Well here we are again, the end of another year. Things have been pretty quiet here, and for that I apologise, but there are as always reasons. I wrote 12 months ago that 2024 had been pretty 5H1T, seems 2025 didn’t get the message that it was supposed to be better, and honestly I can say that 2026 is looking to be an improvement. That said perhaps….

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So what are those reasons for the almost radio silence? Well there are some biggies. Firstly my Mum passed away back in May. Not totally unexpected, she has had Alzheimer’s disease for several years now, and the progression of the disease and the impact on the rest of her has been pretty stark. I can’t say that the last six months of her life were pleasant for anyone. In some ways grief has been a funny thing because really we ‘lost’ my Mum a long time ago. Dad passed away in 2016, so now they are together again. It’s interesting that in my 53rd year I am perhaps more alone than I have ever been in my life. Sorting out Mum’s ‘estate’ has taken a bit of time and isn’t done yet mostly because the Department for Work and Pensions can’t be bothered to get their finger out and tell us whether they have overpaid or underpaid Mum’s state pension and other benefits. It’s difficult to move on.

I was going to talk about the state of the world here, but honestly you probably know as much as I do about that, and I don’t want this post to be too depressing.

Going forward I would maybe like to dust the cobwebs off of this site again. The only social media I keep up-to-date these days is Instagram, and mostly it’s switched to receive, but I’ve been thinking about the good old days of the internet when weblogs (blogs) such as this were de rigueur and maybe there’s a place for it again? I certainly not going back to twitter or whatever we’re supposed to call it these days, I don’t use ****book and I’m barely on Mastodon. I’ll see. Any thoughts let me know.

So aside from the above, what else have I been up to in 2025? Well let’s see now.

Reading

As is my want I’ve read quite a bit this year. I read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas for the first time and found it amazing. Other highlights include The Lantern Network by Ted Allbeury, Ratline by Philippe Sands, Ghost Story by Peter Straub and The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. I don’t tend to read many (if any) modern new releases, so if you want to know about something that was published this year and what I thought of it, then I probably wouldn’t know. I doubt that will change in the future either.

Watching

I hardly watch television these days, and a bit like my reading when I do it’s older stuff. I have enjoyed catching up on the latest Star Trek incarnation – Strange New Worlds. It’s been a bit hit and miss, but overall it’s been quite enjoyable. The latest season of Slow Horses was okay, but I think it wasn’t as good as previous seasons. I did enjoy the latest All Creatures Great and Small although again I prefer the version from the 1970’s/80’s. The new version of The Day of the Jackal was good and Conclave wasn’t bad either, and my watching of it ended with some fairly auspicious timing!

Work

A much quieter year. There has been a lot of work on local government reorganisation happening which has had a knock-on effect of slowing down a lot of the work that I would traditionally be involved in. Uncertainty pervades. It’s meant that I’ve been a lot less busy workwise, but then with things happening with Mum, that has been a balancing force. Not sure when / if things will pick up. Work in 2026 could be one to watch.

Garden

Again my focus has been a little bit elsewhere, and I’ve not grown as much this year as in previous years, there have been some highlights around broad beans and lettuce but otherwise I’d say it’s been a pretty average growing year.

Outdoors

Some salvation here, a lot of downtime has again been spent walking (and thinking). It keeps me mentally on an even keel, and I don’t plan to make any changes here.

So what about the year to come? Well I think the global outlook doesn’t look great, but I don’t think I really need to tell you that or dwell on it too much. I certainly don’t intend to be watching, reading or listening to anymore news than is absolutely necessary. Concentrating about what is in my control and what I can do about it feels like the best course of action.

Will I make more of this site and post more here? Frankly I don’t know, I’d like to but the best intentions and all that. Let’s see what happens.

It’s ten years since I went freelance, do you have any question you’d like to ask me about that?

I’m not sure whether I am going to be able to participate in AudioMo this year, but if I do subscribers to this blog will likely get at least one post with audio, a day for the month of June. If I don’t posts will return to their usual hiatus.

It would be easy to look back on the last year and remember some of the things that haven’t gone quite according to plan, not that there particularly was a plan. I’ll try not to do that but…

The year started, the way the previous year ended, with lots of water. Groundwater flooding is a thing here and floodwater started in December last year and carried on until May. It’s the longest length of time I can remember, and the levels were about the worst they’ve ever been and for a good proportion of that period. It doesn’t make for a very comfortable time and at times when pumps are running quite mentally tiring. I have realised over the last few years how much I hate the rain, mentally I find it very tough. This coming season it looks like it might be drier, fingers-crossed.

It doesn’t matter how much people bang on about climate change they always forget about the changes that are already locked into our climate / weather systems and the adaptation that will be required, because they are too busy banging on about cutting carbon. The latter is important, but adaptation will make a significant difference to many peoples lives, probably without them noticing.

We’ve had a change of government, finally the venal tories have been kicked out of office to be replaced by a seemingly lacklustre labour. Whilst its clear that they have a lot to do and it’s early days they are very unimpressive and picking fights over things that don’t really matter whilst boxing themselves into not raising taxes just about anywhere. Modern politicians are so f*****g useless.

I’ve pretty much given up with social media these days. I’ve closed my Twitter account, I’ve been there since sending tweets was something you did via SMS and I feel a bit of a loss about giving up something I’ve had for so long, but honestly the place is the worst of a bad bunch, and I am considering going even further.

LinkedIn is becoming quite the cesspool of trolls too, I am amazed that so many “professionals” can be such a bunch of dicks to one another. As someone who is self-employed I feel I need to maintain a presence there but honestly I find the behaviour of many of the users to be something that wouldn’t be allowed in a work place so shouldn’t be allowed there.

Bluesky appears to be attracting a lot of bot accounts. I’m not very active on there, but seemingly a lot of accounts want to follow me. Many do not seem to be real.

I don’t use Facebook anymore, although I still have an account. I do use Instagram, and will probably continue to for a while at least, even if my posting is sproradic at best.

Mastodon is probably the least used (generally) even though it’s been around a lot longer than some of the others. Possibly second only to Twitter and Facebook.

When #AudioMo comes around in the summer I’ll need to seriously think about what I’m doing.

We ended the year with our dog Sam swallowing a stone and requiring emergency surgery to remove it, followed by a lengthy stay in a veterinary hospital and a hefty bill which will only partly be covered by insurance. I don’t begrudge the unexpected expense but I could do without it.

Overall 2024 has been pretty 5h1t.

Reading

I’ve read a lot this year. We’ve pretty much given up tv as a pastime in the evenings, and reading has pretty much been my No.1 pursuit. Top fiction authors this year include: Craig Thomas, Martin Walker, Stephen King, Robert Harris and Georges Simenon.

Watching

As I mentioned above, not a lot but I did enjoy both Slow Horses and Masters of the Air. I also enjoyed Guy Ritchie’s somewhat ridiculous but very fun, Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Garden

The veg garden has been pretty average this year but we did have a magnificent glut of purple podded mange tout.

Work

The year held a lot of promise at the start, but ended up being quieter than expected. Some promised projects didn’t get started but may come up in 2025, and others became a little more involved. Overall not a bad year, but not the best either.

Outdoors

I spent a lot of time walking in my downtime. I do some of my best thinking when I’m outside and it’s the place that keeps me mentally calmer. I’ve kept a daily wildlife log on these walks too. I plan to continue with this next year.

That’s it. That’s 2024, here’s to 2025.

After days, weeks, months and probably even years I’ve finally deleted my Twitter account. I’ve been @tontowilliams there since 2007 when twitter used SMS to broadcast messages.

In many ways I am gutted to have deleted my account. However, I have not been using the platform for many months and prior to that I was at best a sporadic Tweeter.

I am still on the socials though. Probably the one that I am most active on is Instagram where I am also @tontowilliams but I am also on Blue Sky and Mastodon although my presence on the latter two is infrequent at best.

I am of course also here, but if you are receiving this or have found it online you’ll know just how regular these communications are. (There might be an end of the year post coming soon, but I make no promises).

Quitting Twitter is of course everyones personal choice and there are many good reasons why people feel the need to remain there. My presence there is not really a good reason so I’ve left. I don’t want to continue to support the individual who now owns the site. It’s that simple.

I made many good friends on Twitter and I hope that I won’t loose touch with them, some will hopefully read this. If that’s you then do reach out I would like to stay in touch.

I think that I spend far too much time thinking!

I’d say that I have the majority of my life behind me now and sometimes I worry that I don’t know the direction that I’m heading (other than the inevitable at some point) and possibly I feel the most uncertain about life in general than I ever have at any other point in my life. There are ‘things’ that have passed that I can never get back, and some things that I know I’ll lose at some point in the future.
I’ll sit and write about those things to kind of crystalise them and have them down on paper. It helps me think and worry about them less.

The adage ‘life’s too short’ is pretty damn accurate. I read a lot of stoic philosophy and the tenant that you cannot control the things that happen to you, only how you react to them is very true.

Lately I’ve been trying new ‘things’ to explore some of the thoughts about what I want to do with my life. Some of them have given me pleasure, but I don’t feel very fulfilled by them and ultimately I know that I’m going to stop doing them. They were experiments. They weren’t necessarily failures, nor where they raging successes.

I’ve learnt that sometimes you need to be content with what you have, whilst accepting that sometime you will lose some of those ‘things’.

Sorry for the random deep thoughts. I am going to post this but I might delete it later.

Back towards the end of last year I discovered my Kindle reading stats. I mostly read on a Kindle Paperwhite that’s about five years old, and although the stats aren’t available on that device you can find them either on a Kindle reading app (iOS or Android) or by going to the link here. (You need to be signed into your Amazon account and read on a Kindle!)

The stats showed me that I had a pretty healthy consecutive daily reading streak going, and I got to thinking as to whether or not I could get that to a year? To be honest I read everyday so it didn’t feel like it was going to be a hard target to achieve, and a few days ago I hit the 366 days (this year’s a leap year).

I was right, it wasn’t a hard ask to hit that target, I just had to read a minimum of a few pages of a book each day and as I normally have more than one book on the go at any one time it didn’t impact on my reading that much. Except towards the end of the ‘year’ when I focussed my reading much more towards the kindle, and my ‘to be read’ pile(s) of real books started to stack up. I noticed that I would favour a book on my kindle over reading a ‘real’ book. Towards the end I was feeling much more driven by the target, and at the same time realising what an arbitrary thing it was. To be honest I nearly gave up because I didn’t want to be ruled by a number or gamified by some statistics. Since completing the year, I haven’t opened up my kindle and I do miss it, but I’ve been making some minor inroads into the piles of unread ‘real’ books. The piles had started to garner comments during Zoom calls about how many books I had, and how precarious the stacks were looking (these comments aren’t without foundation), and they are only a small proportion of books I’ve yet to read.

In total over the ‘year’ I read 135 books, 91 of these were on my kindle. (If that sounds like a lot of reading, I don’t really watch any tv or films these days or spend a lot of evenings out of the house, I’m mostly reading).

Will it change my reading habits? No probably not, although I might be a bit more balanced between reading on my Kindle and a ‘real’ book. I might have a look in a years time and see if that’s the case.

One thing I won’t be doing though is chasing any more arbitrary numbers, I track my reading, but I don’t have a target of a number of books I want to read, that’s another one of ‘those’ numbers that I gave up years ago. I’m still going to be taking part in reading events (if you listened to my AudioMo posts, you’ll know I was taking part in “June On The Range”, an event around reading Westerns. I’m also currently taking part in “The Summer of Trek” – reading Star Trek books during June, July & August and about to take part in “GarbAugust” – reading trashy books during August. I like these events, because they make me read things that perhaps I wouldn’t otherwise, and there’s no one holding my feet to a flame to take part.

Reading, whatever drives you to do it should at least be fun.