a few of my favourite things
We’re having a quiet Christmas Day after a big, tumultuous year. I just woke up from a sneaky nap, and now I’m sitting on the couch with the aircon blasting, thinking about some of the highlights of 2025 while my husband installs a magnetic knife strip in the kitchen.
Outside, the weather is soupy-hot. My weather app says the temperature feels like 37C degrees. The cats are ignoring their Christmas gift – a spherical rattan scratcher toy – and have each found a spot around the house to snooze.
I’m secretly hoping for a storm despite warnings of ‘lashing winds’, flash flooding, and large hailstones. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, however, here are a few of my favourite things from the past year.
The best shows I watched this year include Toxic Town (Netflix), Boots (also Netflix), and Dying for Sex (Apple TV), all sad but edifying and beautiful in their own way. Honourable mentions go to Adolescence (of course) and SAS Rogue Heroes.
(Can I digress for a moment to mention a couple of non-favourites? Too Much was aptly named – it had so much going on that none of the storylines or characters was adequately developed. Everybody raved about Dept Q; I seem to be the only one who hated it.)
In terms of movies, I didn’t watch a single good film all year! Not one! By the time we got halfway through The Woman in Cabin 10, for example, I’d started hoping somebody would succeed in offing Keira Knightley’s character.
I’m so glad I’ve got that off my chest.
Favourite songs I discovered in 2025:
Emilie Nicolas – ‘Feel Fine’
#1 Dads & Tom Snowdon – ‘Return To’
Ólafur Arnalds & Talos – ‘Signs’
Haux – ‘Seaside’
Billie Eilish – ‘my future’
Biblio – ‘Curls’
Ásgeir – ‘Fennir Yfir’
Gordi – ‘Avant Gardener’
The Paper Kites, feat. Rosie Carney – ‘By My Side’
The Sei – ‘Let It All Go’
To be clear: some of these songs are several (even many!) years old, but they were new to me in 2025. I’ve played them a lot. (Where did everyone end up once they ditched Spotify? I’m still using Apple Music.)
Obviously, the best thing I did this year was GET MARRIED! We chose to seal the deal on 2/2 because we’re old, and it was a date we could easily recall.
I don’t regret having a small wedding, but it meant keeping to a very limited guest list. We were intending to have another reception-style party on a different day, probably in winter, but then the whole year seemed to simply disappear into a vortex of work, work, work, COVID, and a side serving of early pregnancy loss.
I still feel guilty about leaving some friends and family out of our special day. This photograph, however, makes me laugh every time I look at it. (There’s a reason nobody in my family lets me cut anything – turns out I butcher not only blocks of butter, cheese, and bread but also slabs of lemon cheesecake.)
My little yellow frock was an Italian-silk shift dress that I bought off the rack from Oroton on my lunch break in the city. After a hair-related debacle that left me panicking half the day, we ended up popping a Valium before walking down the ‘aisle’ – and we had a ball.
My reading habits in 2025 barely improved from last year’s, but I’m trying my best to mitigate the midnight doom-scrolling and transfer that time and energy to reading for pleasure once more. Because I read so much and so closely as part of my day job, I don’t find reading as enjoyable as I used to – as a pastime – but I’d really like to change that.
I was #blessed this year to be sent a couple of books to review, as well as interview four amazing authors at Brisbane Writers Festival, which forced me to read some titles I otherwise might have missed.
Toni Jordan’s Tenderfoot is my idea of a perfect novel: expertly structured, flawlessly rendered. No detail goes to waste as Jordan explores the vagaries of childhood and the cruel realities of greyhound racing in 1970s Brisbane.
Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend (a novel) and Abbas El-Zein’s Bullet Paper Rock (a memoir) have both stayed with me, too. Body Friend is an unusual meditation on chronic illness and the impossible tug between the impulse to either discipline or rest the sick body. Bullet Paper Rock centres on El-Zein’s childhood and adolescence in war-torn Lebanon and the cycles of violence to which humans seem so endlessly and inexplicably beholden.
Speaking of habits I need to curb, I’d like to shop/spend less in 2026.
I did nab a handful of Very Good Things this year, though.
The Embryolisse Lait-Crème-Concentré is actually as great as everyone says it is, especially under makeup as a morning moisturiser (forgive me a moment for sounding like an influencer). I was also delighted to discover a much cheaper alternative to The Body Shop’s enzyme peel: this Japanese product is a fraction of the price but does the same glorious thing: binds to dead skin cells, which then ball up into sticky little globs that you can wash off with warm water and a cloth. It’s so satisfying!
The clothes I’ve worn the most include a black boiled-wool dress (pinafore?) from COS in an oversized cocoon shape, as well as some poplin barrel-leg trousers from Assembly Label. The former is sadly too hot to wear in Brisbane except in the dead of ‘winter’, but it’s so easy to throw on over skivvies or blouses. I’ve gained a lot of weight in the last 12 months, and I find these simple but architectural shapes very flattering. The trousers, I think, are equally as flattering, even if my husband commented, ‘Stop! Hammer time!’ the last time I put them on for work.
Finally, the best recipe I stumbled on all year was this honey and pine nut tart from Sainsbury’s Magazine, of all places, which I found online while desperately searching for something baklava-esque in pie form.
I baked it for a dinner party and have made it half a dozen times since – with all sorts of nuts, including almonds, pistachios, and hazelnuts.
The pastry comes together in the food processor (no fussy cutting-in or other tedious steps), and it just seems to work out every time, even on the occasion that I forgot it was in the oven and over-baked the filling. It’s better when the centre is still wobbly, but you can’t too wrong.
My mother-in-law, not a big dessert person, even went back for seconds when I made this tart for her birthday a few months ago, which has never happened before.
