I’m doing an audit of sorts at the moment, taking stock of what’s happened (for better or for worse) in 2025 and thinking ahead to what I want to do or achieve or make happen in 2026.
It’s been an unusual and uneven year to say the least. I completed the first draft of my second novel, Obsolete Constellations, and made a start on further edits of my first one, The Radiant City, in time to submit it for the Hilary Mantel Prize. Well, you’ve got to have a go at these things sometimes, haven’t you?
Gareth and I launched the podcast and anthology for True Voyage Is Return and, with our Little Earthquake hats on, created a series of short films as the culmination of our work on The Way I See It, an 18-month project capturing Birmingham residents’ thoughts and feelings in the full first year of the new Labour government.
Don’t let this busyness fool you, though. I’m three-quarters of the way through my lowest-earning financial year since 2011, and with the world as it is, this is no time to be struggling to find paying work. But anyway, I digress.
Some friendships have beautifully blossomed this year while others have fizzled out or else spectacularly crashed and burned. Same goes for some working relationships, too. I suspect it’s like this every year, but this year it feels more noticeable, more dramatic, more extreme. “Hold dear to all you have and are,” a wise friend has said to me more than once, and I feel like I’m really starting to understand what that means for me.
Likewise, with those journeys that have come to the end of the road: as Oliver Burkeman said (five years ago) in his last Guardian column: “…don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.” In some cases I did the burning and the choice was mine; in others, someone else made the choice and lit the match themselves — but either way, my task is to be comfortable leaving those smouldering embers behind and kindling new fires elsewhere.
This year saw the deaths of two people I never met but who made an indelible mark on me during my formative years — Dame Jane Goodall, the primatologist whose pioneering work studying chimpanzees transformed the way we understand so much of our own culture and behaviour; and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the scientist who devoted his life to studying African elephants and spearheading initiatives for their conservation. I would do well to remember the sparks they struck up in me as a child and as a teenager. I never found my way to the zoology career I dreamed of back then, but the principle of doing what really matters to you — the old chestnut of saying yes to something by saying no to something else — is something I ought to reflect on more in 2026.
Our Christmas Day viewing this year was Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third in a trilogy of star-studded whodunnits headed by Daniel Craig as the suave Southern-drawling detective Benoit Blanc. It was my second favourite of the three films, after Knives Out but before Glass Onion. (The internet largely seems to agree on that order of preference.) It pushed all my buttons about religion in the usual good and bad ways. It made me realise just how sick I am of far-right-leaning influencers (in real life as well as characters in fiction) but I probably have to accept that I’ll be seeing more of them, not less, in the coming years.
Not all of the top-flight actors get great parts or much screen time. Andrew Scott feels especially wasted as Lee, a sci-fi novelist who’s become angry and embittered behind the moat around his property. Cailee Spaeny also gets far less to do than her talent deserves, but she does get a few quietly powerful moments as Simone, a cellist battling chronic debilitating symptoms which medical science cannot explain and which she hopes faith (backed up by sizeable donations to the Church) might cure.
Very, very late in the almost two-and-a-half-hour film, Father Jud (played by Josh O’Connor, who’s the very best thing in it) talks in voiceover about what becomes of the surviving members of the congregation:
“The flock, what was left of them, scattered. Some got what they wanted, only to discover the one thing every holy man knows… God has a sense of humour. And some got a fresh start. Maybe to find a path that’s theirs. I hope so. And some got their miracle. Not being cured or fixed, but finding the sustaining power to wake up every day and do what we’re here to do, in spite of the pain. Daily bread.“
The bold type is my emphasis. As a child who unthinkingly prayed and sang hymns at primary school and who unwillingly went to Sunday school for a time, I always took the mention of “daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer very literally, and never really thought about it again much after that. I’ve since come to assume that we’re meant to see the nourishment in question as being God, rather than a loaf of white sliced, and I have no time for that way of thinking and even less interest in it.
The passage of bold text quoted above accompanies the camera zooming in on Simone who is playing her cello in full exhausting exhilarating flow. The solidly terrestrial kind of miracle, the sort that’s all about exceptional accomplishment, doesn’t come as a gift from an invisible force beyond the clouds. It comes from “doing what we’re here to do” — what we decide we’re here to do, without it being predetermined for us. That brief shot has functioned as its own kind of revelation for me, one I can totally get on board with.
So, here’s to a 2026 filled with daily bread — the kind we bake for ourselves, with craft and sweat and discipline and love. That’s the nourishment I want and need. That’s what I’m going to bulk up on this year, and I intend to enjoy every last crumb of it.
