Another thing: Gooch thoughts
Featuring hot takes and NEW trends.
Welcome to Letters From the Knot, a free newsletter/blog, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. When I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
I’m a big lover of the gooch period* that comes between Christmas and New Year. After the planning and shopping and tense negotiation between various invented traditions, the gooch is a moment of genuine relaxation and joy where it’s still okay to drink every day, but you don’t have the pressure of gift giving to contend with. Nor yet has the feeling kicked in that you have to put your life back together and get a six pack and write a novel. In some ways, it’s the purest form of existence. It’s a time of licensed excess and total flexibility. Anything is possible! It’s also the perfect time to do some thinking about the year past and the year ahead. Rather than doing the obvious thing of posting a listicle during the gooch, I thought it would be cooler to procrastinate for two weeks and publish it on the twelfth of January - you’re welcome.
*A couple of years ago, in the lead up to the festive season, I spoke to several people about their Christmas plans - where they would be, what they were eating etc. I would then get to, for me, the natural next question:
“And what are you doing in the gooch?”
Three or more times in a row, this question was met with shock and revulsion and I had to explain myself.
“I mean the week between Christmas and new year, the Christmas gooch, have you not heard of that term before?”
“Just seeing family,” my neighbour would say, gently, eyes down, and “no I’ve not heard that phrase, sorry” before pushing their pram towards the highstreet.
I did some investigating after this and was able to confirm that, for much of my immediate circle, “the gooch” was an accepted and acceptable form of slang for referring to the quiet languid sweet-spot between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I won’t go into the etymology of the term here (if you don’t know, you can google it but that’s on you) but it’s also known by the more jemble-coded** term, “betwixtmas”, a word not only ugly to look at and inherently nauseating, but now further degraded by a presumably time limited ad campaign for Twix. There will never be a chocolate bar with the nuts to do a gooch-themed festive ad campaign which, in itself, marks it out as the superior phrase.
I began to expect, after asking around a bit, that maybe the term wasn’t quite as widely known as I had thought, and might in fact be restricted to 20-30 people who I already knew, and that maybe one of them had come up with it. But then, as at so many times of need, I turned to Urban Dictionary and discovered an entry from 2017 from the mysterious 54M3E5T. The entry had received one down-vote but a resounding five upvotes. Thanks to 54M3E5T, I knew I wasn’t alone.
** a jemble is a person who uses old-timey language and linguistic flourishes in place of a personality - thinks like saying ‘foorsooth’ and ‘methinks’, - but, again, it’s not really my job to educate you on these things.
The best (and less than best) things I experienced last year (2024)
Now for the actual purpose of this newsletter - a listicle.
Films
A pretty average year for film generally speaking. Much of it was characterised by me and my partner seeing and hating a film only then to annoy lots of people by slagging it off. Notable examples include Conclave which I thought looked nice but I found it very hard to actually care about because it seemed to take for granted that the future of the Catholic church was important or interesting. It also ended with twist that felt like an offensively clumsy metaphor for comporomise. I accept that I’m basically alone in this view because everyone else seems to have loved it. The same goes for Nosferatu - as with every film Robert Eggers has made in the past 10 years, I had high hopes because The Witch is so incredible and stripped back and spooky. In the end, though, I thought it was a disappointing mess and that it couldn’t decide between being big and camp or being dour and gritty, thereby landing confusedly between the two. Robert Eggers is the perfect illustration that a bigger budget doesn’t mean better films. Also the sound design was batshit (pun intended).
This same dynamic (me disliking things that everyone else loved) can also be seen in the case of Poor Things and La Chimera (soz).
Good films this year included Anora which was fun for the first half as a troubling portrayal of young love and class difference but became even more fun when it swerved into being a rambling crime caper. The pacing is pleasingly wild and I always love a director who can confidently switch from high paced to ludicrously slow scenes while keeping the whole thing engaging. Shout outs to Heretic and Godzilla Minus One for being “a good bit of fun” but the best film of the my year was The Zone of Interest which was emphatically not fun but also an absolute masterpiece.
Music
Despite all of the downsides of streaming services, part of the fun is the insane proliferation of genres and artists, meaning rarely is there any overlap between my top albums and any of my friends by the end of the year. This year, I got especially entranced by the mournful dirge-y organ music of Kali Malone whose album All Life Long was very very nearly my favourite of the year. Shout outs also to Laura Marling’s Patterns in Repeat and CHROMAKOPIA by Tyler, The Creator.
My eventual favourite album of the year was an incredibly late entry, but one I’ve gone on to listen to basically every day for the past month - Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii.
I know she’s been compared to Kendrick Lamar a lot which is obviously high praise, but I think Doechii does more in the two minutes of NISSAN ALTIMA than Kendrick has managed in his last two albums (even if Not Like Us is undeniably the song of the year).
TV
TV always feels tough because whenever something good comes along, I hoover it up in about three days. That was the case for the final series of My Brilliant Friend, which came out this year and, despite my partner and I trying to ration ourselves, was gone in no time. Like the previous three seasons (each of which adapts one entry from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the best books ever written), it’s absolutely stunning and heartbreaking and it’s surprising to me that more people aren’t talking about it. Other shows I consumed so quickly I barely remember them (but would still recommend) are One Day and Baby Reindeer.
Other than that, it’s felt like a bit of a fallow year, albeit punctuated with sugary treats like the rebooted Big Brother and the now diminishing returns of The Traitors. I’ve been lucky to have rediscovered a stable diet of Lost this year, because it’s kept me going between the rare highs, the latest of which is the discovery of Lady in the Lake on Apple TV, a show with a terrible and completely forgettable name that’s absolutely incredible. Set in 1960s Baltimore, it’s a murder mystery that’s so much richer and more beautiful and more interesting than it needs to be. The soundtrack is stunning and it’s so so hard to know where it’s going. Watching it was like finding water in a desert.
Games
I increasingly find it hard to get drawn into video games, perhaps as a result of being relatively time-poor. That said, I’ve managed to carve out an implausible number of hours to play Balatro - an addictive poker-based deck-building game that benefits from being playable in the tiny scraps of time between all the other things I need to do. It’s got no narrative at all, which would usually turn me off instantly, but is just weird and arcane and secretive enough to keep me going in again and again and again. The art style and insane flexibility are some of the reasons a seemingly simplistic game is at the top of a lot of end-of-the year lists, but there’s some deep mechanical genius at work here that I can’t understand.
I found myself a little disappointed by some big blockbusters this year. FF7: Rebirth was bloated to the point of tedium, for example, but the Indiana Jones game was a nice surprise. The story is quite obvious and boring but the voice acting is good and the locations well realised. It’s knockabout fun and what’s bloomin’ wrong with that?
Eating
I had an epiphany at the end of this year that, nearly every time I try to eat at a “fancy” restaurant, I come away feeling underwhelmed and, often, ripped off. The worst example of this was St John Bread and Wine which I’d had on my list for a long time but found to be not only quite ordinary but also fussy and stuffy - the staff were rude, the plates were small, and food didn’t feel either inventive OR generous. I realised that I’ve spent the year going to other restaurants that, though probably inspired by the original St John, are doing similar food at much better prices and with a little more love - the best meal I ate this year was at The Baring in the sort of De Beauvoir/Islington area, a place where every dish is impressive and it’s unpretentious enough to offer a £15 lunch and wine deal. A similar experience can be had at the Lady Mildmay or Jolene in Stoke Newington, but honestly most of the best things I’ve eaten this year have been incredibly cheap and unfussy, including a near weekly visit to Karnaphuli, an cheap and friendly Bangladeshi restaurant that, for a fraction of the price of places like Kricket, Gymkhana, and Dishoom, far surpasses those ‘modern’ experiences for both flavour and vibe. Going here, and to places like Adana 01, Xi’an Biang Biang, and the incredible Proper Tacos (Nag’s Head Market) has reassured me that you could eat phenomenal food in London every day of the year and never have to spend more that £15 on a meal.
What I’m looking forward to doing this year (2025)
I have zero credentials to make any predictions about “trends” for the year, or to say what’s in or out. Nor am I committed enough to make any proper resolutions, so I’ve bundled a bunch of loose thoughts about the coming year here. I’m not going to stand by or defend any of these:
Related to my above restaurant reviews, and having been firmly Vittles-pilled, I’m not going to any “fancy” restaurants this year - cheap local things only.
Been going to London’s docklands a lot and I think it might finally be time to reclaim the Millennium Dome as a cool place to go.
Don’t know if anyone has realised but cheddar has been having something of a revival and I predict that will continue for 2025.
Entering the sixth year of my direct debit to the National Lottery which I think means, statistically speaking, I’ll be a millionaire by the end of the year.
Spent a lot of time last year trying to get away from London to the countryside to be around green things but, since getting a car, we’ve been spending more time driving to obscure parts of the city (i.e. docklands) and walking around there instead. I’ve had it the wrong way around - don’t escape the city to get some countryside, make the city your countryside.
Having only maintained a gym habit by rewarding myself with an episode of Lost on the treadmill, I’m anxious about what will happen to my body when I run out of episodes (currently on S5E3, reccos welcome).
I’m continuing to get good at cooking, now having reached the pleasing point of being able to elevate normal meals in a way that makes people impressed. Basically just needed to add more salt tbh. Going to cook new things every week so pls give me hints on good places for recipe info.
Overall vibe for 2025: have a nice time and don’t try to change everything about yourself just because capitalism is engineered to tell you that you and your body and your job and everything you own isn’t good enough.