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2025 Winter Solstice Update

by Matt Marshall on

We entered the winter period after the Autumn Equinox by getting stuck down with an awful illness. Based on the reports across the region, I think we were among the first wave to fall to an aggressive flu. It took us a long time to recover and it was very scary for a while. We made it through though, and we’ve mostly managed to recover.

This winter has been characterised thus far with feeling overwhelmed. Firstly the sickness, but then D’s developmental milestones have left us quite disrupted. Our social calendar has been very busy to the point of squeezed, which is an odd feeling for us.

The Solstice, however, has been amazing. It was a little touch-and-go for a moment with the build-up week being quite packed and stressful, but both “Solstice Eve” and the Solstice Day itself were incredible. D is old enough to understand that something is happening and is special, and she really enjoyed seeing her family and opening her presents. My favourite moments were when she said “Thank you daddy” without prompting.

This was a great way to ride out the midwinter, and I look forward to the return of the light.

Key Events

Hobbies

Quite sparse entries in the hobby list this update. I wish there was some more exciting things happening but the key takeaway is: “I’m plodding along”. No big pushes to try new things, no real slippages. A few cases where there are opportunities to do more, but overall I’m pretty happy.

Archery

No archery to speak of really, although we are planning on attending the “Boxing Day Fun Shoot” as a family. I think I’ve managed to shoot about 6 arrows this year! I think my goal for next year is simply just to shoot more than once, since my equipment is all set up now.

Creative Writing

No creative writing to speak of either. I’ve had a few ideas for poems but haven’t prioritised writing any down. I think Creative Writing will be taking a backseat for a little while, and I’m OK with that.

Exercise

My mainstay of strength training is holding nicely. I’ve been making decent progress with my pull-up form, although I’m disappointed in my numbers. I hope to be making strides in this across the next few months. My current thinking is that I need to do more pulling generally, so I hope to be doing the odd pull-up here and there across the day to build a solid base for then getting higher reps during training sessions.

I haven’t tried to start running again. This is mostly due to lack of being in the habit, now. I’m not sure where I want to be with running, so my main job is to do some thinking about this before I make any half-hearted attempts to reinstill a running habit.

My feet are stronger than ever, though. Winter has not deterred me from the barefoot lifestyle, and I look forward to building up my barefoot running soon.

Hiking

No hiking across this half of the year either, sadly. Again, this is largely due to incompatibilities between hiking and my toddler. She would love going on a long walk, but she also hates being in the car long enough to get there.

I think the main goal for the next few months is to try and find a location nearby which sort of ticks the “outside walk” boxes, without being a “proper hike”; we can build from there.

Languages

My Esperanto is coming along strong. My informal Esperanto club with my friend M has moved from monthly to bi-weekly, which is nice. I’ve also restarted my daily journalling habit, which means I write more Esperanto again.

I need to put some more Esperanto books into my reading list to prompt myself to pick them up, as I’ve not managed to read any despite getting good recommendations from people on the internet.

My company is also allowing me to expense a year’s subscription to one of those online learning platform things, so I’ll be doing some Mandarin just to try it.

Logs

Albums

I’ve had a nice half-year enjoying lots of music. Looking at the logs, most of these are old favourite so there’s not too much to write about or reflect on. I continue to dip my toes into both Hip-Hop and Pop music as I’m trying to take each of these genres much more seriously and open myself up to new musical experiences.

For times that I’m struggling to determine my mood; I’ve also got a bare-bones “choose me a random album” script which picks a folder in my library and I then queue it in my music player. This has helped me explore some more of my backlog.

As always, this is a de-duplicated list1 so doesn’t include the many re-listens throughout the half-year.

Books

A bit of a slow one for reading I feel and this is reflected in my current mood which is that I’m in a bit of a slump.

However, there have been some great books in here which have perked me up. I picked up a copy of “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky on the recommendation of a friend and I was not disappointed. The follow-ups were great as well, although I don’t think I was prepared for the tone shifts, with the third one being the most eyebrow-raising. Ultimately, I enjoyed them all and will definitely read them again but I definitely wasn’t prepared for the discussions on the nature of consciousness towards the end of the third book.

I picked up “Paladin’s Strength” by T. Kingfisher because my wife loved it so much. I was initially hesitant because I had a mixed experience of the previous book in the series, because I didn’t know it was fantasy-romance going in and had a rough time because of that. However, this was very entertaining and nourishing and it humbled me nicely. I still don’t totally gel with the plot-beats of romance, but this was so well executed and set against a compelling story that I didn’t roll my eyes or get irritated once.

I also enjoyed “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir, although there were things that bothered me about it. A different friend recommended this one to me, and I enjoyed “The Martian” so I thought I’d give it a go. It was very thrilling, and overall I’d recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi with the caveat that Andy Weir apparently can’t write women or non-Americans. The only other critique is that the main character of this novel behaves and sounds exactly like the main character from “The Martian”. This is fine if you want more of the same in a new-and-exciting setting/dilemma, but I think if you didn’t know that going in you’d be disappointed.

Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” books continue to be my mainstay palette-cleansers. “Tiffany Aching” has started appearing, and is not disappointing. There have been a few duds; I didn’t enjoy “Making Money” very much, but overall I continue to enjoy reading Discworld in publication order between other books. I also re-read “The Player of Games” by Iain M. Banks, which is an old favourite and always reminds me of my father. A good comfort read.

I read Brandon Sanderson’s “Steelheart” series, which is a YA series. Overall, I think it was OK although it was more YA-oriented than I was expecting. The first book felt like a carbon-clone of the first “Mistborn” novel in terms of plot beats and climax. I actually quite enjoyed the second book, but “Calamity” had a very disappointing ending. I liked where we ended up, but it really felt rushed and I wanted there to be much more room to breathe and hint at or discover the mysteries. However, I think Sanderson was likely working within the constraints of the format. I won’t be reading them again, but I’m glad I did.

The dishonourable mention this time round goes to “The House in the Cerulean Sea”. I was recommended this by a few internet strangers and also an AI when I asked around looking for something “cosy” to read. I hate-read this book past the 40% mark and I have so many negative things to say about it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book I’ve disliked more. I will try not to rant here, but I have no idea why it is so recommended on BookTube and GoodReads etc other than the fact that I suppose it is also technically a Queer novel. However — and I say this as an openly queer/bisexual man — we should stop recommending this book. It’s awful. Queer people deserve better than this. It’s very poorly written, it’s got poor character-work, all the “good” characters sound the same and it’s full of transparent navel-gazing and moralising. To be clear, I agree with the moral messages that Klune is conveying; but the book is so poorly executed that it’s very jarring to read. There is also complexity around Klune supposedly drawing inspiration from experiences of indigenous children in Canadian “Residential Schools”, which does raise further questions. I haven’t researched this thoroughly though.

On the upside, I cured myself of the bad taste left by “The House in the Cerulean Sea” with “Bookshops & and Bonedust”, the worthy-prequel to “Legends and Lattes”, followed by “The Mercy of Gods” by the authors of “The Expanse”. Both were great and just what I needed.

Movies

Not a bad haul of movies. I actually went to the cinema to watch “28 Years Later”, because I had a day to myself to prep for my handfasting and I did it after picking up my outfit. I loved it, and I was a bit surprised. People who know me well understand that I am terrified of zombies, so might be surprised that I opted to see it. I was too, but the trailer was so good and the movie did not disappoint. Very well executed, and very intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. Going in, I didn’t realise that it was set in the North East of England so it was lovely hearing local accents and seeing my native Northumbria being portrayed in the film. My one gripe was that the characters seemed to teleport across vast swathes of the Northumberland and Tyneside so that the director could capture scenes at famous locations in the area, but if you’re not familiar with the North East then this shouldn’t bother you.

Other highlights for me were seeing “Into The Wild”, watching “Big Hero 6” with my wife, and re-watching “The Endless”. The Dungeons & Dragons movie was also way better than it had any right to be and I loved it. I also watched some trash, being the first “Resident Evil” movie and the “Alien Vs Predator” movie. “Resident Evil” wasn’t too bad and was delightfully cheesy. I mostly watched it because I used to love it, and watching “28 Years” motivated me to try and overcome my zombie-phobia. “AVP” was pretty awful, and I mostly watched it as I would a B-movie.

I also watched a bunch of the Mission Impossible Movies when I was in the early stages of being sick, before I got bad. I’d never watched beyond the third movie before, but was reliably informed that they were solid action movies. I enjoyed them. They were far from nourishing, but were very well executed and tight cinematic experiences that I thoroughly enjoyed.

“The Revenant” was a bit of a miss for me. The cinematography was great and I adored it, however the movie was asking me to empathise with a settler-colonial guy while it also partially portrayed the treatment of the natives at the hands of settler-colonials. I feel that there was a better story hiding in there about the mixed-race son, or changing DiCaprio’s character for a native man.

  1. awk '!seen[$0]++' /tmp/extract-of-my-logs-with-dates-removed.txt ↩︎

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