I didn’t really expect to enjoy 2015’s Daddy’s Home, but surprisingly didn’t hate it. It even made the cut for last year’s Christmas countdown. But I really only watched that movie to prepare myself for the sequel, the imaginatively named Daddy’s Home 2, which I knew would eventually find its way into an iteration of my annual advent calendar.

And so it did, for it is today’s movie of choice.

And if my expectations for the first movie were low, then they were completely rock bottom for this one. And in truth, it is not a great movie. But, quite possibly because I expected it to be so bad, I actually did find elements to enjoy.

I may even have enjoyed it slightly more than its predecessor, although that isn’t the highest of accolades really. But when you dispense with the idea that the plot is going to make even the tiniest bit of sense, then there are some funny moments.

Score for Christmasishness

It is a Christmas movie. The fact that it is a sequel to a non-Christmas movie is the only reason I’d even dare to call it Christmas(ish), but the entire plot centres around a dysfunctional family getting together for the holidays, and it’s hard to see how the movie would work if it wasn’t set at Christmas. So full marks on the Christmas score, though if I were judging on any other criteria I would be significantly less generous with my verdict.

2011’s Bad Teacher is not as funny as it promises to be and also boasts a fairly predictable plot. But if you lower your expectations enough, then it can be a fairly diverting, if unmemorable, 97 minutes. If nothing else, it’s worth watching for Cameron Diaz’ performance as the eponymous educator and it’s credit to her efforts that you find yourself rooting for a character that has almost no redeemable features.

Jason Segel is also likeable, if underused, and if Justin Timberlake is profoundly irritating throughout, it’s actually because his character is meant to be irritating.

It’s probably just as well that a talked about sequel never got made, and no surprise that a spinoff TV series was axed almost before it got going; there is barely enough material to make this one mediocre film stretch out for its modest running time.

Still, I didn’t hate it.

Score for Christmasishness

As with a lot of movies that are set in schools, this one spans the academic year, and as most years include Christmas, then a Christmas does pop up in this too. It covers the school Christmas dance and the main character’s own holiday experiences, including an unexpected Christmas dinner with the family of one of her students. It’s pretty Christmassy for about ten minutes or so. Which is more than some movies that make my annual list, so Bad Teacher more than deserves a place on this year’s countdown.

The 34th cinematic offering from Walt Disney Animation Studios was a strange choice, given the type of movies that had preceded it. Nineteenth Century French Gothic literature doesn’t automatically lend itself as source material to an animated movie aimed at children, and while there are certainly dark elements in other Disney movies, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notredame does seem to be particularly bleak.

Of course the 1996 movie does ‘Disney’ things up and we have talking gargoyles and a much happier ending that the original novel. But there’s only so much you can lighten this tale, and in particular, the main antagonist, Frollo, remains pretty unsettling by the standards of Disney’s usual fare.

I actually think it’s a pretty good movie for the most part, although the talking gargoyles are probably unnecessary. It’s not really for kids though.

The less said about the ‘straight-to-video’ sequel the better, although that is significantly more child-friendly and clearly not based on anything Hugo wrote.

Score for Christmasishness

It’s really got nothing to do with Christmas, but there is a bit at the start of the movie called ‘The Feast of Fools’ that is expressly mentioned as happening on January 6th. Which is potentially the twelfth day of Christmas, depending on how you count. It’s certainly close enough to make the cut given the tenuous reasons on which I’ve based the inclusion of other movies in my annual countdown.

2012’s DreamWorks feature Rise of the Guardians is a fun little adventure movie that doesn’t require a great deal of effort on the part of the viewer. Indeed, it’s all quite prosaic from a storytelling perspective, but it looks great, and has a voice-cast that is nothing short of stellar.

Really its USP is the fact that the eponymous guardians are the folkloric figures we all know and love from childhood – notably the ‘big three’ of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, but also the Sandman and Jack Frost. And the bad guy is the Bogeyman.

It’s an interesting concept that is quite probably underused, but Rise of the Guardians knows its audience and I’m pretty sure I’d have loved this as a kid.

Score for Christmasishness

This has to be the most Christmassy movie ever made to be set at Easter. Santa Claus is one of the main characters and we get the full works of sleigh, reindeer and elves. And the base of the eponymous guardians is his workshop. Also, because Jack Frost is one of the characters, we also get a lot of snow and ice to add to the Christmasishness. But the movie can’t quite get full marks because, when all is said and done, it is still set in April. Which is not Christmas.

I know, objectively, that 2012’s The Perks of being a Wallflower is not a bad film. Indeed there is quite a lot to recommend it, not least the performances of the lead actors. But I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I doubt it was aimed at me, and that’s fine, but actually ‘not being the target audience’ doesn’t often put an otherwise well-made movie straight into my bad books.

I think in the end, the problem I have with this particular offering is the fact that it wildly misses the point about being a misfit during adolescence. Not being part of the ‘in-crowd’ is just what happens to some people. You don’t need to have experienced trauma to find being a teenager difficult.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t children and young people who don’t experience the same issues, or worse, as the characters in the movie, but I still think we live in a world where that is not, thankfully, the majority. Plenty of kids just find school difficult because it is difficult and I think that could make for just as compelling a narrative for a movie like this, without the need to insert additional distress to explain the social awkwardness of the main character. Who, isn’t, when all is said and done, even that socially awkward really.

But I’m certain lots of people love this movie.

Score for Christmasishness

Despite the fact that I didn’t really like the film, I can’t knock its Christmasish credentials. It’s set over the course of a year so it’s only Christmas for a bit of the movie, but it is pretty Christmasish for that bit and includes a Christmas party complete with Secret Santa, a family Christmas dinner and a New Year’s Eve Party. And snow. So for the bit of the movie when it is Christmas, it is very Christmas(ish).

1995 teen comedy Clueless just happened to come out when I was still a teenager, so I was quite possibly its target audience at the time. I tended to be more into action movies back then, but I did see this a few times and I quite liked it. It also meant that when I re-watched it recently, I was able to enjoy it from a nostalgic perspective and not worry too much about being considerably older than the target audience, because if I am now, I wasn’t then.

Anyway, Clueless is a pretty good movie. It is definitely of its time, but it holds up pretty well today. I think. Although that could be because I am also of its time and I think I hold up pretty well today. Which is contrary to most of the available evidence.

Clueless is loosely adapted from Jane Austen’s Emma, which perhaps gives it a little more gravitas than many a teen comedy, but it mainly works because, while the movie is clearly mocking the overprivileged teens that make up the central characters, it does so affectionately throughout. We probably shouldn’t like Alicia Silverstone’s ‘Cher’, but the fact that she is so endearing in spite of herself, is really what gives the movie its charm.

And, perhaps unusually for a teen comedy, Clueless is pretty funny too.

Score for Christmasishness

Another one that takes place over a period of time that happens to include Christmas. Predominantly Christmas features as the backdrop of what looks like a pretty dreadful party. But it’s about 15 minutes of the movie, it definitely looks Christmassy for the duration and it contains several plot points that are pretty important to the narrative as a whole. Certainly Christmas(ish) enough for my purposes.

The Expendables franchise may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it could never be accused of pretending to be anything that it isn’t. An unashamed homage to the action movies of the 80s and 90s (with a cast that for the most part were the stars of those of movies and who had seen better days even back in 2010 when the titular mercenaries had their first cinematic outing), all of the Expendables movies are essentially a heady mix of gratuitous violence and cheesy one-lines, held together by the slenderest of plots. But if you liked that kind of thing in the 80s and 90s (as I did) then you’d probably find it hard to hate this franchise.

Arguably the best of the entries is The Expendables 2, which reunites the cast of the original (Stallone, Statham et al) with expanded roles for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, following on from their cameos in the first movie. This time we also get Chuck Norris thrown into the mix and a scene-stealing performance by Jean-Claude Van Damme as the bad guy.

Score for Christmasishness

Given that Jason Statham’s character goes by the name of Lee Christmas, you could make a case for including all of the Expendables movies in my annual countdown, particularly as I’ve incorporated many a film for more tenuous reasons. Indeed I might well revisit the franchise for future editions of this annual nonsense. But The Expendables 2 stands out because there is a picture of Santa Claus painted on the front of the team’s plane. Given that there are no other festive references in the film, I can only assume the image is somehow linked to Statham’s character, but it does add extra Christmasish credibility to the movie so I’m giving it a slightly higher Christmasishness score on that basis.

Few actors divide opinion as much as Nicholas Cage. Is he a gifted actor, as indicated by his numerous awards or is he, in fact, a really bad actor?. Those arguing the latter case need look no further than 1994’s abomination of a comedy Trapped In Paradise. Which is not a good movie. At all.

In fairness, despite being a pretty decent cast on paper, few of the actors associated with this mess come out of it with much credit. But Cage is particularly bad and it seems almost beyond belief that the same actor would turn in an Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas the following year. But somehow he did just that.

Trapped in Paradise though, is genuinely without merit. It isn’t funny, the characters are all largely unlikable and what little plot there is has more holes than a colander.

Score for Christmasishness

Bad though the movie undoubtedly is, there is no escaping the fact that it is pretty Christmas(ish). It’s mainly set on Christmas Eve, in a town not dissimilar to the Bedford Falls of It’s a Wonderful Life. There are Christmas Trees, Christmas jumpers, presents, and no shortage of snow. None of which makes the movie any more watchable, but if you are going to struggle through it, then this is the time of year to do so.

Danny DeVito’s 1989 black comedy reunites him with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner after their successful collaborations in Romancing the Stone and The Jewell of the Nile.

The War of the Roses is quite a departure from those earlier movies but none the less enjoyable for it. Having absolutely nothing to do with the actual War of the Roses, it’s instead about the disintegration of the marriage of a couple whose surname is Rose.

While the movie is pretty dark, outlandish and surreal, the build-up is subtle enough that by the time the ill-fated couple really start to let loose on each other, enough groundwork has been done for the events to make sense within the movie’s own internal logic.

Turner and Douglas have enormous fun as the warring spouses and, bleak though the movie ultimately is, it does have the decency to also be genuinely funny.

Score for Christmasishness

While certainly not a Christmas film, the narrative does feature two different Christmases, the first when the titular couple are still very much in love (albeit the early cracks in their marriage are beginning to show slightly) and later on we see a different, very awkward family Christmas, after the couple have notionally separated but still find themselves living in the same house. There are a few call-backs to the first Christmas in the latter and the two events serve as a poignant juxtaposition to highlight the different stages of their relationship. Both Christmases feature all the usual trimmings, and there is plenty of snow. A gift from the first Christmas also returns as a significant motif for the failing relationship towards the denouement of the movie. It’s not exactly a movie full of joy, but it is hilarious and certainly a bit Christmas(ish).

The original 1972 version of The Poseidon Adventure is infinitely better than the 2006 ‘reimagining’ of the story. It is still, fundamentally, a popcorn disaster movie, that requires a certain amount of suspended disbelief, and clearly the special effects are no match for the remake, but the advantage the original has over the subsequent version is that you actually do find yourself caring about the fates of the characters. Which is pretty key to enjoying a disaster movie in my experience.

There were some good actors in the remake and it’s probably not their fault that the script did them no favours, but even so, the combination of Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine and a superb Shelley Winters in this version is quite a high bar for any movie to compete with.

Score for Christmasishness

As with the 2006 version, this is set on New Year’s Eve, but the key difference is that it actually looks like New Year’s Eve. And a massive Christmas tree is quite pivotal in the plot as it serves as an escape route from the ill-fate ballroom for the survivors of the disaster. So it’s quite Christmas(ish) as far as disaster movies set on cruise ships go.

It’s pretty much accepted wisdom that every even numbered Star Trek movie is good and every odd numbered Star Trek movie is bad. It’s not actually true anymore, though it is a little more true when you only consider the movies starring the cast from the original series. I still think that’s both a little harsh on Star Trek III and perhaps a little over-generous to Star Trek IV. Although I do love Star Trek IV.

All bets have been off on the odd/even theory since the 2009 reboot, which was an odd numbered movie, both on it’s own terms and within the context of the Star Trek back catalogue and which was, frankly, brilliant. But the Next Generation iteration of the movies was also able to dispel the theory with the awful Star Trek: Nemesis, which was an even numbered movie.

Before that abomination though, the Next Generation had been pretty faithful to the odd/even rule, with the brilliant First Contact and the prosaic Insurrection largely sticking to the established pattern. But before any of that we had Star Trek: Generations.

Which was the seventh ever Star Trek movie and thus an odd number film.

And it too supports the theory that odd number Star Trek movies are bad. Although I do find it difficult to truly hate it.

Billed as the movie in which the original cast handed over movie responsibility to the cast of The Next Generation, it was a little underwhelming on that score. Hardly any of the original cast were in the movie, and they were done and dusted before anyone from The Next Generation even appeared on screen.

But if you wait long enough then you do get to see Kirk and Picard interact on screen for the first and only time at the denouement of Generations. It’s all too brief and concludes in the most unsatisfactory of ways, but if you are a fan of Star Trek, as I now am, having watched all of the series and movies (up to that point) in a strangely committed viewing effort between 2016 and 2018, then it was still pretty cool.

Ultimately if you only watch one Star Trek movie, then don’t pick Generations. But if you watch them all then I’m sure you’ll agree that it isn’t the worst thing with the Star Trek name attached to it. Not by a long way.

Score for Christmasishness

The Christmasishness of this movie all hinges on a kind of fantasy sequence, that makes a small amount of sense within the internal logic of the narrative (at least as much as anything else makes sense). In it, Captain Picard finds himself enjoying a Victorian Christmas with his entirely made-up family. It’s all a bit weird, but for that brief juncture, the movie is quite Christmas(ish).

Compared to the largely coherent Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe has always seemed a bit shambolic and rushed. Which isn’t to say there haven’t been some good movies to come out of the project. My Christmas Eve entry for the 2019 iteration my advent calendar was the rather excellent Shazam, which is technically part of the DCEU, even if it mostly seems like an entirely standalone movie.

But there have also been some very bad movies within the DCEU, and few worse than 2016’s Suicide Squad.

Which really is, on every objective level, a terrible film.

Although I do quite like it.

If you’re prepared to switch your brain off from the outset and don’t really need the plot to make even the slightest bit of sense, then there are bits of the movie that are quite enjoyable. And to be fair to the cast, they do the best with what they’re given. Will Smith and particularly Margot Robbie almost do enough to save it from being completely terrible.

Score for Christmasishness

Though not a Christmas movie in any respect, a number of the characters have flashback scenes, and Will Smith’s Deadshot has one which is set around Christmas time, as he is visibly out Christmas shopping with his daughter. And it all seems quite festive before Batman rudely drops in to ruin his day and, presumably, his daughter’s Christmas.

2020’s Wonder Woman 1984 may not be as good as 2017’s Wonder Woman but it’s by no means the worst entry in the DC Extended Universe. Which may be faint praise, given some of the abominations that have been churned out under the umbrella of that particular franchise. But Wonder Woman was a great movie so not being as good as that movie is no great crime and there is plenty to enjoy in the sequel.

It’s definitely about 30 minutes too long, and, even within the context of it being a superhero movie, it does require a lot of suspending of disbelief but it works more often than it doesn’t.

Score for Christmasishness

For most of the running time, it has nothing to do with Christmas, but then, right at the end of the movie, after everything has been resolved, we see the eponymous character in a very Christmassy scene. It adds absolutely nothing to the story, but it is definitely there.

2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level is the sequel to 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which is, in itself, both a reboot and sequel of sorts to the original Jumanji. It may help to have seen the previous Jumanji movies to enjoy the 2019 offering, but it’s not really necessary. The Jumanji movies know who their target audience is and they are unashamedly easy viewing from the off.

And it’s hard not to enjoy a movie that is so intent on entertaining you. I’m certain there are gaping plot holes throughout the narrative, but I don’t care. Jumanji: The Next Level achieves the perfect balance of retaining everything that was great about Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle without being a total rehash of that movie. It even manages to pay an homage the 1995 original at the end too. I don’t think it would reasonable to ask anything more of a movie that is, on paper, a sequel to a reboot.

Score for Christmasishness

All three Jumanji movies are a bit Christmas(ish) but Jumanji: The Next Level is the most Christmas(ish) of the three because Christmas is actually a plot device. The four main characters from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle are reunited because they are home for the holidays. It’s never Christmas within the demonic titular game, but in the ‘real world’ scenes it is very much Christmas throughout the movie and explicitly so.

It’s Christmas Eve again, and therefore time once more to bring an end to my annual Christmas Countdown of films that are a bit Christmas(ish). You’d imagine that after six years of this pointless lunacy that I would finally have fun out of movies but, alas, I already have another 24 lined up for next year. None quite as good as today’s entry though, which is arguably one of the greatest movies of all time.

Indeed it’s so great that, even though it is a sequel to another great movie, it is often purported to be better than it’s precursor.

I don’t know if I agree with that assessment, because I did really like the first movie, which was my Christmas Eve movie of choice last year.

That film was Francis Ford Copolla’s 1972 masterpiece, The Godfather, which of course means that this year’s Christmas Eve entry is Francis Ford Copolla’s 1974 masterpiece, The Godfather Part II.

I’m not sure it’s especially fair to compare the two films anyway, because they are clearly best viewed as two parts of the same peerless masterpiece. But if you do view the films that way then maybe you have to consider The Godfather Part III as part of the whole, and The Godfather III is nowhere near as good as the first two.

On balance I think I have a slight preference for the original movie, but The Godfather Part II is an astonishing sequel/prequel and deserving of the many plaudits it has received over the years.

Score for Christmasishness

On first viewing I didn’t think that The Godfather Part II was as Christmas(ish) as its predecessor, but on repeat viewings I can see it scores pretty highly on the Christmas(ish) scale. There is only one really obvious nod to Christmas, which is when we see a fully decorated Christmas tree in the home of one of the main characters, but the timeline of the movie (or one of the timelines, as there is a dual narrative covering two different time periods) covers a lot of ground after we see that Christmas tree until the action focuses on a New Years Eve party in Cuba. So everything that happens in that time (which is a significant portion of the running time) must happen in and around Christmas. After that there are references to a Christmas present, and quite a bit of snow on the ground. A Christmas tree is also referenced (if not explicitly seen) in one of the final scenes in the movie – a flashback to the Corleone family gathering to celebrate a birthday which happens to be in December.

I’m wearing a onesie festooned with images of Christmas trees and reindeer. I’m a tad more inebriated than would be the norm mid-afternoon. The oven is full of delicious (and expensive) things roasting and coated in an elaborate range of herbs and condiments. And we’re halfway through our second tub of chocolates in as many days.

All the evidence would suggest that it is Christmas.

And compared to Christmases of recent years, it is a pretty good one. Although the bar was set pretty low in 2020 and 2021 thanks to a certain pandemic so I wouldn’t want to overstate how good this Christmas is.

The fact that we are allowed to see other people this year, hasn’t necessarily encouraged my family unit to alter our usual plans of staying at home and quietly overindulging. But we are planning on seeing other people on other days over the festive break which is an option that was not available in recent Christmases past.

This year our family unit is a little larger thanks to the arrival of my youngest child, who has taken on the moniker of Littler Proclaims for the purposes of this blog.

Littler Proclaims is enjoying her first Christmas insofar as an eight-month-old ever could. She generally seems to be a happy child anyway, so I’m not sure whether Christmas has factored into her mood. Unlike her older sister – Little Proclaims – who this morning declared herself to be a ‘Christmas expert’ and who is intent on educating her younger sibling to all the ways of the season.

Little Proclaims’ current thesis on the subject is that Christmas is mainly about opening presents and eating chocolate. And she truly is an expert at both of those things.

But I’m not too shabby at those things either, so I like to think she learned from the best. Plus I’m also really good at drinking too much alcohol, a skill I’ve yet to pass on to my offspring, because I’m led to believe that might constitute bad parenting.

Anyway, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, I hope this Christmas finds you well. And a little fatter than you were yesterday.

As I write this I’m still enjoying a Christmas Day which has predominantly seen me sitting around in a festive onesie, drinking too much beer and eating too much festive food. But lest you accuse me of slothfulness, rest assured that I did cook the vast majority of the festive food, which was not without some effort on my part. And some of it was quite healthy. Or would have been if I hadn’t eaten it to excess. The beer is harder to justify from a health perspective but it is only Christmas once a year so I’m sure that’s justification enough for having a few too many. It’s the beer I drink every other day of the year that is probably of greater concern.

I did start the day by leaving the house and running (albeit very slowly) ten whole kilometres so I can justify any excesses I like today. Putting on a festive onesie upon my return home has no real justification beyond the fact that it’s pretty comfortable. And it amuses my elder daughter, which is frankly priceless.

I’m currently sat at my dining table, opposite said elder daughter, who is playing quietly with one of her Christmas presents. This is also priceless (the playing quietly, not the Christmas present which definitely did have a recommended retail price). We were, until mere moments ago, accompanied by my younger daughter, who was also playing with a Christmas present, a plastic monkey from an equally plastic train set, which she was banging on her high chair with unabashed glee. Then all of a sudden she started crying, as eight-month-old children are prone to do and Mrs Proclaims took her away to provide a solution that I am biologically ill-equipped to offer.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this post beyond the fact that it is rare that I find myself with time on my hands. As tomorrow I’m expecting to be driving to Wales to see my family, I can’t imagine I’ll have time to write a Boxing Day post. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t write a Boxing Day post, but it’s nice to have the option available to me, as I reach the end of a year in which I have rarely had the luxury of disposable time.

The main reasons for that lack of disposable time (and indeed my lack of any disposable cash) have been my two daughters. But, as daughter number two has just re-joined my little dining table gathering, complete with an additional plastic toy to bang on her high chair, and daughter number one continues to play with her unicorn themed Polly Pocket playset while loudly singing about this being “the best Christmas ever”, I can’t help but feel that disposable time may be a tad overrated.

It is New Year’s Eve and as such I am bound by the international blogging code of ethics to review the year that is about to end. The year in question is 2022, which, not being a leap year, was made up of 365 days. Some of those days were quite interesting. Some were not very interesting. I expect most fell somewhere in between those two states.

2022 was a bit different to its immediate predecessors insofar as it wasn’t mostly dominated by a pandemic. Covid 19 was still a thing, and back in January still seemed like it might even be quite a big thing, but mainly it has carried on in the background of 2022 while the world at large has moved on to being concerned about other things.

Indeed the main impact of Covid 19 on the state of public health in the UK is that, after two years of largely avoiding people, we’ve rediscovered that there are a whole host of other ailments that we can catch off each other that can also make us quite ill. This December the Proclaims family have enjoyed a range of respiratory viruses, none of which were Covid 19, but all of which have contributed to a lot of coughing, sneezing and general self-pity.

But other stuff has happened in 2022. So much stuff, in fact, that it would be superficial to imagine I could cover it all in one facile blog post.

But my posts are nothing if not perfunctory so I shall attempt to sum up 2022 in an overly simplistic manner that offers little to no insight into the actual events I’m describing.

The main thing that 2022 will be remembered for is probably war. Which is not a great thing to be remembered for and makes the pandemic-blighted 2020 and 2021 seem almost heart-warming by comparison. War is always horrific but it is rare that there is such a broad consensus on which side is in the wrong. However, as ill-informed as I generally am about world events, I’m going to get off the fence on this one and state that Russia are definitely the bad guys.

Indeed so in agreement is the world that Ukraine are the innocent party in the conflict that Ukraine won the Eurovision song contest this year. Which really must have stuck it to Putin and his cronies.

Pro-Ukrainian feelings did not stop the Welsh football team from beating Ukraine in the playoffs for the 2022 football World Cup. Being a fan of the Wales football team, I was not at all conflicted about how I felt about this – I was genuinely delighted. And even though Wales would go on to not win a single game at arguably the most controversial World Cup in history, it was quite a big deal for Wales to be there, having not qualified for a World Cup since 1958. Whether the World Cup should have been in Qatar or not (and it obviously shouldn’t have been for all kinds of well-documented and cogent reasons) it would be hard to begrudge Wales fans for being a bit excited about it. And, Welsh failures aside, it was a really good World Cup from a sporting perspective, with arguably the best final ever. And Lionel Messi finally confirmed his status at the greatest of all time (or the GOAT as the cool kids like to say) by being on the winning team. Although Pele did die two days ago, which reminded people that he was also the GOAT. Because you can never have too many GOATs in sport. But Qatar 2022 was terribly controversial. much more so than the preceding World Cup which took place in…erm…Russia. Still it was really good to see that so many vocal commentators were there, in Qatar, to point out the obvious sports washing that was taking place, while simultaneously staying in luxury Qatari accommodation and eulogising the football to the point that the sport effectively washed itself.

Does that last sentence make sense?

Probably not but then not much in 2022 really did.

UK politics, in particular, made less than no sense for most of 2022. It had always been stretching credulity to imagine Boris Johnson could really ever make an adequate prime minister. But somehow he managed to eke out his premiership for just over three years. Not the longest innings, but on a par with a few of his more recent predecessors and far more time than he deserved given the obvious failings of his period in charge. At the time of his demise it was hard to imagine a less competent prime minister. But Liz Truss was keen to step up to the plate and in just fifty days she broke the British economy and achieved the shortest premiership in UK history. Rishi Sunak has as much blood on his hands as any frontbencher from the last few years, but such was the turmoil that Truss left in her wake that even the most ardent critic of the Tories would have to say that Sunak’s relative blandness is almost a breath of fresh air.

The UK economy remains broken though and no amount of insincere soundbites are going to make 2023 anything less than painful for most of us. Particularly those of us that made the dubious decision in 2022 to increase the number of mouths to be fed in our households. But more of that later.

For no retrospective of 2022 could be complete without referencing another family. The British Royal Family to be precise (other Royal Families are available). For while 2022 saw the shortest time in office of any UK prime minister, it was during that premiership that the longest reign of any UK monarch came to an end. Queen Elizabeth II died in the year of her Platinum Jubilee and whatever your feelings are about the concept of a monarchy (and I would largely consider myself to be at the cynical end of that spectrum), most people would acknowledge that she was a figure beloved by the British people and to be so consistently held in such high esteem for her seventy-year reign is testament to the fact that, in all likelihood, she was deserving of that affection. Alas the same can’t quite be said of some of her surviving family. But that’s a topic probably best left to the expertise of Netflix.

On a personal level, 2022 has been a year to remember, mainly through an increase in sleepless nights and dirty nappies. For in April 2022, shortly after celebrating my 43rd birthday (and by ‘celebrating’ I mean ignoring) I was blessed with the arrival of my second child – the adorable Littler Proclaims. Her arrival is the predominant reason I’ve been absent from this blog for much of 2022, but she has been a delightful distraction (the odd poonami aside) for the most part. She’s currently sleeping on me as I write this, which is not exactly an aide to the process (typing one-handed is not a skill I have truly mastered) but is gratifying in almost every other sense. I like her when she is awake too, although she is currently beset by one of the aforementioned respiratory viruses so not at her most cheerful at present. She is in general a pretty happy baby though, full of smiles and babbling nonsense.

She is not as exuberant as her older sibling, which is something of a relief. Regular readers will know that I adore my firstborn but the OG Little Proclaims is nothing short of high maintenance. She dotes on (and occasionally terrorises) her baby sister but the sudden shift from being the entire centre of her parents’ universe to cohabiting that space has been a difficult adjustment for her. Fortunately 2022 has offered her an opportunity to maintain the spotlight as she has formally begun her primary education and has been attending a nearby school full-time since September. I was never particularly school-shaped as a child (which makes my career choice of teaching a little strange) but Little Proclaims is very much enjoying her initial foray into the classroom. She even secured the prestigious role of ‘The Cow’ in her first school nativity recently. We were very proud. And less ironically than we thought we might be. Few children can ever have embraced the role of ‘The Cow’ quite as enthusiastically as Little Proclaims did.

Children aside, 2022 has not been without personal triumphs. I’ve participated in, and completed, no less than five half marathons, which is quite a lot more than I would have been capable of running in 2021 and completely unimaginable in 2020 when I was struggling to get to grips with the couch to 5K training plan. There have been other successes and failures, as there are most years. Mainly 2022 was more positive than negative on that score, which is better than the norm I feel.

In blogging terms though, 2022 was a catastrophic failure.

I might need to do something about that in 2023…

As it’s New Year’s Day I find myself, as I do most years, compiling a list of stuff that I need to start doing in the coming year in order to make myself somewhat less inadequate.

Most years, fully aware that any genuine attempt at self-improvement will inevitably be doomed to failure within a few short hours of me completing said list of goals, I have taken to writing insincere resolutions on these pages, mainly for comic effect.

Last year I hit a particular low in this endeavour, when I wrote a list of resolutions that mainly centered around me watching the movie Space Jam. And the worst thing about that post is that, one year on, I still haven’t seen either the original 1996 iteration, nor have I seen the 2021 sequel – Space Jam: A New Legacy. Weirdly though, I did buy a Space Jam themed basketball top, which I wore quite a lot last summer. I don’t play basketball. I don’t know why I bought the top. It is pretty comfortable in hot weather and bizarrely we had quite a lot of hot weather for a UK summer but I’m still not sure it was an entirely appropriate purchase. I might get around to watching the movies in 2023. But that definitely won’t be my resolution for this year, because whether I wrote that post for comic effect or not, you’d imagine I could have gotten around to watching two relatively short movies in order to offer some kind of conclusion to last year’s efforts.

But I didn’t, so I’m not going down that road this year.

Instead I thought I might buck the trend and set myself some actual goals for this year. Unambitious goals naturally, because the last thing I want to do is set myself up to fail, but goals I might like to achieve nonetheless.

I’m not sure this is going to hit the ‘comedy highs’ of my nonsensical ramblings about Space Jam but I would like to be better at stuff so perhaps it’s time to share those ambitions in blog form in a rare show of sincerity. Here goes nothing:

1. Lose some weight. Any amount of weight. I’ve weighed the same for the last five years in spite of having started doing quite a lot of exercise over the last three years. I can only conclude that I need to make some dietary changes. And maybe drink less beer. This will be hard. I like food and I like beer and I have a lot of both in the house at the moment. But I am overweight by anyone’s definition and that probably isn’t the wisest lifestyle choice as I head towards my mid-forties. I’m not going to put a number on this, but if I weigh a tiny bit less on the 1st January 2024 I think that would probably be a good thing. Obviously I need to do something about all the food and beer that is currently in the house so I think the best thing to do would be to spend January 2023 binging on all of that and then start on the weight loss journey in February. That seems like a pretty foolproof plan right?
2. Write more. Ideally write that novel that I’m always saying I’ll write. But at the very least post more regularly on this blog. I like writing. It make me happy. I like to think that my writing sometimes amuses other people too. But the important thing is it makes me happy and I didn’t do enough of it in 2022.
3. Keep fit. I think I am pretty fit now, in spite of the aforementioned weight-loss difficulties, but I used to be very fit and then I became fairly unfit in my thirties without realising it had happened. I prefer being fit. It’s good to be able to keep up with my lively eldest daughter and she’s only getting livelier as time goes on, so I need to stay at the top of my game. Obviously keeping fit would be easier if I enjoyed exercise. I assumed that after three years of working out regularly that I might have found some level of pleasure in the pain by now. But I haven’t. So really I’m just committing to another year of being miserable. Which seems like a stupid thing to do.
4. Spend less money. As the cost of living goes through the roof, I imagine this will be challenging, but I’m not averse to impulse purchases (the Space Jam basketball top is probably a good indicator of this) and I’d really like to have more money for things like a new kitchen, given that my current kitchen seems to be falling apart. I’m not sure all of my frivolous purchases would necessarily add up to the cost of a new kitchen, but I’ve got to start somewhere. I know a new kitchen is relatively boring, but I would be happy to make a concession on this and go for a Space-Jam themed kitchen if that would in some way help to make it a reality.
5. Enjoy the moment. Not necessarily this particular moment. But some moments. I think I might be one of those people that is so concerned with the future that they forget to enjoy the present. Maybe I’ll just end up finding out that the moment is actually rubbish and therefore impossible to enjoy but it would nice to have a little more certainty about this.

There you go. A list of resolutions with a modicum of sincerity. Does that sincerity mean I’ll achieve any of them?

Or I will I continue to be an overweight man who drinks too much beer while wearing sports tops with abstract cinematic themes?

Only time will tell.

As it is January and thus still very much a time for making unrealistic pledges, I’m still fairly confident that I’m going to turn around my 2022 blogging slump and actually post quite regularly in 2023.

However, my ambitions are tempered with a little reality – gone are the days of posting daily as I managed for an entire year between March 2020 and March 2021. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that that level of blogging commitment was only possible for the following reasons:

1. There was a pandemic – even though I still had to work for quite a lot of that pandemic, I definitely had an increase in disposable time during that unhappy period.
2. The pandemic also meant that I tended to use blogging as a coping strategy because pandemics are quite stressful things. While there are still a multitude of stresses and strains on my daily existence, I’m not sure I’m in quite such a heightened state as I was during the spring of 2020, hence blogging is once more a hobby rather than a therapeutic necessity.
3. I only had one child. One child can hamper the productivity of even the most committed blogger, and my pandemic-fuelled blogging spree was actually preceded by a similar blogging slump to the one I experienced last year, but, during that hiatus, I always assumed I would get back to blogging at some point. This time around I have been less certain as to whether blogging is a sustainable pastime. Obviously, it is sustainable, there are lot of bloggers who are also parents, but it is definitely harder to find time with two small children than it was with one. Particularly without the benefit of a global health crisis to underpin it all.
4. I did write a lot of haikus. Which does make it easier to churn out daily content, particularly when you ignore most of the rules surrounding what makes a haiku a haiku and instead just rely on counting syllables.

Anyway, I’ve decided that I will still blog and attempt to blog regularly, but that level of regularity will be somewhat less than daily. I think, at this point I’m going for weekly. I may revise this schedule.

One would hope that a schedule that is less reliant on quantity may allow for a little quality to filter through onto these pages, and no-one would be happier than me were that to be the case. But unlike Icarus, I shall not attempt to fly too close to the sun and so my commitment to attempting to blog at least once a week will not be subject to any kind of quality control whatsoever.

For example, producing a post about my blogging ambitions for the coming year was not really my intention when I started writing this. I had fully been intending to write about how uncomfortable my new shoes are, which is much more in line with kind of hard-hitting content you might expect to see on James Proclaims.

But I wrote this instead.

Which isn’t really anything much and probably not the greatest omen for what is to come in future weeks.

I will try and get an update out about the shoes soon though – I imagine a few people are probably keen to know how that situation resolves itself.

In the meantime, if you are feeling a little short-changed by the redundancy of this particular offering, console yourself that it is not a haiku.

I haven’t actually written a haiku for this blog since March 2021.

I am weirdly proud of this fact.

I suppose as I’ve gone all in on what is essentially a prosaic admin update on the inner workings of my blog, I might as well offer a little commentary about comments.

I have, for some time now, taken to closing the comments section of my posts after a period of time has elapsed (this period has ranged from 1 to 7 days depending on my whim at the time). This is mainly as a way of controlling spam – the bots do like to comment on really old posts, often incoherently but occasionally posting links to sites that are…well let’s just say ‘not safe for work’.

However, limiting the amount of time my actual readers have available to comment on posts means that I also have a slightly more realistic chance of getting around to reading and replying to those comments. Which is something I always intend to do but, as it turns out, not something that I do always do. So, apologies if, upon reading this, you find that you really wish to add a thoughtful and/or insightful comment only to discover that you’ve missed the window. Then again, if this post did inspire you to wish to write a thoughtful and/or insightful comment, then it is possible you have slightly overvalued the words you have just read.