Ah, 2025—what a gloriously indulgent year for the human banquet, as we gorged ourselves on another twelve months of richly seasoned folly, washed down with a vintage blend of hubris and hysteria. As the final crumbs are swept from the table of this year, one can only raise a glass to civilisation’s unerring knack for transforming every triumph into a soggy canapé and every catastrophe into a flaming pudding that sets the dining room alight.
In the end, 2025 proved that humanity's greatest talent is persistence: persisting in conflict, in denial, in viral absurdity. As we stumble into 2026, one can only hope the next year brings fewer disasters and more genuine progress—or at least better memes. After all, in the grand comedy of errors that is history, laughter is the only sane response. I, for one, have had enough. The wheel is still spinning, the hamster is on fire, and the only sensible response is to step off, lie down in the sawdust, and wait for the whole circus to burn itself out. Preferably before the next “visioning workshop” on net-zero pronouns.
Let us, then, conduct a brief post-mortem on the corpse of the year now twitching its last on the carpet.
January–March: The Triumph of the Thermostat
The year began, as all good years should, with the nation discovering that its energy bills had reached the sort of figures previously reserved for Qatari sovereign wealth funds. The government’s response was characteristically bold: it instructed the populace to wear an extra jumper and consider the possibility that being cold builds character. Somewhere in Davos, UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer wept a single tear of empathy before boarding his helicopter. Meanwhile, the BBC unveiled its new flagship drama: a gritty eight-part series about a non-binary Viking who invents vegan mead and confronts toxic masculinity using the medium of spoken-word poetry. Critics called it 'stunning and brave'. Everyone else reached for the remote and accidentally discovered the shopping channel, which suddenly felt like Chekhov.
Donald Trump, freshly reinstalled in the White House like an updated version of Microsoft Paint, wasted no time in reminding the world that subtlety is for losers. On his first day back, he pardoned over 1,500 January 6 enthusiasts—because nothing says "law and order" like absolving a mob—declared a border emergency, and promptly withdrew from the Paris Agreement and WHO, proving once again that global cooperation is best handled unilaterally. Tariffs flew like confetti at a bankrupt wedding, prompting lawsuits from California and trade spats with half the planet. By year's end, Trump's Mar-a-Lago peace talks with Zelenskyy had produced... well, more talks, while Ukraine droned on (literally) and Russia reclaimed bits of territory with the enthusiasm of a landlord evicting squatters.
April–June: The Summer of Cultural Enrichment
Spring brought the now-traditional festival of street furniture removal, as various municipalities discovered that bollards were symbols of colonial oppression and that the real enemy of inclusivity is anything that prevents a Deliveroo cyclist from achieving 47 mph through a pedestrian zone. In London, the Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan—still convinced that the internal combustion engine is powered by the tears of poor children—expanded the ULEZ zone until it effectively encompassed the Home Counties and parts of Belgium. Motorists responded by purchasing diesel generators the size of small bungalows and running them 24 hours a day out of spite. Emissions, oddly, went up.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel expanded its military hobbies to six countries, striking Iran in a 12-day extravaganza dubbed Operation Rising Lion—presumably because subtlety was on holiday. Gaza saw a fragile ceasefire hold just long enough for everyone to reload, while Sudan quietly hosted the world's largest displacement crisis, with millions fleeing famine and gangs in a conflict so under-reported it might as well have been scripted by Netflix for obscurity. Syria, fresh from ousting Assad, pondered whether the new bosses would be different from the old bosses, and Haiti demonstrated that gang violence plus hurricanes equals a humanitarian crisis even aid workers treat like a bad blind date.
July–September: The Age of the Expert
The long, hot summer was dominated by experts. Experts told us that the heatwave was unprecedented (a claim that would have surprised anyone who’d lived through 1976 and hadn’t spent the intervening decades pickling their memory in oat-milk lattes). Experts told us that eating beef would doom the planet, then quietly boarded transatlantic flights to lecture other experts on the importance of reducing one’s carbon footprint. One particularly luminous expert suggested that the solution to knife crime was to redesign knives with rounded ends. The nation nodded sagely, then went back to stabbing one another with screwdrivers, which are notoriously difficult to redesign without compromising their utility when assembling flat-pack furniture.
Nature, ever the reliable comedian, chipped in with wildfires in California that barbecued billions, floods in Texas that turned the Hill Country into an inland sea, and a parade of cyclones and earthquakes across Asia that killed thousands and cost fortunes. Extreme weather racked up insured losses exceeding $120 billion, reminding us that climate change is the gift that keeps on giving—mostly insurance premiums and despair.
October–December: Peak Britain
Autumn delivered the coup de grâce. The UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer—having promised to “get Britain working again”—promptly put the entire civil service on a four-day week and reclassified “quiet quitting” as a protected characteristic. The Royal Academy’s annual exhibition featured a sculpture entitled “Untitled (My Trauma)” consisting of a discarded Greggs wrapper suspended in a tank of the artist’s own urine. It sold for £340,000 to a hedge fund that wanted something “confrontational” for its reception area. And then, just when we thought the cultural septic tank could take no more, the Church of England announced that it was considering replacing the Lord’s Prayer with a land acknowledgment and a trigger warning. One suspects even God is now on LinkedIn, frantically networking in case the pews empty entirely.
And The Rest ...
On the brighter side—or at least the side with better lighting—AI continued its relentless march toward making humans redundant. Agentic AI agents promised to plan our lives better than we could, while breakthroughs in gene therapy slowed Huntington's disease and new HIV preventives achieved 100% protection in trials. Quantum computing inched closer to usefulness, and space tourism hit new heights when Katy Perry warbled "What a Wonderful World" in zero gravity aboard Blue Origin, proving that even orbital joyrides can't escape the gravitational pull of kitsch.
Culturally, we feasted on Labubu plush toys turning into meme gold, Kendrick Lamar resurrecting bootcut jeans at the Super Bowl, and Beyoncé finally snagging that elusive Album of the Year Grammy for Cowboy Carter. Celebrity scandals abounded: Diddy jailed, a Coldplay kiss-cam exposing corporate adultery, and Jon Hamm's viral dance reminding us that even Mad Men can boogie. Pope Francis's death led to the election of America's first pontiff, Leo XIV, who no doubt pondered the irony of a nation withdrawing from global pacts while exporting its clergy.
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Yours truly, meanwhile, has spent the year hunched over a keyboard like a man trying to defuse a bomb made entirely of opinions. I have written 164 posts, a rant virtually every other day, approximately 450,000 words—enough to fill a modest school library or one particularly tedious House of Lords debate—on subjects ranging from the death of civility to the rise of the battery hen as a metaphor for modern existence. My reward? A modest uptick in subscribers and a comment from someone calling himself “BasedYeoman1488” informing me that I am simultaneously a Zionist shill and a cultural Marxist.
Truly, the algorithm knows me better than I know myself. I have become a caricature: the man who can no longer watch the news without composing imaginary footnotes. I saw a pigeon the other day and immediately began drafting an essay entitled “Columba livia as Symptom of Late-Stage Capitalist Alienation.” I found myself staring into the fridge at 3 a.m. muttering about the semiotics of semi-skimmed milk. It is time to stop before I begin referring to myself in the third person and demanding that my own posts be fact-checked.
So I am taking a break. Not the sort of break that involves wellness retreats and being yelled at by a woman named Kaia while holding the plank position—no, thank you. I intend to do absolutely nothing with the sort of dedication normally reserved for tax avoidance by multinational corporations. I shall read books that do not come with discussion questions printed at the back. I shall listen to music written before auto-tune was invented. I may even attempt to cook something that does not arrive in a cardboard box with a picture of the meal it vaguely resembles. And I shall refuse—utterly refuse—to have an opinion about anything that happens between now and the moment I decide the world has once again earned my contempt.
So, if you do not hear from me for a while, do not assume I have been cancelled (though the way things are going, it feels increasingly like a matter of time). I am simply practising the most subversive act available to modern man: strategic silence. So may your turkey have been moist, your relatives bearable, and your Wi-Fi strong enough to sustain the illusion that doom-scrolling counts as a personality. And if, in the new year, you find the discourse suddenly a fraction less bilious, you will know that, somewhere in the Midlands, a very exasperated man has finally managed to shut up for a minute.
Yours in voluntary obscurity,
The Ranting Brummie
(For the moment, at least)