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Devoted father and husband. Committed contrarian. Impostor, loner, optimist, troll. Pushing 40. No, hang on. I am 40.

I am a contrarian because in any conversation, my instinct is to first pander and validate, then to get to the substance of it, the opposing argument, the counterfactual. Yeah, they shouldn’t have said that, absolutely – but maybe they’re still carrying some trauma from what happened before. It has indeed been a difficult year – incredibly difficult – but let’s not lose sight of everything we’ve achieved, personally and professionally, which is considerable.

Amid the hand-wringing and despair, which is admittedly tempting, I insist — mostly to myself — there is hope everywhere if you look for it. Marches for peace, iwi-led green restoration projects, the local vege co-op offering a bagful for $15 a week, even if they do often weigh it down with brassica. Then I read ‘The Three-Body Problem’ with its doomsday cult actively seeking the end of humanity and I wonder whether I’m deluding myself. On one hand this, on the other hand that. Most of all, my views are contrary to my other views.

For me, the best thing about getting older is steadily realising how little I know or understand, and consequently how much more there is to learn. Here’s a snapshot of what I noticed in 2024.

Books

I read 52 books in 2024. Earliest published: 1974. It’s a while since I last had a year of reading so skewed to the last half-century.

These books offered a rare combination of audacity, craft, and ideas that made them impossible to forget:

• ‘We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa’ by Chris McDowall and Tim Denee
• ‘Gifts’ by Ursula Le Guin
• ‘The Books of Jacob’ by Olga Tokarczuk
• ‘In the Skin of a Lion’ by Michael Ondaatje
• ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera (re-read)

Hard to recommend a favourite but if pressed, I would go for ‘In the Skin of a Lion’. It’s a short read, for a start; no-one who reads this post is going to pick up ‘The Books of Jacob’ when they realise it’s 912 pages long. (Those who do may also be sufficiently moved to write their own short story aping it.) Ondaatje’s book has breathtaking scenes to hook any reader and a profound respect for labour, especially the dirty kind. Like one of its central characters, you won’t be able to shake the smell of the leather tanning pits afterwards, and you’ll think differently about the power and value of the collective.

These books left an impression, not as deeply but enough to still linger as another year begins:

• ‘Dartmouth Park’ aka ‘How to Make a Bomb’ by Rupert Thomson
• ‘Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed’ by Paul Cronin
• ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ by Carlo Rovelli
• ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’ by Rashid Khalidi
• ‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy
• ‘You Are Here’ by David Nicholls
• ‘Amma’ by Saraid de Silva
• ‘Being Mortal’ by Atul Gawande
• ‘Feijoa’ by Kate Evans
• ‘The Gosden Years’ by Bill Gosden
• ‘Cloudspotting for Beginners’ by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
• ‘Outline’ by Rachel Cusk
• ‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Liu Cixin
• ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula Le Guin

The kids are at a hybrid stage in their reading. They’re capable enough to read by themselves in bed before turning off the light themselves, and they want to do that most nights. But they want us to read them a couple of chapters or picture books first, all cuddled up in a pile on the sofa.

This means I’ve become quite familiar with Yvette Poshoglian’s Ella and Olivia series of early readers — slight, comfortable narratives in which something goes a little bit wrong but everything works out okay in the end. And we all need to be reminded of that sometimes.

The biggest breakthrough, though, was with Cece Bell’s ‘El Deafo’, a full-length comic about how Bell came to terms with sudden onset deafness as a young child. There’s an increasingly popular genre of autobiographical children’s comics dealing with serious issues like these. Raina Telgemeier, author of ‘Smile’ (corrective dentistry) and ‘Guts’ (psychogenic vomiting and therapy) is the champion, and Bell’s contribution is a worthy — and funny — addition.

At heart, these books are about learning to deal with other people knowing what’s different about you. I’m on the fence as to the value of sharing all these awful bits of other people’s childhoods with my sensitive kids because they’re as likely to keep them awake at night as to reassure them. Are they better off not knowing? Would they handle the shunts of the peer group better without a bunch of thought-provoking texts to refer to? I don’t know, but I do think books that reflect the reality of childhood and plot a relatable path through it are a public service, and I often wish there’d been more of them when I was little.

Music

My favourite ten seconds of a song in 2024 were the lead-in and drop for the first chorus of ‘Things You Didn’t Know’ by Clara La San, from fave album of the year Made Mistakes. It’s aloof to that point, a spark in the gloom: four repeated ascending notes, La San’s lead vocal and the “ooh boy” backing it up, and some simple bass and percussion loops. But then a rich bass synth kicks in, and the elements from before shine more brightly. It’s like the floodlights have come on, revealing that what you thought was a small bedroom is in fact an enormous, reverberating cavern.

Clara La San had worked and reworked this half-hour of echoing R&B, her first album, over a few years. The tracks feel lived-in for it, spacious, with an elusiveness that I would say is her signature if it weren’t for her post-breakup lyrics playing it absolutely straight. But I’ve never cared that much about the words. It’s the feeling a song evokes, more than the content. And you can swim in the feelings here. To me she inhabits a space that’s always dark and a bit mysterious, as if she’s addressing you from the other end of a long, unlit tunnel. She released a second album in December, too late in the year for me to properly absorb, and my first impressions were of some sparks of light emerging. But I still want it dark.

A close second was the second part of the chorus in Nilüfer Yanya’s ‘Made Out Of Memory’, the bit that starts with Yanya crying “people wanna blame someone” as if it’s an epiphany, like – finally I understand, it wasn’t personal.

BRAT, the biggest album of the year, didn’t pass me by either. The record about which my increasingly dismissive kids would say, “You ALWAYS listen to this!” Several standouts (and for me, quite some filler too) but the one I’ve come back to most is ‘Sympathy is a knife’ and another bone-rattling bass drop to kick off the chorus.

Other albums that held my attention in 2024:

• Mon Amour Mon Chéri by Amadou & Mariam
• Magda by Donato Dozzy
• Chapultepec by Lao
• Bright Space by Mikey Enwright
• Silence Is Loud by Nia Archives
• No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin by Meshell Ndegeocello
• Everything Squared by Seefeel
• PRUDE by Drug Church
• Fragments of Us by Midland
• Nobody Loves You More by Kim Deal

I’m talking albums still, yep. Spotify continues to push Smart Shuffle at me, switching it back on with every update as if I’d turned it off by accident. Apparently, it’s normal nowadays to open Spotify and browse for something to listen to, which I find gobsmacking when a) the interface expressly discourages exploration, and b) there are still so many other sources from which to discover new music.

There may not be any money in it but I am here to tell you the album is not dead. Go to the new releases on any media outlet that reviews music and test-drive anything you like the sound of. For me, it’s Metacritic and Resident Advisor, with the occasional dip into the ocean of noise that is Album of the Year dot org. From these, I piled up a decent set of absorbing repeat listens — here’s a playlist of samples assembled, naturally, on Spotify.

Movies

A ranking of new films I saw in 2024. This won’t take long.

1. THE ZONE OF INTEREST
2. ENO
3. FLOW
4. THE BOY AND THE HERON
5. INSIDE OUT 2
6. ORIGIN
7. POOR THINGS
8. KUNG FU PANDA 4

I saw ENO and FLOW on the same day, making it two years in a row I’ve done the ‘dialogue-free animation about animals / music industry titan whose name starts with EN and ends in O’ double-feature at the New Zealand International Film Festival (in 2023, it was ROBOT DREAMS and ENNIO). Both films attempt to do something different and new, and although the artificial intelligence conceit at the heart of ENO felt like more of a gimmick than an artistic success, the man’s charisma and intelligence shone brightly. FLOW felt unfinished technically, especially the lighting of the animals, but its sense of the cinematic couldn’t be dimmed. Now that it’s getting all this awards attention, I wonder if there’ll be a director’s cut with retouched shading.

Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST towered above both. It’s a film of operational delivery and domestic routines with an extraordinary soundtrack: genuinely, there are two films here, the one you see and the one you hear. I wasn’t convinced by all the choices made, and I think it’s right to expect perfection of a film about Höss family values and dynamics. I am however happy to follow Glazer into the abyss again and again, because he has that gift of both putting on a show and making you think, often uncomfortably. There’s no-one else like him working today.

A few highlights from the few other films I caught up with in 2024:

• SHOWING UP
• ALL OF US STRANGERS
• AFTERSUN
• PAST LIVES

All enjoyed in a two-week period in the middle of the year. That was just before I got my Switch.

Tech and Gaming

I’ve kept the most profitable entertainment industry of this era mostly at bay for years, content to wallow in Doom mods and Championship Manager 01/02. But then I was gifted a Nintendo Switch in July 2024, and since then, the numbers speak for themselves. In the second half of the year, 100+ hours on FC 24 and Dragon Quest XI respectively, plus another 40-50 hours on a range of other games. An average of two hours a day for six months.

Hence so few movies, and hence zero activity on this blog since June. Nothing stimulates the brain like gaming: flashing lights, bright colours, and a sense of control, even mastery, you’ll rarely experience in daily life. Some games upend these norms, but not many. So, high on this new device, I played some games.

• FC 24 — it’s a football game, so it was always going to consume my life to some extent. I took Cambridge United from League One obscurity to Premier League glory. More time-pass than obsession, but I cannot be interrupted while playing.
• Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age — 100+ hours over six months seems like a lot to be sure. But then Bex said she completed it much faster than your average player would, as in a matter of days, and I felt a bit different about the way I’d gone through it. This JRPG is heavily burdened with cutscenes and dialogue, like an epic TV series you can run around in, so the kids have come to enjoy watching me play it. Indeed, we may have spent more time together with Dragon Quest XI than with anything else in 2024.
• Golf Story — a 2D golf role-playing game and the first game to sink its claws into me. Good writing and fun gameplay made this a satisfying experience.
• Lonely Mountains Downhill — mountain biking simulator with fun, exploration friendly tracks and an asymptotic mastery curve. Surprisingly, of all games, this is the one Tara and I have bonded over the most.

Also, have you noticed the explosion of ‘AI’ as a byword for ‘current’? Most major tech companies put it front and centre on their websites, and anyone who wants to keep up with current events now needs to educate themselves, ongoing, like a university professor, so they aren’t duped by deepfakes. I took a friend to task for featuring AI-generated images on his website and he was more bemused than affronted. It’s not that big a deal to most, perhaps because the technology is still relatively nascent. The scary thing is how thoroughly the world’s richest have thrown all their eggs into it. With their commitment, AI — however intelligent — will define our lives for years to come.

Politics

I feel a profound need to just chill, a political imperative to do so, before industrialised society is everything but chill. Otherwise I feel some paralysing mixture of angry, contemptuous, distressed, and amused at the rolling coverage of metaphorical and literal atrocities swamping my socials and my news feeds. Next up from your favoured news outlet, a feature story on the First Lady’s hat. Surely it’s best to sit out the next four years of news.

We’ve come through the waves of COVID-19 and turned the boat backwards. Ka mua, ka muri, goes the whakataukī: walking backwards into the future. This too shall pass. In 2024, I became a school board member, finally fulfilling a long-held promise to myself to get involved in the community somehow. Local is where you can make the biggest impact. Basically anywhere you can kōrero kanohi ki te kanohi (talk face to face). But don’t forget to check in on those friends abroad who can’t absent themselves from the news cycle playing out all around them.

As a colleague once said, storming off to the kitchen to make another coffee: “everyone needs to just fucking chill”. Most of all the planet.

Travel

The snow and ice far beneath us scrolled by. The frames of the Sky Waka pylons were encrusted with stalactites. The weather was good, a photogenic mixture of clouds and sun — a sun that in the vanishing distance illuminated Ngāuruhoe’s striking cone, with Tongariro broad and massive behind it, both dwarfed by the mountain we were ascending. I’ve never seen it like this, I thought.

It — the Sky Waka trip up Ruapehu — was the literal high point of one of our most successful family holidays yet. We used to squabble constantly on our family holidays, worn thin from lack of sleep and unmanaged expectations. Now the kids are older, we’re all better rested and better able to follow through on our grand plans, or deal with it when the plans go out the window. We embrace imperfection, like the boil-water notice in our Alfriston AirBNB — “why are we on a farm?? This is not ‘staying in Auckland’!” — but still cram in the activities, big and small.

It pissed down on us at Rainbow’s End, a proper soaking while on the log flume of all things, and my kids (six years old at the time) said they were cold one time only and then ran to the next thing. Hot pools, whānau meetups, zoo animals, botanic gardens, museums, and the mountains of the central plateau on full and glorious display once again on the way back down. A remarkable week.

Sport

Two things. First, cricket. The most incredible 24 hours of New Zealand cricket of my lifetime, and probably of all time. One Sunday evening in October, the White Ferns won the Twenty20 World Cup against all expectations.

No team has my heart like the White Ferns. I can ride any up or down with the Black Caps, having plumbed many depths with them over the past three decades. But my hope and expectations and belief in the White Ferns is fresh, and vulnerable. I’m overjoyed when they win and bitterly disappointed when they lose. And they lost a lot in the lead-up to that tournament — ten matches in a row — making the march to victory even sweeter, like tumbling off a precipice on a hunt for a mountain spring and finding the water is best at ground level.

In the clip linked above, the players stand barefooted (or sockfooted) on the Dubai turf, grounded at the scene and in the moment of their greatest triumph, acknowledging their captain who’s been through it all in 18 years of international cricket. There’s another, more raucous video of Georgia Plimmer tearing around the changing room and air-guitaring ‘Don’t Stop Believin” with the trophy. But it’s those feet on the ground, swaying in time to the waiata, that stay with me.

Not that the Black Caps aren’t dear to me. I have, after all, plumbed many depths with them over the past three decades. That same day, the Black Caps beat India in a Test match in India, which we’d managed twice in 36 previous Test matches and not since the 1980s, against an India side that had only lost four times in 50 matches during the 2010s. It was completely unexpected; even more surprising, the Black Caps went on to win the second and third Tests as well. No visiting team had ever done that before.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the New Zealand men’s cricket team’s greatest ever achievement. A bigger deal than the World Test Championship win of 2021 or the Champions Trophy win of 2000.

Second, Olympics. Hours and hours on the in-laws’ sofa next door, where their 75-inch TV broadcast the Olympics day and night. The kids having that moment of fascinated inspiration I had as a kid — knowing the Olympics would mean something to me for the rest of my life — and making posters at school saying they want to be in the Olympics doing artistic gymnastics when they grow up. “They’re good gymnasts,” said one of the coaches at the gym they go to for an hour every Wednesday. However long they carry on with it, the spark of sports and athleticism is alive in them.

People

We, our family of four, all sleep in the same room. It’s been like this since the kids were three. For at least two years we’d battled to keep them in their own beds, every night another capitulation, with me folded onto a too-short sofa and Tara being kicked in the stomach by at least one child. Then we went on holiday in early 2021 and bunked in all together in various configurations, and all slept sounder than we had since they were born. It seemed foolhardy to return to those nightly battles after that — though we did, for a brief and insane trial period when the kids were five, and gave up quickly.

I’m coming to think of our sleeping arrangement as a metaphor for our shared existence. Biology and circumstance threw these four people together in a giggling, screaming pile; a tight-yet-expanding bubble of all our best and worst selves. We love each other so much and drive each other properly spare. And we do all this in the middle of the night, too.

It is a temporary arrangement. My children are meeting more of the world on their own terms every day, forming their own relationships with school, books, the high bar at the gymnasium, and the rivers and trees and rocks of the great outdoors. But they still want us to watch and tell them how well they’ve done, and they still want us in the room with them when it’s dark. They’ve said a few times that they’re going to kick us out soon, but they haven’t yet summoned the necessary boldness. Our co-dependence is part of who we are.

The same is true of Tara and I. In the four years after we met, we moved in together, moved overseas, came back home, got married, and became parents to twins. We knew pretty early on that we wanted to make a life together, but as with all relationships, you don’t know how that’s going to work day to day until you’re in the thick of it. Now we are eleven years in and more or less incapable of making decisions independently.

Part of how we manage our co-dependence is to needle each other almost constantly. For example, if I say “that’s annoying” about something — a malfunctioning TV remote, a buzzing fly, some new horror on the news app — and I’m within Tara’s earshot, she’ll say, “Did you see your face in the mirror?” And it’s old, and tired, and often much more annoying than the thing I was initially annoyed by. But if she didn’t say it… well, what would be the point of being married? I have no stats on this but I’ll wager a substantial proportion of relationships in the Western world rely on cheap gags about a partner’s face.

I don’t know whether this constant giving of shit (and attendant low-key swearing) offers a good example to our kids. I do know they get that from Tara’s conscientiousness in all aspects of parenting, especially the banal. Keeping the pile together and looking ahead to the next thing.

What’s next? The kids will want their own rooms soon. We’ll stop picking up after them quite so much. We’ll have a big family holiday overseas, one we’ve planned and saved for since 2018. And we’ll stay close to our parents, as much as we can. Trying to keep our feet on the ground and be where we are, just like the White Ferns.