It’s been a messy, horrible year in so many ways, but there have been things worth praising, and perhaps it’s good for my soul to do just that. So, without further ado, here are my “Best ofs” for 2025, shared in the hope that we can, all of us, focus on the positives.
Best life hack: if you’re not that interested in your children developing an obsession with maths, I understand. Who wants to raise a nerd? But please do know that its main benefit is giving you the mother of all distraction techniques as a busy parent. My seven-year-old son is very much in the grip of what doctors call Number Fever, meaning I can now get out of any conversation by simply writing 12 tricky sums on a piece of paper and handing it to him. Voila! The space to make dinner, put on a wash, or simply look at my phone for 10 minutes of uninterrupted sloth. From there, you can graduate to buying them the cheapest, biggest calculator you can find, and watch them use it like a Gameboy, for a week or so at least. Get your toddler watching Numberblocks now.
Best buy of the year: unequivocally, the second-hand Nintendo Switch we got my son, right around the time the Switch 2 came out. Thankfully, he doesn’t know a newer console exists and he’s loving it so much he’s ceased watching brain-numbing videos of people playing games and now plays them himself instead. His standouts have been Minecraft and Pokémon Legends: Z-A, although my personal favourite to play with him has been Thank Goodness You’re Here!, a delightfully mad cartoon puzzle game made by the two-man team of Coal Supper studio in Barnsley. Set in a fictional Yorkshire town, it’s a riot of pies, mushy peas and toilet humour, with exquisitely stupid gags everywhere you look. It might best be described as a fully playable (and much more family friendly) issue of Viz. Not that it’s completely age-appropriate, mind. Depending on the sensitivities of your child, you may want to speed past some of the slightly more mature themes yourself, but this just means you get to play it alongside them as they chuckle at all the slaps and bums and pie-based mischief. Heaven.
For my three-year-old daughter, I could list the innumerable Paw Patrol dolls, trucks or trains she’s somehow accumulated, but nothing makes her happier than 10 sheets of peelable stickers that she can place at the base of every wall, chair and flat surface at arm’s height, while her much more expensive toys languish untouched. Does this happen every time we buy her anything? Yes. Do we ever learn anything from this? No.
Best films of the year: recency bias may play a part here, but for the third year in a row we went to the Muppet Christmas Carol Sing-A-Long at the Prince Charles Theatre and found, as ever, that there’s simply no joy like seeing your kids laugh at big-screen Dickensian puppetry, while you quietly blub because Tiny Tim did not die. But the overwhelming favourite was the inane leviathan that is A Minecraft Movie, which both my kids have watched roughly 600 times and which is – I shall say just this once and through gritted teeth – marginally better than it strictly needs to be.
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Best food of the year: a very strong showing here for penne pasta with either grated cheddar cheese (my son) or pesto (my daughter). What were the runners-up, you ask? Look, after a long hard season, we’re not going to get hung up on what points were lost. We’re happy that any calories have been ingested at all so we will not belabour the fact that my children refuse to eat anything else for their dinner. At all. As in, I’m seriously worried about their nutrition levels and feel as if I’m soon going to have to starve them for a while until they eat anything else. Something healthier? Sure, but to be honest, I’d feed them solidified lard served on a bed of Monster Munch if they’d eat the damned stuff, but they won’t. You should see me trying to get them to eat pizza. Pizza! They scream like I’ve handed them cow-brain rillettes. Having said that, they ate some battered cod the other day, and even tried some peas. They cried for the entire meal, of course, but this is not the time or place for negativity. They have sums to do and stickers to stick in low places, and I can always return to you next year with a stellar rundown of the Best Treatments for Infant Scurvy. See you in 2026.