I don’t wear the shoes I used to walk in.
~ Fender, Sam, Crumbling Empire, 2025
IMHO, Sam Fender has released the album of the year. 48 minutes of soaring, working class, confessionals that are as joyous to sing along with as they are bleak; it is a poignant record for the challenging and uncertain times in which we find ourselves. Find it on your streaming service of choice, press play and keep your “chin up”.
As you can see from the image above, I am no longer on Twitter/X.
In actuality, I’ve eschewed the dumpster fire that is Twitter/X since Elon Musk acquired it in 2022. But I decided that 2025 is going to be a year of simplification – deleting, tidying and streamlining. If it’s not needed, get rid of it. If it needs doing, just do it.
With this in mind, I deleted my Twitter/X account in January.
And a couple of weeks ago, I finally worked through the coding to make the archive plugin 1 on this blog work the way that I want it to. The archive page is back to only displaying posts and not status updates.
Next up on the list is to archive/flatten the blog I used for my Masters dissertation project. There’s no need for me to be maintaining the themes and plugins when it will never be used again.
Showing up every day and having integrity about the way you live your life: that’s really the magic, because the ending and the beginning and the expectation and the outcome—all that stuff is nonsense. It really is. I know so many people who work really hard and don’t get those things. If you show up every day, keep your word, be somebody who has dignity in the way you comport yourself, that’s quite astonishing.
~ Lee, Min Jin (2019) in ‘The Believer‘
This quote has been sitting in my notes app for several years. After a particularly challenging start to 2025, I have returned to this quote several times over the last few weeks. As such, I felt it was time to post it here.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
~ Bukowski, Charles, The Laughing Heart, Betting on the Muse (1996)
Another good reading year albeit not quite as prolific as last year. 41 books read in total, and nearly all for the first time. And once again, supplemented by thousands of news articles, opinion pieces and blog posts.
Rather than set out any specific goals for 2023 in terms of how much to read and what to read, I am simply going to aim to read every day and follow wherever the literary-nose takes me.