I'm not sure if 2025 will go down as one of my best years. I am certain it's been alright, though - could be better, but I'm glad it wasn't worse. I've got a good feeling about 2026, though - sure, I've got exams next week, but after them, it should be smooth sailing, hopefully.
Anyways, here are five posts I enjoyed writing this year, or simply found memorable:
Ever since I started blogging about chemistry, I always wanted to write something about bismuth. The main inspiration came from some Reddit comment I've long forgotten, but the jist of it was "hey, bismuth has some pretty crazy neighbours". I mentioned this in the first section of the post, before going on to discover that actually, bismuth's chemical properties are insane even without considering what lead, polonium, mercury and radon are like. I won't spoil anything else!
This is also one of the best performing posts on my blog this year; I've been tracking my blog views for nearly two years now, and this post received around 15 views, which for AO2a is frankly incredible. Not to mention some classmates liked the post as well, which was nice. And that's without mentioning I consider this to be one of the best chemistry posts I've ever written.
Another very basic idea that turned into a lengthy piece, I'm glad I went ahead with this post. On the surface, yes it's just me walking around Clapham, which in and of itself isn't the most remarkable suburb in south London. I'd also argue some photos could have turned out better than they did, there's a clear lens flare on some of them.
But in a way, this is also the last proper south London post I've written which kind of felt organic. No endless thinking about whether this random pocket of London should be written about; rather, there was a clear intent, and I followed through with it. I accidentally managed to graph out Clapham using five very dull stations.
And I'd never pass up on a chance to visit Clapham Common, I mean come on!
Surprisingly, the post where I vented about my exams was less successful than the post where I reacted to my grades. Maybe there's a reason for that - this post is by far the longest on my blog, and it's horrendously dense with words.
It's probably more impressive that I thus managed to spew all this out in one sitting, very rarely filtering myself when doing so. In fact, looking back at the post, it's even funnier that things didn't pan out that poorly. In fact, my predictions were almost bang on, with a mix of over and under-estimating myself.
In fact, I'm not sure if I ever want people to read this post again. But it would almost feel wrong if I didn't include it in this list.
I think the Guildford post, more than anything, confirmed to me that I like novelty way too much to make a blog out of London posts. Admittedly, Guildford is simply another suburb, albeit in a pretty area. But it did inspire me to go and write the OPZ posts (which I didn't write enough of, I know).
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Maybe part of the reason I like this post so much isn't necessarily the writing or Guildford itself, it's that it made me realise I shouldn't restrict my writing as much as I usually do. Most of the Distant Days Out posts I write tend to revolve around either a Millwall game, a random holiday, or my dad having work somewhere outside of London. I'm pretty sure before Guildford, the only post like that which I wrote was about a park on the border of London.
So I'm mostly grateful to Guildford for broadening my horizons ever so slightly.
I firmly believe this is the greatest blogpost I've ever written. This was the second OPZ post, and I was aware a blog series about visiting suburbs by bus was kind of weird. So if I was going to blog about Redhill, making it interesting would be a feat in and of itself.
And I think I succeeded. Not by making Redhill itself interesting, but by underplaying it in many ways. I still think about some of the lines I wrote and feel proud, not because they were witty or clever, but because, well, I liked them. They matched the vibe I was going for, which was resigned acceptance.
Believe me, when one of the things you mention in a blogpost is the office of a water supplier, you do wonder what you're doing with your life. I'm just glad I got 1,000 words out of it.
Epilogue
If you want to read any other posts from this year, check out the 2a25 index. Every post from this year can be found there, categorised by topic. I do these indexes both because Diamond Geezer does them and I find them cool, but also because I don't think the labels I put on the blogposts are particularly useful. I mean, one of the labels is "Ruminations", which is both completely meaningless, and also isn't a good name.
Anyways, here's to 2026!
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