The year started badly. I’d intended to take a sabbatical and I got one in the form of a long illness. For five months I was housebound with an unpleasant case of TSW, some weeks of which were bedbound. It was very shit.

Before I understood how ill I was, I’d been in Paris with Landis. Look at him! What a winning fellow!

L said he could hear me scratching feverishly during the nights. One morning, I woke to find spatters of blood on the steps to my sleeping loft. I must have come down to use the bathroom in the night but not noticed how badly I’d injured myself. I flew home to Glasgow and closed the door for the next five months.

There’s a picture of me (I can’t bring myself to post it) at the Hunterian’s Derek Jarman show in June: I’m dressed up for the occasion with a nice brooch and a colourful new shirt, but I also have a grey beard and I look tired. Being out and seeing something new felt like a triumph, but I collapsed somewhat inside a dark video installation and just stayed there, listening to the bleeps and bloops, for about 40 minutes before deciding it was time to go home again. We’d taken an Uber to the museum even though it’s only a half-hour walk away, so compromised was my ability to move about. Still, it was the start of something.

So I got on with things, beginning with the edit of Dickon Edwards’ Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol. 1, now published and selling. We ran a successful Kickstarter to secure an advance for the author and most of the production costs: this really seems to be the way forward. Dickon sent me a Christmas card last week saying “thank you for making me an author.” He was an author already of course, but I was able to use the skills I’ve gradually developed to produce my own work to nudge him into actually having a book. I was glad to do it.

At various points this year, Mark and I “finished” our film. I was in Bournemouth and London (not least for the Iceman’s big Bill Murray gig) and the Midlands at various times to record “one last thing.” It really is finished now and will be screened at the Wolverhampton Lockworks in February 2026. The show has sold out and promises to be a blast. We hope to tour it next year.

In July Samara and I visited Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome, joined in Rome by S’s parents from Canada. I was happy to be back in the world, gorging myself on sights and art and clothes and food and colour and sunshine and renewed relationships.

Also in July I mucked about with movable type at Glasgow Press. Since learning about typography for New Escapologist, I have wanted to know more. My letterhead design was so fiddly and old-fashioned compared to the simple posters the other workshop attendees wanted to make, that I had to be trained by a 93-year-old man called “Auld Dan” — the only person who remembered how to do it all. At one point, he turned the workshop upside down in pursuit of a Gill Sans solidus for the flat number in my address. My “honestly, we could just use the hyphen” was met with a pitying look.

Also-also in July, I did a one-hour talk at the Idler Festival in Hampstead. I was scheduled for the same programming block as headliner Michael Palin so we didn’t get many bums on seats, which was rather annoying given how far I’d come. Still, I made friends with Lawrence from Felt and it’s always nice to see Stew and Tom:

and Ben and Tim:

That’s the art critic Tim Richardson, by the way, who, as a youngster, was in Cluub Zarathustra. I recorded an interview with him in case I should ever revisit my history of the Cluub for a second edition — which I may well do!

September saw a trip to Montreal to refresh myself in the sulfuric winds of our volcano lair. I saw a bit of contemporary art, a lot of family, bought and read Big Mall by Canadian Kate Black, ate poutine and the world’s best bagels and challah and hamantaschen, and drank a lot of Third Wave coffee and St. Ambroise oatmeal stout. My stomach just gurgled involuntarily as I wrote those words.

October had me tabling at London’s Small Publishers Fair and the Edinburgh Zine Fair. I was joined at the former by Dickon and Dowie. The SPF was a bit stressful, largely because the courier failed to deliver Dickon’s books, the launch and promotion of which was the main point of being there. It was fun though, albeit resolutely in the realm of Type 2 fun. The evening of the 24th also saw Dickon’s book launch at the Boogaloo, for which we still didn’t have any books but people gladly bought New Escapologist in which DE has an extended interview. Edinburgh Zine Fair was easier: closer to home and far lower stakes (plus I met Goblin, pictured below).

A planned trip to Poland and then to Utrecht for Le Guess Who in November had to be cancelled. I was so frazzled after the London affair that I lost my passport, probably on the lousy night bus home. That’s what you’re dealing with here: a man who has mastered independent production, travels the world, hobnobs with celebrities, but still has to get the night bus. Urgh. I also just heard that my insurance claim for the cancelled trip (a flight, intercity trains, festival tickets, a hotel room) has been denied because I hadn’t yet booked a return flight. What’s the fucking difference? Double-Urgh. Wretched.

November, as you know, saw the launch of New Escapologist Issue 18. Huzzah, huzzah, fun was had.

The year saw plenty old-skool blogging at my website and here at the NE website and in our buzzy newsletter (subscribe for free!). I also have my little books blog now, so you can see what I’m reading at any given point, plus a few notes, and indeed lists of everything I’ve ever read in adult life. Speaking of which, here’s the gargantuan (sickbed) 2025 books list:

David Toop – Two-Headed Doctor
Melissa Broder – Milk Fed
Robert Plunket – Love Junkie
Christopher Isherwood – Christopher and His Kind
Melissa Broder – Death Valley
Brian Dillon – Essayism
Jessica Lack – Why We Are Artists: 100 World Art Manifestos
Jenny Hval – Paradise Rot
Tabitha Lasley – Sea State
Dorothy Tse – Owlish
Johanne Lykke Holm – Strega
Laren Stover – Bohemian Manifesto
Elvia Wilk – Oval
Elaine Kraf – The Princess of 72nd Street
Jennette McCurdy – I’m Glad My Mom Died
Will Hodgkinson – Street Level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence
Thomas Espedal – Tramp
Margarita García Robayo – Fish Soup
Ariana Harwicz – Feebleminded
Dan Rhodes – Sour Grapes
John Fante – Ask the Dust
Laura del Rivo – The Furnished Room
Christopher Isherwood – Mr Norris Changes Trains
Rebecca Gisler – About Uncle
Harlan Ellison (ed.) – The Last Dangerous Visions
Knut Hamsun – Hunger
Stephen King – Carrie
Albertine Sarrazin – Astragal
Octavia E. Butler – Bloodchild
Stephen King – Cujo
Lissa Evans – Picnic on Craggy Island
Stephen King – Firestarter
David Garnett – Lady into Fox
Gabriel Josipovici – 100 Days
William Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience
Jenny Odell – Saving Time
David Sedaris – Happy-Go-Lucky
Claire Baglin – On the Clock
Hergé – The Shooting Star
Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (aka The White Pube) – Poor Artists
Stephen King – Different Seasons
Hergé – Destination Moon
Adrian Edmondson – Berserker!
Stephen King – You Like it Darker
Lou Sullivan – We Both Laughed in Pleasure
Hugo Greenhalgh – The Diaries of Mr. Lucas
Stephen King – Thinner
Stephen King – The Colorado Kid
Kate Black – Big Mall
Stephen King – 11/22/63
Charlie Porter – Bring no Clothes
Stephen King – Dreamcatcher
Oliver Double – 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up
Marc Marron – Attempting Normal
Stephen King – The Stand
Benjamin Myers – Jesus Christ Kinski
Muriel Spark – Not to Disturb
Sayaka Murata – Life Ceremony

The keen of eye will notice a fair few Spine Kinglers towards the end of that list. This is because I’ve decided to read them all. Burp.

My loved one finished her Monster of the Week project, for which I have been a cheerleader, on Christmas Day. I adore it and wonder what she will do next.

Our non-festive Christmas Day film was Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001). In fact, we watched Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) as well. When I finally get around to writing a script for Robert Wringham’s Movie (20??), I’ll see the 1988 Elvira flick as something to aspire to. It’s closer to what’s in my head than my previous touchstone of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985). Wringham, played by some skeletal lesbian in a well-cut suit, will have encounters with officialdom and showbiz weirdos on the road to a dream gig at the Blackpool Sandcastle. I’m serious!

And at the very end of the year, my mysterious second novel skids on its knees through December’s slowly closing gate. You can order it now (and please do) with no title or blurb or clue as to what it can possibly be about (other than, perhaps, the colour yellow). In hardback, mind you! There comes a marginally more conventional paperback release in the new year.

So. There goes the Year of the Centipede. I enter the Year of the Barreleye feeling liberated and sanguine. I’d like to start the new one by channelling this guy, whom I spotted at the National Gallery of Englandshire in the summer: