Q1 2025
First 2025 instalment of recording the year as it crawls/sprints by, in pictures, words, quotes, cultural snippets. Can this be considered a self-archiving practice?
We brought in the year in Whitstable, a tried and tested flight from any NYE plan pressures. We arrived to rain, families battling with their umbrellas on the seafront as wind whipped through piles of oyster shells, taking refuge in our favourite restaurant for buttery cod and chips on chequered tablecloths as the day faded to dusk and the windows lit up with reflected points of candles. Midnight on Whitstable beach amongst a flash of champagne glasses, a wild ocean roiling just beyond reach of the bonfire and fireworks lighting up the Essex coastline across the water. I told H that the first dream of the New Year in Japanese culture set the tone for the year ahead, but chose to disregard this folklore the following morning.
Photos on iPhone and some 35mm, though I never shoot much in the dark months. I went to Amsterdam and Brussels to see small and larger family members, caught up with old friends in a new life in Berkshire, sauna and dancing by the sea for a beloved friend’s hen do. Paris for work where the smell of the metro took me straight back to being 19 and clueless/amazed in my first time living overseas, as it always does. So did the pouring rain on Rue de Rivoli, cycling back to my dusty Marais hotel room in my one business outfit and attempting to dry everything with a weak hairdryer and warm up under a broken shower. Plus ca change.
“It’s a complex relationship to articulate; taking pictures for a living but also living through taking pictures. It’s my way of exploring the world and deciding my place in it which others might confuse for a ‘being present’ versus not being so.”
From photographer India Hobson. Although I no longer rely on photography for my income, I do reflect often on my relationship with my camera and whether it helps or hinders living for the moment rather than for its capture; I prefer to conceive myself as Roland Barthes amateur, the “purest condition” of an artist who does things only for the love of it.
I went back to Brixham for the first time in a long time to talk about data and eat fish and elect not to swim in a freezing sea. On the way back the trains were predictably cancelled but I didn’t mind - for once not in a rush to return to London. The sun was blazing and the sea sparkling as we wound our way down the coastline, the curve of the track unspooling into a hazy horizon, walkers and gambolling dogs on the beach alongside us and the slow unfurling of gentle waves against the shore. I love this journey; steeples poking out across the bay over bristling yacht masts whose jangle hangs in the air despite being inaudible from the train.
For my birthday H gifted me a night in a hotel I passed every day when I worked in Clerkenwell, whose lamplit library I used to covetously peer into on my dark walk to the station/pub. We were upgraded to a room with an enormous bath and a bed of heavy brocade curtains, a night as a wealthy eighteenth century merchant. Sitting by the fire hoping to catch glimpses of the resident black cat Bagheera, cups of coffee in blue and white china. In the morning we stepped out into the uncanny silence of the City, broken by a gaggle of chessplayers by the medieval monastery playing tinny hip-hop with someone’s Labrador looking cheerfully on.
“Is it sad, to be moved sufficiently? Rather than standing in the rain, terrified and in pain, and yet struck with unbearable ecstasy?”
Sophie Mackintosh writes about the journey of emotional ageing like no other!
It’s late spring now and I miss the winter. One crisp and sunny morning early in the year our road was all pools of golden sunlight and car windscreens fogged over with frost. I remember myriad mornings before school watching my dad scraping at a thickly frosted windscreen and think about how rarely I see frost in London now, how each instance may be the last I ever see. The third winter in this flat, of our bedroom bathed in a pinkish glow of a January sunset. Watching the sky’s blues and yellows and purples and pinks slowly coalescing into a dark murk over the park, like paint water after watercolours.
Most of what I read in the first three months of the year, alongside my infinite scroll inbox of Substack newsletters that I both adore and resent. I started logging my reading for the first time using Storygraph which I have found invaluable for strategizing my huge TBR pile. (Apparently I read “fiction books that are reflective, dark, mysterious and medium-paced”.) It’s also yet another cataloguing medium to become borderline obsessive over; I have been listening to Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism on audiobook, whilst wondering how I could even begin to engage in this exercise of habit pruning he encourages.
I will never ignore a plant against textured glass
Cultural highlights
film Past Lives, which moved me via a tiny phone screen on the Eurostar despite loud Dutch children on all sides; Flow, like moving through a video game as MUBIGo continues to pay dividends
performance The Glass Menagerie in the creeping ruin of The Yard, a building that evokes conflicting emotions within me but that I’ll miss when it’s no longer there; Giovanni’s Room in a packed International Theatre in Amsterdam, where I paid 17 euros for my excellent seat and also for a James Baldwin essay collection from the vending machine only to flip it over and find it marked at £2
art beautiful photographs from my favourites Saul Leiter in Amsterdam and Peter Hujar in London; Noah Davis’s paintings at the Barbican
books Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski, beautiful and melancholy books about experiences behind and beyond the iron curtain
TV ground-breaking excavations of the human psyche in new seasons of Severance and The Traitors
podcasts Keeping Watch, the podcast from the Association of Lighthouse Keepers whose membership H lovingly acquired for me me
newsletters too many to count as ever, but I love to open an inbox filled with food writing: Greed by Jago Rackham, Comfort Food by Nina Mingya Powells, anything by Alicia Kennedy and Rebecca May Johnson
Special mention to the cultural lowlight of exiting Nosferatu at beloved Regents Street Cinema halfway through to be violently ill (food poisoning rather than moral disgust), and successful overlay of this memory by booking the same seats with the same friend to watch Babygirl the following week. Much more entertaining. Also enjoyed a hyper-local durational performance of two cats in our block car park yowling at each other, curtains flung back and windows cracking open as everyone stepped onto their balconies to become a community for five minutes.
Sunset on the Southbank with a new Olympus Stylus. My Yashica was deemed beyond saving by the camera shop, but I decided a compact camera is something I don’t want to live without
I write this in mid-April chugging through Welsh fog, alongside a roiling sea that threatens to creep up the beach and consume the rails in front of us. By another roiling sea in the first minutes of the year I looked resolutionless toward weeks of varying intensity ahead, and promised myself Q2 as my moment of renewal for 2025. I think it will be June, with promise of new things and unknowns. I hope the next instalment here will be one of change and novelty (and that I will actually write it).
“My train is taking off - but don’t hang up!”
Someone on the phone on the overground.