It’s time for my annual round-up of the year just gone (you can read the previous year’s reports here).
This was my first full year of retirement so it will be interesting to see what, if any , impact that has had on the figures. I have worked from home for the last ten years so I suspect that the impact won’t be great..
As ever data for this report has as ever been taken from several sources including last.fm, Audible, Swarm, Fitness Stats and a couple of spreadsheets that I keep. And, of course “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” very much applies here.
Healthily
For over five years, I obsessed about closing the three rings on my Apple Watch, and this went well from April 2020 to August 2025. Then I had to spend a couple of days looking after the grandchildren on my own as Helen was away. I had no problem with this, and I love being with them, but my focus was on them and not my rings, and I woke up the next day to find I had missed it by two minutes. At the time, I was gutted, but now I am much more relaxed about it, but I do need to make sure I get up and out to do some exercise.
Bookishly
I read almost exactly the same number of books this year as last, but more were ebooks than before. This included ten of Mick Herron’s Slough House books, which I can consume at an incredible rate. I also read the last Martin Cruz Smith book this year, Hotel Ukraine, which was sad both for the death of the protagonist and its author. I also greatly enjoyed The Leopard in my House by Mark Steel telling his cancer journey told in that way that only Steel can.
The full list of books I’ve read can be found here.
Musically
My listening stats had somewhat fallen off a cliff since I’d stopped listening to music while I worked and now that I listen mainly to vinyl I thought that there was no way of capturing that. I did consider building myself an audio scrobbler to track my vinyl listening but when I came across Quanta which does exactly that but in iPhone form I used that. This has meant that I am getting much more accurate stats which is reflected in the following chart:
There are three things that I have had on heavy rotation this year: Steven Wilson’s The Overview, David Gilmore’s Luck and Strange and Steven Wilson’s 30 minute extended remix of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome. I have also been introduced to the delights of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan who I am seeing live in 2026.
You can see what I am playing and more listening stats over at last.fm.
Gigs
When I did this write-up last year, I was disappointed when I’d only seen five gigs, so I ought to be even more so as I only saw three in 2025: Mike + the Mechanics, Steven Wilson, and The Divine Comedy. I should have seen a couple more but didn’t make them in the end. All three were enjoyable but not the best I’ve ever seen, but the Wilson gig at the London Palladium was unique in having support for a comedian – Al Murray in this case, who was excellent.
The full list of gigs I’ve been to can be found here.
Podcasts
I’ve listened to even fewer podcasts in 2025 80% The Rest is Entertainment and 20% The Race F1 Podcast.
Moviely
I saw 63 films in 2025, 13 of which were at the cinema (about 21%) which I think is pretty good going. I’m still doing my bit to keep the cinema’s going! The film I probably enjoyed the most I saw way back in February: Companion. Just the right mix of science fiction, thriller and comedy. I’ve streamed it again since then too.
I also enjoyed F1 : The Movie despite it having nothing much to do with F1 itself. If you suspended belief for a couple of hours or if you didn’t know anything about F1 you’d be fine.
What led me to Jamin Winans’s visually stunning Myth of Man I am not sure but I enjoyed it enough to download and watch another of his finms, Ink, which I didn’t enjoy and I think might have been the only film in 2025 I didn’t finish.
The full list of films I’ve been watching can be found here.
Productively
I don’t aim to be productive in the same way I might have done while I was working but I still use Remember The Milk every day to help keep on top of things. It’s become something of a simple external memory for me and remains ever useful. The graph below does illustrate well how use has somewhat been curtailed as I’ve reduced work.
Socially
It’s interesting that I am writing this as the UK waits to see if Twitter (still refuse to call it by the name the manchild has chosen for it) is going to be banned for its AI publishing sexually explicit images. So it is possible that I will be off that fairly soon but I’m sure a VPN could sort that out.
Of course, there are plenty of other social networks about, all of which are pretty hideous and I should wean myself off but, like many, many others, I seem incapable of doing so. However, I am happy to report that my most popular post this year was a happy, if cheeky, one.
I know, it’s a shit joke, but it made me laugh!
Creatively
My two outlets for creativity are software development and writing blog posts both here and on my technology blog, Spoken Like a Geek. This year I wrote 59 posts here and 45 on SLAG which is pretty good going I think. A number of the posts on the SLAG site were about the “12 Apps in 12 Months” challenge I set myself at the beginning of the year. You can read more about that here but you can see all the commits I made due to these projects here:
I enjoy both the development and the writing so there’ll be more of both in ’26.
Best Of
Time for the awards for 2025. Here are my favourite selections:
Film: As I have already said about the film released this year I enjoyed the most was Companion.
Gig: I saw so few that it’s hard to decide but I would probably plump for Mike + the Mechanics as it was an uplifting evening packed full of hits.
Book: I was tempted to say something by Mick Herron but I am actually going to plump for Hotel Ukraine by Martin Cruiz Smith. I have chosen this because I love the character Arkady Renko and I know that there aren’t going to be any more because both Renko and Cruiz Smith are both dead.
Music: This one is a toughy. In the end, it came down to Steven Wilson’s The Overview and the Frankie Goes to Hollywood Welcome to the Pleasuredome reissue. I have gone for the former as I wanted to choose something new.
That’s it for another year.