17 Things About 2025

02 January 2026

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Being productive

#12weekyear
Early in January 2025, I read a book called The 12 Week Year, and immediately started to follow its precepts.

By splitting my year into four periods of 12 weeks, I would have four times as many deadlines as I might have with an annual plan. It’s been exciting, and extremely productive. Try it yourself!

In a nutshell, the 12 Week Year requires you to set clear goals every quarter, then every week, and join others to hold yourself accountable, especially by focusing on outputs (which you control) rather than outcomes (which you don’t).

Outputs, outcomes…? What does that mean, in practice? Well, the book gives these examples: if you are an athlete, concentrate on outputs such as the number of times you turn up for training. If you’re in sales, focus on the number of calls you make to potential customers. You can’t make the gold medal come to you, but you can do lots of training. You can’t make the customer buy, but you can make lots of calls.

Sounds obvious – it IS obvious – but following this framework, general approach and tight deadlines definitely helped me to do, rather than merely dream about, the next item on this list:

My first solo gallery show

#Soloshow
This happened in February. I gave myself precisely six days, from booking the gallery to showing visitors around at the preview party. Nothing works for me so well as a tight deadline.

Too tight? Perhaps, but I had little choice because my show was called Magnolias of Hampstead, and the next time the gallery was available would have been long after magnolia season. I concluded that nobody would want to go indoors to look at pictures of magnolias in April or May, when plenty of other flowers would be out and the sun blazing too.

So I went for it, put the cash down and opened in Feb, and lots of people were kind enough to come along and (even better) buy my pictures so that instead of making a loss on the gallery I made a very welcome profit.

I cannot tell you how happy that makes me, not just the profit, important though that is, but the idea that people enjoy my art enough to pay for it and stick it on a wall. I suppose I should be over that, should have learned to take it entirely for granted, years and years and years ago. But also: maybe not. What I did in Feb goes to show that it’s never too late to do what you have dreamed of doing, or at least it’s not too late for me, or wasn’t this time anyway.

I should add here that I went on to release other collections of art during 2025 – like this one, in the summer – and sold more pictures. Hurrah!

Attention, Distraction, Fiction

#Readfiction
My wife Harriet, who basically never posts anything on LinkedIn – not from one year to the next – went mad earlier in 2025 and did actually post something. It went viral, got well over 100,000 views and well over 600 comments, which obviously made me sick with envy but hey. What was it about? Well, we both studied English Lit – that’s how we met – and have both always been voracious readers, but Harriet has gradually realised that her own capacity to read fiction has dwindled to almost-nothing.

Thanks to her post I have become increasingly aware that my own reading too has suffered. I read loads of non-fiction, but non-fiction is different because, amid 24-hour news and social media bonfires, it appears to be useful, by which I mean that it’s become increasingly hard for me to “justify” (if only to myself) spending more than a short time on fiction.

This perhaps explains why I’ve become such a big, big fan of short stories. Short stories are great, they really are (that’s a link to various short story champions, as listed in recent anthology by Nick Royle). All the same, I’m taking steps to increase my consumption of longer fiction too.

In August, I was the midweek guest at a residential week for writers at the Arvon foundation (Devon branch). For years now, I’ve been a co-tutor on many week-long Arvon courses, but I’ve never before been a guest. Talking about my work felt very self-indulgent, but as you see I’m doing it again right now.

In other writing news, I’ve been delighted to work as a co-writer / editor / mentor / ghostwriter with various people who may prefer me not to say more than that; and have enjoyed the Writers Support Groups I host each month.

Insert Name Here

Was going to write something here about the awfulness of INSERT NAME HERE, who has given me nightmares throughout 2025, but I don’t want to give him airtime. You’re welcome.¹

That being said, I was happy to see again, during the Christmas break, a friend from the US, someone I first met before university. She’s actively opposed to INSERT NAME HERE and brought along with her a copy of one of my books so that she could take a photo with its author, and I thought: ah, yes, I did also write THAT.

So, that’s good.

Another hand on another shoulder

I made portraits of various people alongside their inner child, as part of a project I’ll be coming back to in 2026. Here’s one, of Ben as he is now and as he was long ago:

The hand is modelled on Ben’s dad’s hand, which appeared in the photo of young Ben that I worked from. Ben places his dad’s hand on his younger self’s shoulder: think about that.

Ominous lumps

#Peanut
Peanut, my beloved schnauzer, burned through all our pet insurance by the middle of the summer (including £1,800 to remove a grass-seed from her paw, my gosh, what the heck). By the end of the year Peanut had developed several ominous lumps on her tummy, along both sides, following the chain of her mammary glands – a problem almost exclusively, so we’re told, for female dogs that have had puppies. Before she came to us, Peanut was a breeder’s dog and had 17 puppies in three litters (the Kennel Club maximum).

Finding and dealing with those lumps caused weeks of dismay and required drastic action. It’s been a tough several weeks, to be honest, which if you care for stories involving dogs you can read about here.

Select your Favourites

For years I found Instagram to be a huge source of pleasure and support and it still was, at the start of 2025, when I was announcing my solo gallery show (see above).

But I spent the rest of the year becoming sick of it.

One trigger for that was news that Meta (which also owns Facebook) had decided to train its AI on thousands and thousands of published books, including all my own published books, without permission or regard for copyright. How rude!

After reading about that, I found it increasingly obvious that it was never really Instagram itself that was a source of pleasure and support to me – far from it, because the site is almost deliberately designed to frustrate. What I loved about it were the people whose accounts I follow there, and who follow me my account.

More recently, Meta has decided to push more and more stuff at me from people I don’t know (not only ads). Looking for a workaround, I learned that I could mark certain accounts I follow as “Favourites” so that their posts would show up in my Instagram feed. I started doing that but it soon became obvious that I can’t do that for everyone whose posts I’d like to see: it’s time-consuming and fiddly.

After spending an hour or so marking various accounts as Favourites I stopped, in order to get on with something else, only to find when I came back to Instagram that I could now see posts only from that smallish handful of Favourites, and nobody else I’d like to see.

#Enshittification
If you too feel more than a little fed up with Meta, you may find it entertaining to watch Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, explain how it became so awful.

But perhaps it’s a blessing that the platform I previously enjoyed has become so bad. With this latest Favourites debacle, Instagram seems to have rendered itself useless to me.

I have deleted the app from my phone. Not my account, for now anyway, just the app. But perhaps I’d be better off quitting entirely, and signing up instead for a newsletter or RSS feed from all the people I want to follow, and trusting that people who want to follow me / my work will find me / it somehow.

Outstagram

Speaking of which… as an experiment I recently set up a whole new website of my own using an incredibly simple and cheap platform called Blot, which enables you to post to the web from your own files in just a few moments. It has been a total pleasure.

One of the things I did with it was post pictures that I would previously have posted on Instagram, using the tag “Outstagram” (geddit?). I also set up quickly a Blot site devoted to Micro-Memoirs.

Having demonstrated to myself that anybody could build a simple Blot website, I’m now bringing my Outstagram feed back here, where you can see it on this website. My plan is to bring more and more of what I previously posted on Instagram back onto my own site.

Micro-Memoir in 30 Days

#Micro-memoir
I launched an email based course for people who want to create some kind of micro-memoir, using a combination of words and pictures. (What is a micro-memoir?, you might ask. It’s a fragment, or down-payment on a longer work, rather than a whole life story that, because it’s so daunting, never gets started.)

It was utterly exhilarating, believe it or not, to write daily emails for 30 days, and to feel that I was creating something of lasting value, useful to many other people who may not know about it yet but will one day sign up for the series of emails and create a heartfelt work of their own.

I intend to write more pop-up email series of that kind, they’re a terrific forcing function to get work done – and I will do so in 2026. In each case, my plan is to invite you to follow along only with those that interest you, because I do realise that daily emails about something that doesn’t interest you can quickly become a pain in the wotsit.

A Room of One’s Own

I made portraits of several people in the offices where they do their great work.

This was a huge pleasure because it meant that, in an age when it’s all too easy to go all digital and remote I was able to get into a room with people I like and admire and take reference photos and make portraits that a they would like, I hoped, and b others would find interesting.

This one shows Mark Stephens, a celebrated lawyer:

I first interviewed Mark for a magazine in the 1990s, not long after the death of his client Paula Yates.

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The person who commissioned the first portrait of this kind, in 2025, was Patrick, who went on to write something lovely about the process.

Weekly support

As part of my 12-week year thingy (see above I set up a small but perfectly formed weekly accountability group, comprising two other people. It has been a big help, every Monday, and a massive pleasure.

Typing this, I realise that more than five years have passed since I set up The Whizzy Group, which was really a beautiful thing.

Tech protection

I have made lots of changes to my use of tech recently, not all of them in 2025 but every time I thought about writing and sharing something about it I got stuck with the idea that I should make it hugely comprehensive. That’s obviously not going to happen for a while. In the meantime:

#Substack
I’ve deleted the Substack app, because I don’t want to get sucked into yet another walled garden on the internet. NOTE: I continue to receive with pleasure email newsletters from people I follow on Substack, thank you, but recently I’ve been subscribing to new ones via RSS, not email.

#Proton
I’ve switched my email, calendar and related apps from Google to Proton which is much more privacy focused.

I’m also using a paper diary as much as possible:

#Signal
For messaging, I’m using the privacy focused messenger Signal wherever possible, rather than WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta. I have friends whose work has very high security requirements and they will only use Signal, which tells you something.
Before signing up to new services or newsletters I create anonymous email aliases, which is very easy using the privacy-focused web browser Duck Duck Go.

Throughout, my intention has been to remove excessive snooping by awful tech vampires. I also want to reduce my own tendency to be easily distracted, and that’s why I’ve deleted most apps from the home screen of my phone.
I’ll be sharing more about people’s home screen choices in 2026.

Typewriter maniac

#Typewriter
Every so often this year, particularly when overwhelmed by tech, I have got out my typewriters (I have two and enjoyed myself knowing that as I bashed out words I was unconnected to any kind of digital network, and also (a very different pleasure knowing that I could never really delete what I typed but only type over it.

I love my typewriters.

One is an Olympia, the other an Olivetti. The Olivetti is by a long way the classier of the two:

But I love them both.

Outer space

One of the greatest pleasures of 2025 was taking myself to the Proms, for the first time in years. I went alone and it was a last-minute booking, so I took what I could find. The only available seats were about a mile above the orchestra, practically in outer space.

Additionally, the celebrated conductor who was supposed to preside over that day’s programme fell sick, was replaced by someone else, but I REALLY DIDN’T CARE IT WAS AN ABSOLUTE JOY.

An apology

It was our turn to provide Christmas Dinner this year and I did the cooking (I do most of the cooking in our house and I got really stressed out and had to apologise. I’m a happier cook when improvising, not following recipes with tight schedules.

In other meal-related news, I threw a surprise party for someone earlier in the year which was also extremely stressful, until it actually started, from which point it, too, was AN ABSOLUTE JOY.

Still banging on about portraits

There was an exhibition of society portraits by John Singer Sargent in Kenwood House, Hampstead(ish, and I loved it.
Here’s a picture of me, by me, admiring one of Sargent’s paintings:

If you missed it, sorry about that but you can find lots of the pictures online and in books etc. In fact there are some cracking pictures by Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square, if you happen to be in London any time.

Also: I enjoyed all the portraits in the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer awards this year, and would love to think that maybe I’ll submit one of my own at some point, who knows, maybe next year – after all, I have been telling myself for years that I want to put something in for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition but keep missing the deadline.

Please hold me accountable in 2026.

Thank you

I am grateful to you for reading what I write, looking at my pictures, and just generally being here.

Here’s a sketch of a road in London NW2, on the last day of 2025:

¹ INSERT NAME HERE. I first wrote about him in 2004, for the Financial Times. It looks awfully quaint, now.