In our A-Z year-end retrospective, N stood for Not Knowing. That state has continued, it being Christmas, and therefore down-time for advocates dealing with house sales. The uncertainty has been a bit of a spectre at the feast, and things have also been pretty busy all month -- not the greatest combo.


HOWEVER, there has been Christmas. I'd wanted to spend Christmas in Kuching, and it has been a lot of fun to do so. There was the coffee Advent Calendar (with Parts 1 and 2). And the wacky decorations continued to be entertaining throughout.







But Christmas is sliding down towards oblivion again now, as we look forward to Lunar New Year...



December wasn't all Christmas, though. The month was also notable for Swinburne University's very interesting presentation of their Listening Initiative, and trips with friends to Tebakang and Annah Rais.





Overall, it hasn't really been a great year for Purple Tern, partly because of the still undiagnosed technical problems that occurred towards the end of the year. At 136 posts, 2025 finishes second-last of the seven years it has been running, with only the covid-afflicted 2021 coming up shorter.


The Velvet Cushion, meanwhile, exactly matched last year's total of 120 posts. I'd expected it to be more (and there's a queue of books that won't get their moment in the limelight until next year, even though they are finished already). It has been a super-busy and pretty untranquil year somehow, absolutely not conducive to writing of any description.

December's VC (as well as some interesting info that's charted in another Book notes retrospective) featured a number of standout reads:

-- As an observant evocation of 1980s England, I thought The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst was superb: Funny and tragic in equal measure. And David Szalay's Booker-winning Flesh paired a ruthlessly minimalist style with layers and layers of meaning, and the result was a powerful and worrying novel.

-- Another thing I loved this month was Mark Gatiss's selection and narration of Ghost Stories by E.F. Benson. Lovely shuddery stuff...


-- In the not-quite-fiction-not-entirely-fact category would come Anna Funder's Wifedom, an investigation of the largely unsung role of George Orwell's wife (and, by extension, the ways in which female invisibility remains a problem even now); and W. Somerset Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour, a quirky but illuminating account of his journey from Yangon to Haiphong in 1923.

-- In the drawer labelled "enjoyable police procedural", I'd put Ian Rankin's The Falls.

-- I didn't get on quite so well with Kristin Hannah's Night Road (interesting themes, but somehow one-dimensional), nor yet with Sanam Mahloudji's The Persians (which didn't seem to live up to the promise of its diaspora storyline). I'm reminded, though, of Simon Haisell's recent comment: "It always seems to me that the interesting questions about a book are not 'did you like it' or 'is it a good book,' but rather, 'where did it take you' and 'what did you learn.'" And I guess I learned something from both these books.


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Some links that caught my attention this month:

-- Ellen Scherr on why women get more honest (aka grow out of people-pleasing...) as they age. I have no means of evaluating the science here, but it's a thought-provoking read...


-- Chris Arnade, a walker/traveller/reader after my own heart, on the reasons he can't NOT believe in a God. (Side note: He quotes Wittgenstein, who philosophized from the trenches of WWI, and you think, whoa, that Wittgenstein, he was wise... And then the very next day, in The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez, you read: "According to the physicist Freeman Dyson, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures at Cambridge in 1946, if a woman dared to appear in the lecture room he would remain silent until she got the message and left." Jeez... It's a world full of contradictions...)

-- Calvin Jemarang on change and loss (the title of that piece -- The Vanishing: How a People Lost Everything but Refused To Disappear -- tells you plenty about its elegiac content).

-- Russians (of various political persuasions) on one of the wars we all wish would stop.

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So here we are... The last day of another year...





Right now, in the other room, Nigel is clanging away dismantling shelves... We have had a bit of a breather over the last few days, but the busy-busy will start in earnest again on Friday.

In a few hours' time, weather permitting, we'll head down to the Waterfront to see the fireworks. I'm scared of next year, and hope some big pyrotechnics will get it off to a good start.

Happy New Year, everyone!