The Honey Pot

Happy New Year!

29 December 2025

What a blur of a year. I know it's cliche to say it went fast, but it really did.

As a person with a shit memory, who didn't get back into blogging until June, I can barely remember the first half of the year. Looking at the photos I've taken (mostly cats), I can only surmount that in January my cat tried to steal some baked beans, and we did some house renovations.

That really has been our year: Making the house nicer. It has been a multi-year process since we first moved in at the beginning of 2023, but this year we put new flooring in the living room, new skirting, finally threw out the disgusting old blinds and replaced it with a nice net curtain & regular curtains. Replaced a bed that caused endless back pain, fixed a leaky roof, and got a new shed that can actually fit my gardening crap!

In July I started to collect enamel pins, and slowly but steadily the collection has been growing. Pretty soon, my first board will be complete and I'll post an update picture.

And politically, the UK's Online Safety Act also threw me into despair as I lost all faith in Labour, and started to read about communism. I don't want my site to just become all the commie things I read so I've only made one post, but it remains something rather important and will continue to be so in 2026.

Speaking of 2026, I decided to set myself a New Years' challenge. A very easy one, since like most people my resolutions never pan out. I just want to read 10 books in 2026. Less than one a month seems achievable. I've already chosen the books (although they might change), so in no particular order:

For most of them I'll be reading on an eReader (Kobo Clara BW). I've already started reading Betrayal at Falador, giving myself a little head start. Set in the RuneScape universe it follows a young Squire of Falador and his friends. I'll do a full review when I've finished it, but so far I really enjoy it. I wanted to start off with a book where I already know the universe, hoping that it would help keep me intrigued and actually do some reading. That's why there's a second RuneScape book in there, by a different author with a different story entirely.

You'll also notice a lot of classics, Frankenstein, 1984, Dorian Gray, Hitchhiker's, Hobbit, they're books that I feel I really ought to read at least once in life.

For the final three, 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' is one I first noticed on The Story Graph, an app/website I'm using to track my reading. Set in a coffee shop in Tokyo, customers can travel back in time. I've heard it can be quite an emotional read, it's very different to what I've read in the past (largely Discworld, or that TERF's wizard series) so it's a tentative toe in the pond of literature.

Second to last now, The Paradox Paradox. I've been a long time fan of Nerdcubed, going back probably 11ish years? I read his first book, Fuck Yeah Video Games, and loved his writing style. TPP is his first fiction novel, a sci-fi book on time travel. Getting this published was a total clusterfuck for Mr Hardcastle, as the original publisher Unbound quite literally became unbound when they went bankrupt, and in the process, decided to screw over all the authors that used them. Eventually he was able to reclaim the rights to his books, retrieve the physical copies of TPP, and get them sent out to backers. It's a book I've been waiting on for around four years I think, so I'm looking forward to reading it!

And finally, The Hedge Wizard. I know nothing about it or the author, I just saw that it was a fantasy book that I think takes elements from the likes of D&D, so we'll see.

It is.. hopefully not going to be a hard challenge. I'd love to complete it early and add more books to the list. With the exception of The Paradox Paradox, they're all ~450 pages or less. A long time ago I used to love reading and getting drawn into a whole new universe, but the last ten years or so I've barely done any. Life became a huge drag, and any moment I had to myself I didn't have the energy, so I'd just watch TV or YouTube. What will hopefully help with that is the other big change for 2026: I finally found a local therapist. I don't know what we'll talk about, genuinely, the first session is in the new year and I haven't got a clue how it'll go, but I'm happy to be making the effort.

So I guess if I was going to set a resolution for 2026, it'd be this: Take things slow, and be less online. Don't get sucked up into the non-stop manufactured drama and appreciate quiet moments.