12 favourite things
2025 wrap
Another year spent negotiating the expenditure of our most valuable currency: our time and attention. When it feels like any choice is made at the expense of all others, the immobilising effect of trying to make the correct decision will leave you in a state of inertia until all of a sudden another year has passed.
If the perfectionism of choice pains you, feel better and remember that most of your time is not really your own. Most of our hours are necessarily spent working or sleeping or in other essential duties required to function, or in duty to others. With the few hours of genuine freedom we’re afforded there’s pressure to make the most of them, to be productive, to better yourself in some way. There is the fantasy you could be doing anything in the world but instead your brain bing bongs around 3–5 habitual leisure activities, and that time itself is pruned by your debilitating phone addiction. Still, days spent in an office with its artificial lights and manufactured pursuits feel like they come at the cost of running in a field or holding hands or picking apples or whatever. We look out the window with longing, where, because of some risk-averse building policy, the view is obscured by a tinted film that makes it always look dark outside.
In December, it’s hard not to look back on those moments of choice, strung together like bunting, and make a judgement on the way you spent your time. I’m in a bad mood (can you tell) because my fridge broke on Christmas Day and I’m five minutes away from taking my heirlooms to Cash Converters.
Anyway, this year sucked! But here is one favourite thing for each month. <3
January: album
The Way of Time, Biosphere
I am Earth’s number one Biosphere fan. In my 2024 Spotify Wrapped I was in the top 0.05% of Biosphere listeners (I’m getting off Spotify, I’m sorry). Once in the ambient music subreddit I was talking about Biosphere and somebody replied to my comment to say Biosphere was his Dad! And it was nice to hear his music meant so much to someone. <33333 I have sent fan mail to Biosphere on multiple occasions. I think fan mail is important to keep alive.
Special mention to Rocky Top Ballads by Fine, released in 2024 but I only listened this year. Especially to whatever special sauce she put in the bridge of Days Incomplete which sends me catatonic.
February: recipe
Smashed potato pickle salad with dill pickle sauce, Veronica Wnuk
Sorry this recipe is from TikTok but that’s the influencer-chef format that permeates the zeitgeist atm.
Pickle obsession hit a fever pitch this year. I started pickling my own onions and eating about a jar a week with some of the most unhinged combinations like cinnamon and allspice and ginger. Managed to make even pickled onions taste like gingerbread.
For work lunches I made this pearl couscous salad that became lazier with every iteration. By the end of the year I was just eating lettuce with pickled onions, the lettuce ultimately becoming a vehicle to consume pickled onion. Unsurprisingly after that I had to take a break.
Anyway, this recipe was great when I needed to bring a potato dish to a dinner or party because it is definitionally a potato salad but in practice it’s a pile of dill pickles and pickled onions.
In the second half of this year my attitude toward cooking took a 180. Where previously I would cook purely for nutrition and eat plain rice, chicken and broccoli three times a week because I didn’t want to allocate any resources to cooking, the late-2025 me cooked for friends, pleasure and for fun. I cooked so many new things, like cheesecake and miso chicken and courgette orzo broth. I wonder if it will last.
March: movie
Weapons, Zach Cregger
Weapons was just that fucking good. Anora was a close second, and One Battle After Another. Feels a bit perverse to not pick the Paul Thomas Anderson film as my number one, but he made two of my favourite movies of all time so give someone else a chance! You can read more on Weapons in the horror wrap I did earlier in the year.
April: podcast
Wisecrack, Tenderfoot TV
I’m not a regular podcast listener apart from TrueAnon, but I listened to this series in one day. It’s short, extremely moreish, and gives a Baby Reindeer energy – or maybe it’s just the accents and stand-up comedy through-line. Either way worth a listen.
May: rubbish on the ground
Manchester cigarettes, pear
My favourite arrangement of rubbish was this gorgeous tableau of a seemingly pristine packet of Manchester cigarettes and an untouched pear that could have just rolled off a fruit stand out of frame.
You can almost see the invisible thread that connects them to their absconded owner. The spectre of their choice to obtain these objects looms nearby.
We encounter this litter in its discarded state but only recently it held meaning to somebody or at least the value of utility. Perhaps I will be the last person to find it meaningful, and there’s something sorrowful in that. The ghost of lost purpose.
I want to start picking up the rubbish I find walking my dog but it’s so inconvenient to carry around a gross rubbish bag and wear gloves and it makes me feel like a loser even in my imagination. But I’m also aware I seem to be more interested in my local rubbish than anyone else, maybe I could make a difference.
June: thing I bought
Vintage jewellery box
The most magical object in my life is this vintage, bright orange, lacquered wood jewellery box with brown velvet lining. I can’t believe I found it, it’s like an object of my soul that caretakes my mother’s and grandmother’s and father’s wedding rings.
The previous owner has scratched a love heart into the felt on the bottom, exactly how I feel about it too.
July: essay
an open letter to my dog who, if i'm being completely honest, lowkey kinda sucks, father_karine
Hard to choose just one favourite for the year but this essay about getting a dog struck a chord of humour and humility. It captures the strange way a dog will see you redesign everything in your life to accomodate this alien consciousness you’re now responsible for. It took me back to when I first got a dog and found it profoundly difficult, lonely, and ridiculous.
Some other favourites:
Shadow Work, The Paris End
I actually went to the MindBodySpirit Festival with my woo woo aunt and mother several times as a teenager and loved it. It’s the only place you can access such a variety of MLM schemes with a spiritual undertone.
Clown Praxis, Mike Crumplar
Say what you will about Mike Crumplar and his smug wisecracks, you can’t deny he’s got style.
The Ocean Sunfish, Librarian of Celaeno
A pleasure to see somebody commit to an allegory.
August: poem
Sonnet 29, Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
September: drink
Mont Blanc
It was a year of fancy drinks. Martinis, matcha and strange pickle-based shots became a financially debilitating desire.
But the yummiest drink of all was the Mont Blanc — iced black coffee with orange cream on top. I will drink a Mont Blanc from any venue, at any time, for any price. The one pictured is from Quarter Two Cafe in MoPo. So grateful the instagram influencer industrial complex invented this drink.
October: exhibition
Lots, Edie Duffy, Clementin Seedorf
The installation choices of this show by Melbourne artist Edie Duffy (amazing name) were so compelling to me. The paintings are hung off-centre and at varying heights, their scale small but chromatically uniform beside gaping doorways and empty industrial shelves. Like tiny portals.
The paintings have incredible lighting, like a picture taken from a disposable camera with the flash on, or a frame from a clue-based video game where you zoom in to inspect everyday artefacts in a haunted house. The whole thing radiates an uncanny energy.
Other than this show, I as always loved the contemporary surrealism by Rae Klein.
November: book
Light in August, William Faulkner
Very average year for reading, both in terms of volume and my choice in books. Nothing stood out to me. I find this devastating. A whole year lost to the sands of time. I didn’t track my reading for the first time in several years so I don’t have data to draw from, but I know I had an obscene abandon rate. At least five books I read 75% of and then dropped, similar to how I did 75% of a journalism degree. I guess I don’t believe in the sunk-cost fallacy.
Books I abandoned included Big Swiss, Wintering, Riddley Walker, Bleeding Edge and The Brothers Karamazov (I will come back to the Dostoevsky, though. The library only give it on a two week loan and it’s constantly booked out. I don’t want to read it on Kindle, and it feels spiritually misaligned to buy it new.)
Light in August is my top read because it was my introduction to Faulkner, and the first Southern Gothic novel I’d ever read. Objectively a brilliant book, but I wasn’t that moved. I also liked Rapture by Emily Maguire, and The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, but I’m such a loyal McCarthy devotee it felt biased to choose his.
I’ve started tracking again using StoryGraph; Goodreads sucks. The interface is infuriating, the data is mid, and it’s owned by Amazon. Next year my target is at least 12 intentional/curated reads, and 12 spur of interest/silly reads.
December: journal
Karst stone paper pocket journal
I went through five journals this year, still half-way through two of them (one for bedside one for bag). My favourite was the soft cover karst ‘stone paper’ journal. Waterproof, took a beating and looks pristine, strangely marine-like texture.
Absolutely no points to the SAM’S journal that disintegrated every time I touched it and left little black flakes in my bag and under my fingernails. Admittedly, I started this journal in 2019 and picked it up again this year to not be wasteful, but is it unreasonable to expect a journal to keep it together for longer than six years? I would hope a notebook can last the majority of my lifetime, like a book, what’s the difference?
Thank you so much for reading my newsletter this year! Next year I will try to stick to a once per month sched but no promises. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ <3
Gorg insight into your 2025. I also loved Rapture - could not put it down! x
Great write up :)