James Proclaims!

Ever since this blog has existed, I have managed to produce some sort of review of the year on the 31st December. I almost didn’t get around to it today because both of my daughters wanted to play with the new Lego sets they acquired over the Christmas period.

When I say ‘play’, what they actually wanted was to commission me to build the images as advertised on the box, exactly as they appear on the box. Lego has certainly changed since I was a kid. The pleasure now appears to be in being able to play with the final product, rather than in the building.

I’m slightly disappointed by this development, so I’m going to ‘educate’ my offspring in the true joy of Lego, by mixing up all the new kits they’ve got with the existing Lego box and forcing them to use their imaginations to build new stuff.

But I did indulge them today by putting it altogether as per the instructions that came with the sets , because it’s not their fault that Lego has become so prescriptive, but they also had no chance whatsoever of following the instructions themselves. Little Proclaims, to her credit, did at least try, before admitting defeat and handing over the reigns of the project to me. Mini Proclaims, to her credit, did not hurl plastic bricks on the floor or attempt to eat any of them.

Little Proclaims is still playing with her set of Lego dogs as I write this. Mini Proclaims has now abandoned her set and is somewhere else in the house.

Singing.

Loudly.

My daughters’ commissioning of my skills to build their Lego sets for them does rather sum up my 2025. I know a lot has happened in the world, but I’d be hard-pushed to tell you what any of it was, other than me doing things to keep my children entertained.

Or going to work.

Which I did, but which I never wish to think of or reminisce about.

My job pays the mortgage. Just about. And that’s all the interest I have in it when I’m not in work.

Of course when I am there I give it my all.

Because I do need to pay my mortgage and being good at my job reduces the risk of me not having a job and not being able to pay the mortgage.

But work is work and not what I want to write about when I write this blog.

I’m not sure what I do want to write about, but my children end up being quite a significant influence, because I spend a lot of time with them and therefore very little time doing much else.

As ever, when I write these ‘end-of-year’ posts, I always have a quick look back at what my resolutions were at the start of the year. I always post those on here too. Look out for 2026’s resolutions tomorrow. Assuming I’m not subject to more Lego projects. Which I might be, because the girls did get a lot of Lego this year.

Interestingly, building of sorts was on the agenda, but less to do with plastic toy bricks and more to do with maintaining the actual bricks and mortar of Proclaims Towers. 2024 was a bit of a traumatic year with regards things going awry in my home and rather than be dependent on expensive tradespeople who don’t always turn up, I resolved to increase my own skillset in 2025 so I could affect some of my own home improvements.

I did achieve part of this goal, insofar as I did do some home-maintenance courses, and I feel fairly confident I could now tackle some of the jobs that would make my home a nicer place to live. Unfortunately I used up any time I might have had to actually carry out the repairs in the learning how to do it all.

So I haven’t achieved that resolution, but I am upskilled enough for it to roll over into 2026 and potentially for some home improvements to happen before 2027. 2025 did, at least, not bring the same level of catastrophe that 2024 delivered, so I’m, at worst, breaking even on the home-maintenance front.

My other resolution appears to have been to blog more often. I definitely did not manage that. Until November, when I did do a fair bit.

So not that’s another ‘not achieved’ but with some green shoots of promise nonetheless.

Aside from DIY courses, I can’t really remember anything much that made 2025 different from other years. I love my children but since becoming a parent I seem to have established a fairly consistent ‘Groundhog Day’ kind of existence.

For the latter part of 2024 and the first half of 2025 I did start going to see a lot of live music. The good thing about live music is it normally happens after my children have gone to bed. I don’t mind going to gigs on my own, so I’m not too dependent on having a social life in order to enjoy live music. Which is just as well, because my children are my social life for the most part.

I’ve mainly been to the kind of gigs that a 46 year old man having the beginnings of mid-life crisis would go and see, which is to say a lot of bands who were at their peak in the 1990s. The highlight of that was when I managed to see Oasis play Wembley in July, which was much better than anyone had any right to expect.

I meant to blog about that at the time,

But I didn’t.

I am going to see some more live music in 2026, all going well, so perhaps I’ll do some sort of retrospective of all the acts I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

That is quite dependent on me getting back to some kind of blogging regularity, which I expect I will include in my resolutions for 2026.

Although, as has already been evidenced, a resolution is no guarantee of results.

I’m not sure what else happened in 2025. I could ask AI.

AI didn’t start existing in 2025, but the use of AI has become more ubiquitous this year. I could actually ask AI to write this post for me. It would probably be better than this.

It does seem to defeat the object of having a blog though.

I do use the newish AI feature on WordPress to generate images for my posts. Some of them are a bit weird, but it’s fairly convenient.

Using AI to generate pictures for a little-read blog in my own little corner of the internet is one thing, but I’m a little bit scared about the rise of AI in a more general sense.

I grew up in the 90s. A lot of movies I love from then depict dystopian future where the machines have risen up and taken over. It’s literally the plot of The Terminator and The Matrix.

So 2025 might be remembered as the beginning of the end.

Hopefully not.

But I might use the massive amount of Lego we have in the house to build a bunker.

Or to perhaps to build a nicer house than the one I live in.

Which would currently not be that hard to achieve.

Anyway, whatever else happened, 2025 certainly achieved the goal of being a specific and measurable period of time. which is all we could reasonably expect.

And the machines haven’t taken over yet, which is also a good thing.