Barnflakes’ Top 25 of 2025
Blue-grey Tanager, Costa Rica.
1. Costa Rica [Travel]
It was like a dream where humans and nature were living harmoniously side by side. The closest I’ve been to paradise. But it won’t last forever.
2. House [Home]
We’ve spent a year and a half updating a large Edwardian house in Cornwall. H did such an amazing job of project managing it.
3. Katrina: Come Hell and High Water [TV] [Homeless Movies]
Netflix bought some footage of New Orleans I shot in 1996 for their moving three-part documentary on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
4. The Celtic Way Pilgrimage [Travel] [Capricious Cornwall]
In some ways more atmospheric than the one I walked with H in May several years ago, when the weather was glorious every day. This one, where my daughter and I walked from Newquay to St Michael’s Mount, sleeping in churches along the way, with H joining us each day from Portreath onwards, was a heady mix of rain, mist, wind and sun.
Road trip… Cornwall to London and back again.
5. Finally being reunited with my belongings [Stuff]
After eight years in Cornwall, I finally dusted off my belongings in London and, filling up a Luton van, Graham drove me to London and back. 2000 CDs, 500 records, 800 books, 50 DVDs, furniture, pictures, bric-a-brac and various nick nacks. It was a great road trip too, listening to music and chatting all the way, stopping off for coffees, seeing wonderful countryside, plus hanging out with my mum in the Big Smoke.
6. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (2007) [Literature]
Other books I enjoyed this year were Lonely City (2016) by Olivia Laing (quoted at the start of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, 2017); Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau*; All Fours (2024) by Miranda July; Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Malcolm Bradbury, In the Heat of the Night by John Ball (1965) and On the Calculation of Volume (2024) by Solvej Balle.
*(Thoreau’s famous masterpiece chimed with me in numerous places, including the bit about the “lives of quiet desperation” most of us are leading. His skepticism of technology was legendary; new innovations such as the telegraph he was wary of, as, if there’s no substance to the content, speeding it up won’t make it more meaningful (one can imagine what he would think of social media). Thoreau was also against newspapers, filled as they are with repetition and trivia: “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, we never need read of another. One is enough.” I totally agree.)
Ship figureheads on display at the Box, Plymouth.
Anthony Gormley, LOOK II, 2017, Plymouth.
7. Pockets of Plymouth [Travel] [Art]
My daughter and I spent a weekend in Plymouth and discovered pockets of pleasure I’d never seen before on my usual day trips to the city: The Box, Barbican and charity shops, obviously, but also a Beatles art installation (‘Beatles bums’), an Anthony Gormley sculpture (above), an Elizabethan garden, the Mayflower Steps, the converted Royal William Yard, some model ships displayed along the sea wall at West Hoe, and a boat trip to Mount Edgcumbe were just some of the things we came across walking around this interesting city.
8. Beautiful Blu-ray box sets [Film]
Deep dives into the films of Derek Jarman, Walerian Borowczyk, Louis Feuillade, Tod Browning and… erm, Star Wars.
9. Getting back in contact with American friends [Travel]
With the Katrina documentary released I got in contact with American friends I hadn’t heard from in years (some had helped with the New Orleans video, others I’d stayed with). One of them had a son who was by chance travelling around the UK. He came to stay with us for what at first was meant to be just a few days but ended up being a fortnight. He was good company so we didn’t mind too much.
10. Fruit and veg from our garden [Food]
We had various fruit and vegetables – strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrents, redberries, figs, tomatoes, courgettes – growing in the garden and greenhouse from about April to October. H did a great job with the tomatoes and courgettes in the greenhouse.
Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II at the South London Gallery.
11. A cultural weekend in London with my daughter [Art]
I took her to the Jenny Saville exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery; she took me to Born with Teeth at the Wyndham’s Theatre, a play by Liz Duffy Adams about an imaginary gay relationship between Marlow and Shakespeare. We also went to the South London Gallery and the National Gallery, as well as the Clapham Junction charity shops, where we both got untold Barngains.
12. Langona Film Club [Film]
This was the first, official film club in our house. It was so popular I had to turn people away. I showed Bait alongside my New Orleans documentary, Desire, Hope & Bourbon (the Katrina film had just been released so it seemed appropriate).
All in a day’s purchasing… barngains galore.
13. Barngain Books [Barngains]
I buy so many books, largely in charity shops, of course, and far too many to mention all of them.
14. Pulp – More [Music]
This was both Mojo and Uncut magazine’s album of the year, Pulp’s first new album for twenty-four years. Though not neccessarily my favourite of the year, but I didn’t buy much new music; I was too busy listening to my old collection (see No. 5).
This year heralded two Holy Grails of rock music finally being released: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraka ‘82: Expanded Edition box set contained the fabled “electric” sessions, despite Bruce denying its existence just weeks before its release. An expensive year to be a Springsteen fan, with his seven album box set Tracks II coming out just a few months previously.
Also released for the first time on CD was Buckingham and Nicks’ eponymously titled album, which came out in 1973 and then vanished. This was their only release as a duo; soon after they joined Fleetwood Mac, and the rest is history.
I still listen to new music on Spotify but I was definitely more interested in reissues this year; Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window 1956-1963 was another welcome release.
15. Dave’s Eurovision Song Contest Smorgasbord [Music]
I hadn’t watched the Eurovision since I was a child but it has become an annual event round Dave and Nicky’s. A whole evening of watching, laughing, singing, voting, eating and drinking. A lotta fun.
16. Two Photography Documentaries [Film] [Photography]
We saw two documentaries about photographers at the cinema, and they were both really good. I am Martin Parr (★★★★), RIP, was an amusing and illuminating portrait of the famous British photographer. Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other (★★★★), the strangers in question being street photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his less-famous but also creative wife Maggie Barrett, was an honest, fascinating and disturbing chronicle of a loving-yet-unequal relationship of an ageing couple.
Once again, we start the year going to the cinema pretty regularly at the start of the year then completely forget about it for six months when the weather gets better (and start going again when it gets dark, wet and windy). So I’ve missed a lot of what I’ve wanted to see this year, but enjoyed Flow (★★★★), 28 Years Later (★★★★), The Girl with the Needle (★★★★), The Brutalist (★★★★), A Complete Unknown (★★★★), Sinners (★★★), Frankenstein (★★★) and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (★★★★). I’ve really got to see One Battle After Another at some point, the number one film on most end of year lists.
17. Doing a bit of graphic design [Graphic Design]
I’ve not missed working in an office – my idea of hell – but doing a bit of design this year has been nice: I design the monthly Oxfam newsletter, Bookmark, which goes to every Oxfam bookshop in the country; a logo for my brother’s olive oil bottles (currently unfinished otherwise I’d show it here), and a few other bits and pieces.
18. High tea and a boat cruise on the Helford River [Travel] [Capricious Cornwall]
My mum had a special birthday so we – me, my brother, H and mum – had high tea in a posh hotel and a lovely boat cruise on the Helford, passing a fallen tree on Frenchman’s Creek that Kylie Minogue posed on for the video Flower in 2012.
Puffins.
19. Puffin Island, near Padstow [Nature] [Capricious Cornwall]
It was sunny before, and sunny after, but on our particular boat trip it poured with rain. No matter, we saw puffins! I had no idea they were so small.
20. Seeing a baby adder [Nature] [Capricious Cornwall]
It snaked its way across the sand near Godrevy beach, into the grasses by the Red River that snakes to the sea. I was too transfixed to take a photo but it had the markings of an adder. I’ve been wanting to see one in Cornwall for years.
21. Foraging for fungi [Capricious Cornwall]
I’m still a fun guy, especially when I’m looking for fungi.
22. Alien Earth [TV]
I hardly watch any streaming services (I only subscribed to Netflix for the first time to watch the Katrina documentary) or TV (it’s Blu-ray or the highway) but I couldn’t miss a show featuring the best alien ever, originally designed by HR Giger (via a free trial on Disney+).
It must only be in recent years I’ve started to side with the aliens and monsters in any horror or sci-fi film. They’re usually just going about their business when humans come around to interfere. Even if the aliens are evil and intent on world domination I think, good luck, give it a go, it can’t be any worse than what we’ve done.
Alien Earth see a future very near when the planet is run by five corporations – they don’t name them as Google, Apple, Microsoft etc but that’s the implication. My partner popped in mid-show during a scene of a meeting between the heads of two of the corporations and asked, in a quaint fashion, who the baddies were. I was like, they’re humans, they’re all baddies!
Tina by JH Lynch.
23. Finally getting (some of) the ones that got away [Barngains]
I’ve previously blogged about missed barngains, that is, cheap items I either missed by a few seconds (as someone else just beat me to it) or inexplicably just didn’t buy (there’s no excuse), at car boot sales or in charity shops. It needs to be noted that, yes, I could have bought these any time on eBay but prefer coming across things organically, in real life, even if that means waiting 20 years. I’m in no rush. This year I finally got a Tina print by JH Lynch (Redruth junk shop), Jethro Tull’s Stand Up LP (mainly for the pop-up gatefold; I haven’t actually played the record yet) and two LPs by Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing it All Back Home (next to each other in a charity shop in Truro, the same two I didn’t buy 25 years ago in a car boot sale near Richmond).
24. Six Tate Gallery exhibitions in a day [Art]
We treated ourselves to a Tate Gallery Membership and it virtually paid for itself in a day. We went to three exhibitions in Tate Britain and three in Tate Modern: Ithell Collequin (★★★★★), Edward Burra (★★★★★), Lee Miller (★★★★★), Threate Picasso (★★★★), Nigerian Modernism (★★★★) and Emily Kam Kngwarray (★★★).
25. I’m never happier than when I’m cleaning records [Music]
I had a eight-year delay in finishing the cleaning of my records so I continued when all my stuff came to Cornwall. I bought a lovely new record player with the proceeds from the Katrina documentary and all the £1 charity shops records I’d bought over the years now sound like new, mostly.
BONUS ENTRIES (Pictured clockwise from top left)
Seeing my daughter’s Private View [Art] [Travel]
A lovely week in Wiltshire and Somerset seeing my daughter’s Private View, having a tasty tapas at the High Pavement in Frome and seeing art (Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely) and a Piet Oudolf garden (with a former Serpentine Pavillion at the back, pictured) at Hauser & Wirth in Bruton, Somerset. Very proud of my daughter.
Eating the best vegan curry ever [Food]
At Wilder in Falmouth, a small restaurant with about a dozen tables and just one thing on the menu, a delicious thali which changes weekly.
Making a book [Activity]
H and I did a day bookbinding course on the Lizard with local artist Sue Lewington and made a book. A lovely day.
A spring picnic in Kew Gardens [Activity]
What’s not to like?
Casper says it’s tiring just reading about the year, let alone doing it.
• I have written the fewest blog posts this year since… 2007. I’ll try to do more next year.
Previously on Barnflakes
Barnflakes’ Top 23 of 2023
Barnflakes’ top 22 of 2022
Barnflakes’ top 20 of 2020
Top 30 of the year (2019)
Barnflakes’ top 20 of the year (2018)