure

  • Camping

  • Gigs and live entertainment - The Barrowland Ballroom is a special place but anything that I see live be it gigs or theatre is always a pleasure. Theatre highlights were Sister Act, Hamilton, Gravity And Other Myths, The Book Of Mormon and Going Postal

  • Helping at school events - I enjoy helping with the cafe/bar when I can

  • The Car - a lot of time has been spent driving but almost as much has been spent waiting, reading, writing, listening, scrolling.

New places for the year:

  • Lego House Denmark - totally rocked. A perfect trip. 

  • Cumbrae - family, an island you can walk around once in a day (well done kid!), and lots of mudlarking opportunity

  • London - a day spent hunting Paolozzi was definitely not a day wasted

  • Tabletop Scotland - what a pleasure! Friends and games. 

  • Baysdale - a February break with friends that was a first couples weekend away for us and many others and we had the most perfect weather, food, games, booze and, above all, company

  • Coasteering at Shieldaig Adventures and zip-lining at Zip Trek Aviemore - thrills, both. 

  • NOT the dentist chair… or the ultrasound scanning bed, both of which had multiple visits this year and thankfully are in the past (for now at least, I’m sure I’ll be back for more dental work in the future. Damn you inherited dental traits!)

Creative hobbies

Creative hobbies… as per last year it feels like maintaining the cabin, house and car most certainly aren’t hobbies (but I did a fair bit of those), nor was helping clear mum and dad’s garage (or mine!). But I’ve done a little:

YouTubers

It’s a small but perfectly formed list of favourite YouTube channels (mostly makers) - Colin Furze (with the ongoing secret garage), Look Mum No Computer (with his ongoing museum project), Jonny Smith and The Late Break Show (with the ongoing Alegro, Smart Roadster projects and always awesome barn-finds) and Grind Hard Plumbing (making things a bit safer by changing crew and finishing an amazing bike build).

Thank you for reading. I’ll give you back your year.

Beautiful light at Newhaven Harbour, Edinburgh