This weekend we took a trip into London to visit the Design Museum for Wes Anderson: The Archives. If you had asked me to draw up a shortlist of directors whose works I’d like to have the chance to step into, Anderson would be right towards the top. It was a delightful—if occasionally surreal—experience to come face-to-face with so many of the building blocks of his meticulously-designed worlds. 

Upon entering the exhibition—through a door marked ‘NO CRYING’—you’re greeted with a display case in which Anderson’s hand-written spiral bound notebooks are piled below a gallery of candid Polaroids taken on set throughout his career. It’s a fitting introduction to Anderson the archivist, as well as the filmmaker. 

The exhibition proceeds (mostly) chronologically through Anderson’s oeuvre, starting with Bottle Rocket (1996), through to 2025’s The Phoenician Scheme. Centrepiece to each room are the costumes used during filming. It brings home just how many iconic looks have featured in Anderson’s movies: from Jason Schwartzman’s beret in Rushmore (1998), to Ben Stiller’s tracksuit and Gwyneth Paltrow’s fur coat in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and of course the blue and red ensemble worn by the crew of the Belafonte in 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. 

There are also a huge number of props and pieces of set dressing from each film: as small as a compass or pocket knife (Moonrise Kingdom (2012)) and as large as a scale model of multiple train cars (Asteroid City (2023)). Even the entire façade of the titular building in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and the rooftop signage from The French Dispatch (2021) are viewable up-close. 

One of my favourite rooms of the exhibition was the one that breaks the chronology, but for good reason: bringing together sets and maquettes from Anderson’s two stop-motion animated films to date. The chance to see the level of detail in the models for The Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) and Isle of Dogs (2018) was truly special. 

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Also in several of the rooms were screens playing scenes from the film in question. The idea was to showcase the costumes as they were worn, and the props as they were used. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the screens always had people gathered at them with smiles on their faces, won over anew by the charm of Anderson’s film-making. I certainly came away from our visit with the intention to revisit each of these movies again soon. 

In some personal news, my electric toothbrush has become haunted. For about 20 minutes today I thought my neighbours were drilling, but it turned out to be my toothbrush vibrating in the ceramic cup it lives in. I’ve had no choice but to swaddle the brush in soft fabric whilst waiting for its rechargeable battery to die. I will then dispose of it responsibly, attaching a label that reads ‘Caution: possessed by a restless spirit’.  

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Writing about this makes me recall reading once someone’s 21st century lament, that all they wanted to do was read their book and smoke a cigarette, but they couldn’t do either because both their book and cigarette required charging first. 

Back at it again with a new one from local roasters Routes, and this time it’s something… unusual! I’ve not had ‘coconut fermented’ coffee before, and right upon opening the bag it became very obvious that this was going to be a different experience. The beans smelled strongly of coconut, and whilst the aroma deepened upon grinding, the cup still had a distinctly coconut-y scent. As for taste: it’s a strong, sweet and unusual coffee as a filter. I’m intrigued to find out what happens when I throw it in the AeroPress later in the week. 

I’ve sung the praises of Zach Gage and Orta Therox’s daily puzzle site Puzzmo here before. I still play pretty much every day, and recently a new game got added that I’ve really been enjoying: Ribbit. 

It’s simple enough to play: just find all of the words of four characters or more in length. The paths between, and borders around, each letter denote the connections you should be looking at. 

As you find words, those connections disappear as they’re no longer required, making for a puzzle that actually gets easier the more progress you make. This conceit, along with the visual design of the puzzle, was the subject of a recent newsletter by Zach Gage, from which I found this detail really interesting: 

On my wife's recommendation, I kept the walls, but I switched the visual focus from walls to paths. Instead of light paths and solid walls, the final version […] has solid paths and light walls. This minor visual trick worked perfectly.

The most delightful part, however, comes when you’ve found all of the words that use a given letter. The letter then disappears, revealing a little frog in its place. 

Not to boast, but at the time of writing I’ve got a pretty decent Ribbit streak going. You should think about joining me, and if you do, let’s be friends.

One thing I’ve missed since we moved out of (more) central Oxford, to the eastern village-like part where we’ve now lived for two years, has been easy access to coffee spots. We were a little spoiled where we were previously: two streets away from one local roastery and—on the other side of the road—a vegan café owned by another. Where we are now, the closest place is a 30 minute walk or 10 minute cycle away. Not a huge effort by any means, but an hour’s round-trip is a different proposition to nipping out for a quick croissant, and I’ve found we do it infrequently. 

That changed a bit this week, with the arrival of this cute little horse box coffee place just about 10 minutes’ walk away. Hours are limited, at least to start with, but the coffee was good, and the vegan blueberry muffin was a treat. 

It is customary at this juncture to discuss resolutions. That’s one of mine above, in pennant form, gifted to me for Christmas. And I have another, which goes something along the lines of: read more, write more, relax and make a ‘mess’. Those quotation marks are important: I don’t intend to leave the house in disarray, I mean to not be quite so uptight about adhering to self-imposed restrictions. These are everywhere in my life, from the restricted colour palette of my clothes (every item bought from one retailer), to the times at which I make coffee (08:15; 10:30; 15:00). Before heading to bed each night, I don’t just make sure the door is locked, I also check that the couch cushions are in their correct rotation. I am prone to completionism and perfectionism, which are fine only so far as they might make one happy. So, that resolution is about letting go of the need for things to align quite so neatly at all times. 

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Starting the new year with a new coffee from Round Hill. My first cup, as filter, tasted a little more black tea than ‘blackcurrant jelly’, but it was very enjoyable. 

Back in January of 2020, I squirmed in my cinema seat throughout the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019), hooked on every tangent taken by Adam Sandler’s unravelling jeweller / gambler. Here, older brother Josh recaptures much of that same frantic energy, but it stems from a different place. Where Sandler’s Howard Ratner was increasingly fuelled by sheer desperation, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is propelled by unflagging self belief. As things start to come unglued, that distinction makes all the difference. There’s a myopia to Mauser, and a powerful selfishness; the film catalogues numerous misfortunes rendered unto others because of his actions. And yet, some combination of script, performance and character arc make him hard not to pull for. You’re still likely to only use the edge of your seat, but you’re less likely to watch between your fingers.

Friends, as has been tradition for more than quarter of a century, I’ve rounded out my music-listening year with a rundown of the twenty  records released in 2025 that brought me the most joy. If that sounds interesting to you, grab a warm drink of your choice and head this way for the full list.

Recently we took a trip to Bath, a city we’ve visited a few times in the past, but only ever for a day at a time. On this occasion we stayed over—at a cute little townhouse on North Parade—so that we had a bit more time for wandering. We found good coffee at WatchHouse¹ and Coffever, browsed the shelves at the superb indie bookshop Topping & Company,  enjoyed a meal at The Botanist² and pancakes at Courtyard. 

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Back in June, I descended the stairs into the basement at Third Man Records in Soho and was treated to a pretty incredible set by Seattle band Deep Sea Diver. During that show, Jessica Dobson mentioned from the stage that they were due to be back in the UK in November, to play the Pitchfork Music Festival. So, I snapped up a ticket for the festival’s 8 Nov takeover of five venues in Dalston. 

With each of the spots walking distance from one another, it was a case of figuring out who else I wanted to see between doors opening at 17:00 and DSD taking the stage at 21:30. I got started with Texas quartet Mamalarkey, whose 2025 LP Hex Key I’ve been enjoying. The venue at EartH, with its amphitheatre-style seating, was a slightly weird setup for a rock show, but the band made it work and looked to be having a good time. 

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Do y’all Shazam? I’ve had the  app on my phone for fifteen-plus years at this point, and it still feels a little like magic every time it works, which it does more often than not. If you’re not familiar, it’s a simple utility for identifying a piece of music: you hit a button, Shazam turns on your microphone, listens to what’s playing around you and reports back with the name of the track, the artist and (usually) a link to Apple Music.

My primary use cases for the app fall loosely into the categories of ‘I recognise the song playing in this coffee shop, but cannot for the life of me recall the name of the artist’, or ‘what is the song playing in the background of this pivotal scene in a movie that I would be paying more attention to if I wasn’t just thinking about the music?’. If I open Shazam now, I can scroll back through the list of tracks I’ve used it to identify, and I figured it might be fun to share a few of them, along with what I can recall about where I heard them. 

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I regret to announce that I must formally declare reading bankruptcy. Somehow it’s come to pass, once again, that I have no fewer than six novels in some state of completion, and I’m making significant progress with none of them. Not that any of them are uninteresting, just that my attention is hopelessly divided. 

In my experience, when this happens¹ the best solution is to shelve all of the in-progress books (with the bookmarks still in place), and start something new. Make it something easily digestible, with the intention of speeding through it, and then you’re on solid ground—you can start stacking up completed books again in no time. (I’ve also found, over the years, that my capacity for returning to the flow of a novel-in-progress is better than I would have presumed. In most cases, even a couple of months after last having opened a given book, I can slip back into the flow of its plot, and recall its character arcs, after a chapter or two.)

So then—in the words of Philip Larkin—time to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. 

1. And that’s at least once per year; sometimes more often. 

Just opened today,  the house espresso from Society: La Violeta. My first brew tasted a little woody, with perhaps a hint of tobacco. Not unpleasant, but I’ve had plenty of espresso-based drinks at Society cafes¹ and have never had a cup that tasted like this. So… I should probably make some adjustments. 

1. By my count I’ve visited four of their six locations. 

I just read this article in The Athletic about Michael Jordan’s first contribution to the new season’s NBA broadcasts on NBC. It contains a detail that I found genuinely touching, tailor-made for the final shot of the some-day biopic.

Jordan said he last picked up a basketball when he attended the Ryder Cup and rented a house for the event. When the homeowner stopped by for a visit, he requested that Jordan shoot one free throw on the property’s basketball court.

“When I stepped up to shoot the free throw, it’s the most nervous I’ve been in years,” Jordan said.

“The reason being,” Jordan explained, “is those kids heard the stories from their parents about what I did 30 years ago.” He wanted to fulfill the kids’ expectations.

Jordan swished the shot.

“That made my whole week — that I was able to please that kid, not knowing if I could,” Jordan said.

I have been reading Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, Will There Ever be Another You (2025), whilst listening to live recordings of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Sometimes the vaulting call of the brass, and the bone-deep bass, feel like perfect companions to the prose: loose and balletic but also compact at the sentence level. In other places, the contrast between a passage of the music and a passage of the text is so strange it adds to the discordance of the novel.

I’m in the process of reconstituting my Apple Music library. For the first nine years of the service, I added material to my collection as it appealed to me, but rarely did anything in the way of library curation. At the start of 2025, I zeroed out the whole collection: reset everything and cleared out every single track. Until a week or so ago, I had only added 2025 releases back in, but recently I got a hankering to do some old-fashioned metadata management—a task on which I spent countless nerdy hours back in the heyday of  iTunes. 

My starting point for this rebuild has been to go through all of my annual lists of favourite albums, and add each release to my library. Whilst doing so, I’ve trimmed unwanted ‘bonus’ tracks from ‘deluxe’ releases, made sure that solo artists are sorted alphabetically by their surname, uploaded versions of artwork unblemished by unsightly ‘parental advisory’ badges, and corrected the track listings for records such as Deftones’ White Pony (2000) and Desaparecidos’s Read Music/Speak Spanish (2002). 

Since I only have complete versions of these lists dating back to 2003, the next step is to start building out the library with records released before that point. My plan for this is to go through the list of artists who are now in my library, and consider for each whether there are releases currently missing that should be added. That feels like a decent strategy, but there will also be plenty of artists still missing of course (ie those who haven’t released a list-calibre record since 2003). To that end I see the third phase of this project as a kind of long tail approach: when the urge to listen to some Prince, Janet Jackson, Fleetwood Mac et al next arises, I’ll try to find time to sit and consider which of their releases should be included in my personal collection. It’s something of an arbitrary question, given that a near-boundless streaming library is only an extra tap away; that said, however, I’ve enjoyed re-adding and personalising the few hundred records I’ve already chosen to include. 

There are few artists whose work I’ve had more contact with than Stanley Donwood. There’s a Donwood print on my bedroom wall; the cover of the notebook in which I took down initial impressions for this post features a Donwood design; heck, there’s a Donwood piece on my arm. The last of those is an element from the suite of work made by Donwood, in partnership with longtime collaborator Thom Yorke, for the artwork of Radiohead’s albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). 

Whilst my friend group in high school was certainly into The Bends (1995), we became somewhat obsessive over OK Computer (1997). And, just as evenings were spent listening in depth to the music, picking apart its nuances and textures, so were many lunch hours taken up discussing the minutiae of the artwork. We looked up words in Esperanto, copied strange symbols into the back of our Maths books, and attempted to scry the obfuscated elements layered into each page of the CD booklet. 

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