Well, 2023 is nearing its end and it’s a year that’s finished as it’s begun, with family being the case in point.

My dear mum passed away on 8th December 2023, after being admitted into Hospital in December 2022 with an infection and whilst this was being treated, she received the full diagnosed her dementia. Since her admission into a care home in January 2023, this last year has provided me with a reminder of being present. Bless you Mum xx.

I tend to take these moments of quiet, to have a period of self-reflection, to see how things have gone against my set goals, sometimes these are formal and structured, sometimes these are ad hoc. Goal setting (both professional and personal) is imperative for you to function at a greater depth.

The main areas of personal informal focus this year, was to remain grounded and present, with a focus on my mental health, that will ultimately lead to happiness and fulfilment for me and that of my kids. Seeing my mums health deteriorate in the course of this last year, has been demonstrable on keeping front and centre for remembering the good memories and laughs I have shared with my mum.

I also set myself some additional goals, 1) exceed 100 sales on the Etsy store, 2) reach 1,000 subs on Instagram, 3) Maintain my focus and standing at work, and achieve by 52 book 2023 reading challenge.

These were all achieved, I have done this through a simple and what I think effective plan.

Etsy Store, I’m loathed to admit defeat, but due to my profile as a Street Photographer, I am more reliant on Etsy and their store platform to sell my wares, than my website.

I reached 111 sales for 2023, with a total of 30 orders in 2023. My most popular items were:

Coupled with my excellent professional printing partner, I was able to fulfil orders to 8 different countries this year, namely: UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, USA, Luxembourg, Switzerland. I am also holding a 5 star feedback.

On Instagram, I have two accounts a film account and a digital account. My main activity is on the film account, with a sufficient archive to post 35mm, 120 and 4x5 images. Q4 of 2023 has seen a little more activity on the digital account, largely due to the film prices spiralling out of control. I enjoy shooting both formats. I am just clutching to the 1k followers on the film account, but the focus for 2024 will be to build the 325 followers in the digital account.

At work, I have built a reputation of coaching and helping some of the younger members of the team, giving back, through an informal process of mentoring and coaching. I remember vividly when I started, as I naive and inexperienced 20 something, that I didn’t know what the tolerance was to act, behave and perform. I coach people now, by saying your actions are based on reason and logic, not knowledge and experience, that follows. I love this role and I do it for the enjoyment I get from seeing the younger folk rise. Everyone should have and / or be a mentor.

I also finished the year as top performer (for the third consecutive year) in performance, which is a token gesture based on the position of my mum.

Secondly, I’m not much of a ‘sit in front of the TV’ type of person. With the exception of watching (informative) YouTube videos, I am much more relaxed reading a decent book. I generally exceed my yearly challenge of 52 books and I take enormous joy from reading a wide genre of novels.

I have read 61 books this year.

In no particular order or ranking, these are the standout reads for me for 2023.

Best Memoir:

I don’t take Requests – DJ Fat Tony

Harrowing, honest and funny, this is the candid and outrageous memoir of a life of extremes. It's a story of getting it all and losing it all. Addiction, recovery, and starting again. Drawing a vivid portrait of Britain's street culture from the 1980s to the noughties, DJ Fat Tony describes his childhood on a London estate where he honed his petty criminality, was abused by an older man and became best friends with Boy George. He spent his teenage years parading the Kings Road in his latest (mostly stolen) clobber, worked as a receptionist at a brothel, hung out with Leigh Bowery and Andy Warhol, and created his drag persona, before becoming DJ to the stars (including Prince and Madonna) and spiralling into a life-threatening drug addiction.

This is a story of loss and redemption and living to tell all the tales in glorious, funny and often heart-breaking detail, from one of social media's best-loved meme-thieves and the world-renowned DJ.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.

Political:

How Westminster Works…..and why it doesn’t - Ian Dunt

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER British politics is broken. Anyone sitting down to watch the news will get the sense that something has gone terribly wrong. We have prime ministers who detonate the economy, secretaries of state who are intellectually incapable of doing the job and MPs who seem temperamentally unsuited to the role. Expertise is denigrated. Lies are rewarded. And deep-seated, long-lasting national problems go permanently unresolved. Most of us have a sense that the system doesn't work, but we struggle to articulate exactly why. Our political and financial system is cloaked in secrecy, archaic terminology, ancient custom and impenetrable technical jargon.Lifting the lid on British politics, How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't exposes every aspect of the system in a way that can be understood and challenged, from the heights of Downing Street to the depths of the nation's newsrooms, from the hallways of the civil service to the green benches of the Commons.Based on interviews with some of the leading voices in politics, from former occupants of No.10 to key figures in Whitehall, Westminster and Fleet Street, Ian Dunt provides exactly what people in power have always tried to a full description of the mechanisms of British government. And a vision of how we can fix it.

Johnson at 10 – Athony Seldon

Mindboggling to see what a complete and unmitigated disaster, the Johnson ‘administration’ was.

True Crime:

Shallow Graves: My life as a Forensic Scientist on Britain's Biggest Cases – Ray Fysh

Shortlisted for the True Crime Awards 2023 Best New True Crime Author The murder of Sarah Payne, Adam the Thames Torso, the London bombings, the Night Stalker and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko... The solving of all these cases can be linked to one Ray Fysh, a beer-swigging Charlton Athletic fan from Woolwich, a natural raconteur and also one of the finest forensic detectives the country has ever seen.Ray began work for the Met Police in the 1970s when forensic investigation was seen as little more than a geeky side show, only in existence to confirm or eliminate evidence. But by the mid 90s Ray and his team had made huge progress in their field, contributing to the UK becoming a world-leading innovator in forensic techniques, with Ray himself being named as Special Adviser to the Forensic Science Service. As the SA, Ray worked alongside Senior Investigating Officers from day one of a case, directing his team to identify forensic opportunities and harvest case-cracking clues.As Ray looks back over his career at the cases he worked on, the reader is given unparalleled insight into the highs and lows of an astonishing career, the historic classist snobbery of the Met and the stunning realities of crime and forensics

Unlawful Killings: Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey – Wendy Joseph

Every day in the UK lives are suddenly, brutally, wickedly taken away. Victims are shot or stabbed. Less often they are strangled or suffocated or beaten to death. Rarely they are poisoned, pushed off high buildings, drowned or set alight. Then there are the many who are killed by dangerous drivers, or corporate gross negligence. There are a lot of ways you can kill someone. I know because I've seen most of them at close quarters.'

Non Fiction:

README.txt – Chelsea Manning

An intimate, revealing memoir from one of the most important activists of our time.

While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq for the United States Army in 2010, Chelsea Manning disclosed more than seven hundred thousand classified military and diplomatic records that she had smuggled out of the country on the memory card of her digital camera. In 2011 she was charged with twenty-two counts related to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military records, and in 2013 she was sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison.

The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition, seeking hormones through the federal court system. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison.

In README .txt, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. Manning details the challenges of her childhood and adolescence as a naive, computer-savvy kid, what drew her to the military, and the fierce pride she has about the work she does. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of our digital, information-driven age.

Photography:

Portrait of Britain Volume 5 – Hoxton Mini Press

The worst of the pandemic might be behind us, but the crises just keep coming. War is in Europe. Inflation and temperatures are on the rise. This, the fifth volume in the British Journal of Photography and Hoxton Mini Press’ collaborative series, brings together 200 portraits from all over our island that show Britain at a time of resilience and reimagining. It creates both a thoughtful reappraisal of our recent past, and reveals the individuals both loudly and quietly changing the future. It is published in support of 1854 Media’s annual award, Portrait of Britain, which sees the finest portraits taken in the nation in recent years tour the country via JCDecaux digital billboards. The book features an introduction that sets the portraits within their cultural context and the full shortlist of 200 photographs alongside quotes

Fiction:

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.

Pig Iron – Benjamin Myers

Pig Iron is the story of John-John, a young man wrestling with the legacy of brutality left by his bare-knuckle boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls John-John into the dark recesses of a north-east town where his family name is mud.

As he attempts to trade prejudice, parole officers and local gangs for his ‘green cathedral’ - the rural landscape in which he seeks solace - Mac’s rise and bloody downfall threatens to engulf John-John’s present.

A far cry from the recent media stereotyping of travellers, Pig Iron is a sensitive portrayal of Britain’s most marginalised and misunderstood ethnic group. More than anything, it is about the redemptive power of nature and the landscape of post-industrial northern England.

Pig Iron is the story of a traveller who hasn’t travelled; a young man fighting for his surname and his very survival.

Wellbeing:

This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A journey into the heartland of psychiatry – Nathan Filer

Presents a balanced summary of the controversy around the biological model of mental ill health, along with the impact this model has had on service design and culture, and society’s understanding of/relationship with its own and others mental health. Coming at a time when the profile of mental health is increasing, this exposure of the counter narrative to the disease model, from an author with his appeal is incredibly important.

History:

Napoleon, a life – Andrew Roberts

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times bestselling author of The Storm of War—winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoleon

Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.

Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.

The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes

The history of the birth of Australia which came out of the suffering and brutality of England's infamous convict transportation system. With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.

One of the greatest non-fiction books I've ever read . . . Hughes brings us an entire world. --Los Angeles Times

Sport:

Tackled – Ben Tornley

Ben Thornley: The Class of '92 Star Who Never Got to Graduate is the autobiography of a Manchester United player who had the world at his feet, only for a tackle to shatter his knee - and his dreams. Ben tells his story with insights from the likes of Alex Ferguson, David Beckham and Ryan Giggs. It's the Class of '92 as you've never heard it before.

Tome:

The Armour of Light – Ken Follett

The grand master of gripping fiction is back. International No.1 bestseller Ken Follett returns to Kingsbridge with an epic tale of revolution and a cast of unforgettable characters.

Short Story:

Water – John Boyne

You just cant ignore Boyne’s writing. When its good, its very good.

Little Gem:

Foster – Claire Keegan

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.