With the close of 2025 I crowned a tumultuous year in which I got married, moved house and saw Evelyn, my belligerent character, leave Coronation Street after six years, heading to virtual university at 79 to study law with special emphasis on dogs. The Street may have gone very gay and very murderous lately, but I hope canine-obsessed Evelyn left her mark on its cobbles. I loved my sojourn there, so she’ll be back and she’ll be ugly. My last vainglorious appearance of 2025 was in the Boxing Day episode of ITV’s The Masked Singer, where the panel failed to guess the identity of the seething, exhausted old goose, wobbling and warbling blindly around the stage. I was voted out in favour of Dermot O’Leary dressed as a sprig of mistletoe with Mick Jagger-sized red lips on his hips. I hope to get over the loss of dignity in the fullness of time.
Further embarrassment: I started New Year’s Eve by falling over a hiked-up pavement in Hampstead and landing hard on my knees, with the thud of a woman who has been overeating for months. It was fantastically painful and the only word that came out of me for ten minutes was an Anglo-Saxon one with asterisks. New Year’s Eve can be a damp squib, but Howard Jacobson and his wife Jenny throw the best annual shindig ever with dinner at Bocca di Lupo and fabulous firework-gawping on the terrace of their elegant, candlelit loft in Soho, where ‘Auld Lang Syne’, happily, failed to be sung. I climbed Howard’s stairs very, very slowly, spluttering and smelling of arnica. Still, the party had all the elements of glamour which my mother used to imagine was everyday showbusiness.
Last Monday my agent told me that I’d been offered a role in a ‘low budget film, starting… next Wednesday’. Obviously, someone had dropped out, but it was shooting in an animal shelter so without reading it I said yes. I’d have paid them for a chance to pat an okapi. I thought I’d need a wig as the character was, er, somewhat younger than me. I googled the actor who was playing my husband and found that he was an American hunk in his early sixties. I told my agent that the studio execs would be withdrawing the offer once the hunk had googled me. By Wednesday they had gone schtum and by Thursday, their original star was back in the picture. Ah well, another year without an Oscar.
On Saturday, David and I went to Kew Gardens for the twilight nature walk in -1°C, courtesy of a wavier jet stream over the North Atlantic. David lent me his Nordic thermal long johns; Scottish wool and the North Face were layered on. There was more than a hint in my gait of a Subbuteo model, waiting to be flicked. But oh, it was sublime. The stars shone all over the midnight-blue London skies and the wolf moon howled arrogantly above the diamond dot that was Jupiter. We drank spiced rum toddy in gloved hands as we walked through strings of fluorescent lights. The only downside was that I missed the promised meteor shower. Did you know, incidentally, that you can buy a chondrite meteorite online for £410? Or a Kenyan one for £2.33?
David is a Sunderland ’Til I Die supporter – in fact, his sons made the documentary of that name. It is getting harder to watch my first crush, Manchester United, without recalling every frame of Groundhog Day, so I climbed on to David’s coach to Tottenham to watch the Black Cats. (Their nickname is, oddly, based on a gun battery – and not on their strip, which is red and white, so they ought, by rights, to be called the Red Pandas.) The stadium was a bit more Le Corbusier than the last time I went to watch a match, at the Stretford End in 1973, but the game was undoubtedly better then. And no, I don’t think this is just rose-tinted specs. The endless passing-back to await the right formation had me yelling ‘Gerronwi’ it you asterisk, asterisk boneheads!’, to the displeasure of the surrounding Spurs regulars.
So now it’s 2026 proper and I’m looking forward to a blood test, a search for a decent haircut and a trip to Tesco. It seems they stock Vegemite, which I’ve been hunting for aeons to have with my M&S truffle cheese. I’m watching a lot of meditative Ikebana flower-arranging on my phone. Farewell to Evelyn and canine law – I feel a new obsession coming on.
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