January 2025: The return of the blog

It has been a while since anything I have written has made its way onto the internet, and there are quite a lot of reasons why.

Some are mundane (my laptop screen has developed a tendency to flicker temperamentally which irritates me endlessly, but never to the point to do anything about it), some are quite reasonable (editing and reading colleagues’ words all day at work left me with little appetite to write my own), and some are totally unreasonable (a nagging insecurity that there’s nothing to write about and, well, nobody cares).

On reflection, these last two reasons have not been entirely disproved, so I’ll leave it to the discerning reader to proceed through the return of this blog (or Substack, it’s 2025 after all) with caution.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve been struck by one of life’s perfectly awful maelstroms over the last few months; the kind that appears out of nowhere and seems to suddenly pull you out of life’s flow, a series of unfortunate events that would leave Lemony Snicket quaking and has left me totally wiped out, at home, and trying to recalibrate myself, and my persistently troublesome gut, one small step at a time.

And before you worry that a list of tips and tricks to get your gut flora back in order is about to follow, I’ll reassure you that there will be no kombucha, kefir or even kimchi mentioned in this substack.

It is a space safe from such prebiotics and even probiotics, a place free from the fear of live cultures (billions of which I have nobly ingested since the summer), and free from the 15-second recipes which fill my Instagram feed with ingredients you have never heard of. Alfafa, really?

Instead I shall leave the kale, spinach and chia seeds aside, and get the creative juices flowing instead, sharing what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to lately, cobbling together some thoughts as and when they come, safely releasing my inevitably pent-up frustrations in the form of substack posts, and reflecting on some of the discoveries, challenges, joys, and encounters that I hope 2025 will bring for all of us.

Good reads

One silver lining of having spectacularly tanked my social life in the last six months (which I wouldn’t particularly recommend) is the time I’ve found for reading. My reading is always quite an eclectically wonderful mix of genres and recommendations from equally eclectically wonderful friends, which makes for quite an exciting and unpredictable time. (I’m always on the lookout for more, so do send any my way).

This week I’ve rather unexpectedly found myself in the 17th Century world of art history not once, but twice: firstly in the astonishing masterpiece of historical fiction which is Rachel Blackmore’s Costanza, with its narrative swirling around the life of the eponymous character, caught in the Rome of Gianlorenzo Bernini, and secondly in the beautiful prose of Thunderclap, Laura Cumming’s award-winning memoir-of-sorts reflecting on the life of her father and the often overlooked Dutch artist Carel Fabritius.

I think Costanza probably merits a review of its own at some point, such is the level of detail and intricacies of the plot, but I would thoroughly recommend it (with a warning that certain scenes are distressing to read). Constanza succeeds in sweeping the reader into the notorious streets and salons of Rome’s most powerful figures of the time, and provokes discussion about the legacies and memory of artists we continue to revere today.

100 per cent faithful

On a slightly lighter note, much like approximately 5.5 million other people on this fair isle, I am currently engrossed in the latest series of the BBC reality TV show, The Traitors, and am also currently expending far too much of my mental energy on it.

When I’m not watching the show, I can be found reading newspaper articles about it (excellent one in The Times today revealing the show is edited backwards to create the plotlines) and exchanging frenzied WhatsApp’s with equally engrossed friends (contestant Lisa’s great reveal the other night, ‘I am an ordained Anglican priest’, caused quite a stir among my Christian friends).

The contestants are whisked away to the Scottish Highlands for what is essentially an elaborate game of wink murder, except Claudia Winkleman is strolling around wearing enviable knitwear and menacing capes, and the contestants must participate in adult versions of challenges which would not be out of place in other firm favourites of BBC programming such as Raven or Escape from Scorpion Island.

I was going to say it makes for relaxing viewing to get the nation through the dark evenings of January, but it really doesn’t - it’s ridiculous, overdramatic, stressful, filled with the best and worst of human qualities; entertaining and absurd all at once.

Not quite a switch-off from real life then.