Round-up Meander May/June '25: Good things to read, watch & listen to 📚📺🎧

War games, wildlife, words

Jun 25, 2025

Hello friends,

It feels like a mere moment ago I was compiling my list of cultural goodies for my last round-up - and yet somehow here we are, practically bumping into the end of June. That old adage about stopping to smell the roses feels more pertinent with every year older I get. And I have in fact been doing it more and more (though not strictly always with roses) - taking a tiny pause out of life and arresting time, even just for a second

Nature definitely provides its own show for us this time of year. As I sit down to start writing this, it's solstice weekend and I'm looking out my office window at the sloping bank that leads up into our garden, where the long prairie grasses and rangy oxeye daisies are dancing wildly in the breeze in the midsummer warmth.

But human-made entertainment remains in full force too. In an hour or two, I'll be heading off to the station to take a train up to London to meet my mum for a late Christmas present theatre trip to watch two of the stars of Strictly Come Dancing strutting their stuff on stage (rather them than me in this heat!) And of course there’s just as much of a deluge of possible films, TV shows, podcasts et al for us to consume this time of year as any other.

So this round-up is, as ever, just my little offering of some things you might choose to feed your eyes and ears with, out of what can often feel like an infinite pool of possibilities.

This is what I’ve found memorable and interesting over the past few weeks. If you've read, watched or listened to any of these yourself, I'd love to know what you thought of them. And as ever, if you've got any brilliant recommendations you want to send my way, I would be delighted to receive them.

Reading

I've had a lot of balls in the air these past few weeks getting ready for the launch of' ‘The Film Thread’ - my brand new members’ film club which is just about to go live as a fun offshoot to this very newsletter.

Despite living in a lark's world, in which I’m obliged to be up early every day to get the kids off to school, I'm naturally a night owl and I tend to do my best thinking and writing late in the evening. What this has meant recently is that my pre-bedtime book reading has been replaced by tapping away furiously on the laptop keys until past midnight most nights.

That said, it’s really only in the most extreme of situations that life throws up that I ever lay down my books completely. So whilst my reading has slowed, it certainly hasn’t stopped.

I zipped through a new popular history of uranium, Chain Reactions, by freelance historian Lucy Jane Santos, which I’ll be posting a video book report on soon. I finished Meditations for Mortals (recommended, especially read spaced out over 30 days as author

Oliver Burkeman

suggests) and Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha kept me guessing until almost the very end!) and I’m nearing completion of the third of six books in Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses series, which I’m reading slowly across the whole of 2025.

And I’ve got two books currently on the go, both contributing to the sub-heading of this round-up and both an absolute DELIGHT.

In the wildlife category, as

Liz Champion

predicted, I am completely swept away by Chloe Dalton’s tale of the newborn wild leveret she rescued and took into her home, in Raising Hare. The precision and care in her descriptions of this initially-tiny, but fast-growing and ever-changing creature - and her broader exploration of the hare’s place in history, folklore and culture - are honestly just beguiling.

As for words, well obviously all books by definition involve words but my other current read, Rosen’s Almanac by the utter legend that is Michael Rosen, is actually about them.

I’ve adored Michael Rosen since I was a kid and was thrilled to meet him and have him sign one of my original 1980s poetry books of his after a children’s book event at Brighton Festival a couple of years ago (I think I was even more excited by seeing him than my son was!) I’ve got this one out of the library but as the title suggests it’s set out as a long series of shorter, discrete pieces, for each day of the calendar, so I’m quite tempted to treat myself to my own copy. I think it might just be the perfect downstairs loo book 🤣

Seriously though, if you’re at all interested in the wonders and weirdnesses of the English language (or if you ever listen to Rosen’s Radio 4 series Word of Mouth) I think you’ll love this book.1

Meanwhile on Substack, I very much enjoyed two windows into very different styles of English abodes in the shape of a fascinating look at the country's last cave homes by

Helen Barrell

and a

Municipal Dreams

deep dive into the Churchill Gardens estate in Westminster, widely considered a gem of British postwar council housing and of particular interest to me since my dad grew up on the nearby Abbots Manor estate and attended Churchill Gardens primary school in the early 1960s.2

With Glastonbury rolling around again this weekend, I loved going on a tour of 20 years of festival-going with one of my favourite writers on the platform, the wonderful

Wendy Varley

(who absolutely rocked the space age glamour look in fancy dress as Lieutenant Gay Ellis from UFO in 2011 - yes, there's a picture😄). And I urge you to spend a few minutes with 80-year old Raymond, a 'Bay Area style icon' who's been keeping a daily journal for 57 years. Just brilliant stuff.

On a more sombre note, I've been paying renewed attention to the writers I follow on nuclear weapons issues in light of the deeply scary situation currently playing out between Iran and Israel. One voice I've found myself turning to is that of

Al Mauroni

, a former US Air Force/Department of Defense expert in counter-WMD policy and nuclear deterrence.

I recommend checking out his Substack in general, but will flag up in particular this piece on a board game entitled Target: Iran, that puts a whole other spin on the war gaming thread that's ended up wending its way through my viewing and listening elsewhere of late. It's a sideways take on the current situation that I think is well worth reading.

And finally, if you care about films and film culture, I'd strongly encourage you to find some time to sit down and read the rallying three-part series on how to save movie-going from

Sophie

That Final Scene

, The death of cinema & how to bring it back to life'.

After digging into the sorry state of theatrical cinema and what might lie behind it in the first two parts in the series, in the third part she brings the mood back up by introducing her 'cultural gym' framework. This really resonated with me, landing just as I was myself engaged in thinking about how I could inculcate some semblance of the natural communion that comes from watching films with other people in a cinema, only virtually. Sophie's words express the magic of this shared experience just beautifully:

Cinema, at its best, isn't a content delivery system but a synchronizer of human experience. When a room full of strangers laugh or cry or hold their breath together, something ancient and powerful happens—a reminder that we're not just isolated consciousness in separate flesh prisons but creatures capable of feeling in unison.
This synchronization of experience feels increasingly rare and precious.

I couldn’t agree more.

Watching

Sadly, I’ve not made it to the cinema myself this month but I have been doing a far bit of communal telly-watching. We’ve been catching up on a couple of BBC sitcoms that previously passed me by: the fairly traditional broad humour of family misadventures with a top-notch cast including Katherine Parkinson, Alison Steadman and writer Tom Basden in Here We Go (which my 11 year old especially enjoyed - a lot of it is marvellously silly); and Such Brave Girls, a much darker, female-led vehicle for writer Kat Sadler and her sister Lizzie Davidson about trauma, narcissism and very poor life choices against a backdrop of poverty in contemporary Britain.

The kids and I also enjoyed some natural history, the picks of the bunch being a beautifully relaxing and eye-opening programme on The Magical World of Moss and - more wildlife - Pangolins: The World's Most Wanted Animals (both on the iPlayer).

Also possibly sneaking into the wildlife category as a wildcard - the 2007 Jerry Seinfeld animation Bee Movie, which managed to get across a vital message about the crucial importance of pollinators for the world, whilst also being a lot funnier than I’d expected (your mileage on honey-based puns may vary 🤣).

And we watched Tales from Earthsea, which was as gorgeously-realised as every Studio Ghibli film but having read the entire book series last year, I felt disappointed by how Ursula K. Le Guin's masterful source material had been mangled and conflated into a rather reductive, cliched tale of good vs evil. This is one case where I'd definitely say choose the books over the film.

A lot of my movie-watching over the past month or so has coalesced around titles from or about the ‘60s & ‘70s - not a deliberate theme although I do often find I end up subconsciously selecting titles that have something in common - do you do that too?

The film that kicked off this unintended 'mini-season' was The Phantom of the Open, the absolutely wild true story of a Cumbrian crane-operator who, despite having never played golf before in his life, became a brief sensation after managing to gain entry to play at the 1976 British Open and then getting the worst ever score in the tournament's history. Featuring an incredibly committed turn from Mark Rylance, as well as disco dancing twins, Japanese businessmen and some fantastic ‘70s outfits, this was a really warm bit of escapism.

I then watched Joy: The Birth of IVF, another British true-life tale, this time of the pioneering scientific efforts behind the first test-tube baby Louise Brown. This was a fairly standard, ‘triumph-against-the-odds’ movie in its mode of storytelling, but the focus on the women at the heart of the story - not just the hopeful mums-to-be but the female embryologist Jean Purdy, whose contribution has too often been overlooked - was really moving and felt so close to home for me, having been born just a year before Louise Brown. The parents in the film could so easily have been my parents or those of my friends. There but for the grace of god etc. And Bill Nighy was wonderful - as he always is.

Continuing my recent vogue for Agatha Christie, I also watched the original 1974 Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney - extraordinary cast, but I did find it a bit stagey - and The Killing of Sister George, starring Beryl Reid and Susannah York. To me Beryl Reid was one of those twinkly, 'grand dame' fixtures of my childhood alongside Thora Hird and Dora Bryan, but in this film she was very far from that image, playing an ageing lesbian actress and star of a popular TV soap opera whose character is being written out against her will (the storyline said to be inspired by the killing off of Grace Archer in the BBC's long-running radio soap The Archers).

The film was controversial in its day for its frank depiction of a gay relationship (which was really incidental to the main plot of the soap opera sacking) and I did find it an engaging watch, especially the scenes in a lesbian night club which were presented in such a normalised and surprisingly modern fashion for a film made in the '60s. It could have been about half an hour shorter though.

Lastly, I complemented all the mid-century Britishness with... a mid-century French film. Mon Oncle, from 1958, was my first experience of Jacques Tati and I found it fun and charming - especially the main couple’s modernist house with its clearly-intended-to-be-ridiculous mod cons which I actually found quite desirable 😄. Great soundtrack too. I’ve lined up what by all accounts is his masterpiece, Playtime, to watch next.

And finally we get to the aforementioned war gaming. Inspired by a podcast listen, which I'll talk about in a moment, I decided to sit down and watch the 2024 American feature documentary, simply entitled War Game, which features an array of retired US veterans, government and intelligence officials and elected representatives role-playing an attempted coup scenario in which right wing extremists and rogue members of the miltary try to prevent the certification of a presidential election.

I found it a gripping but queasy watch, borrowing tropes from heist and spy thrillers (there was a 6 hour clock counting down throughout the exercise), whilst also making clear the human vulnerability and uncertainty at play in a situation that feels unsettlingly possible, all made so much worse by the disinformation flooding the zone.

Listening

But for me as a Brit, it was the Wargame podcast, a joint production by Sky News and Tortoise Media, the new owners of the Observer newspaper, that had the bigger impact.

This 5 part series similarly features a 'cast' of top level government officials and advisors (played by some genuine big hitters of British politics including former foreign, home & defence secretaries Jack Straw, Amber Rudd and Ben Wallace, the latter playing the Prime Minister) role-playing a scenario in which Russia attacks the UK and the US and NATO decline to provide any military support, ultimately leading to a horrifying choice as to whether to deploy Britain's nuclear weapons deterrent.

It's very well put together and makes for truly compelling listening, not least as you really feel like you're getting a behind-the-curtain glimpse of what the conversations of those in power must be like in moments of high level national emergency (the calm and understated tones of the British upper classes - which is what most of these people appear to be, especially on the military side - belying the almost unimaginable consequences being discussed).

But there is also a clear political agenda - that Britain is not, and has not been, spending nearly enough on its defence - which is presented as simply inarguable. The timing of the series, coinciding with the British government's recent spending review announcing increased military spending, surely can't be coincidental. If you want to hear some counter-arguments to the need for more fighter jets, war ships and nuclear submarines, this piece in the London Review of Books is well worth a read: Ready for war?

Finally, I have to share this new collection of poetry by the wonderful writer & storyteller John Osborne, who’s probably most famous for his 2011 show John Peel’s Shed. Like all his work, To Make People Happy is just shot through with warmth, humour and nostalgia and the audio version, linked below, also includes his little voice notes on the genesis and background to many of the pieces. The poem ‘I’d love to die in my own house’ made me cry a little bit - in a good way.

A SHORT FILM TO WATCH

And just before I go, as always I’m sharing a short film you can watch in just a few minutes. This documentary is about one of those slightly oddball, forgotten moments of popular culture - in this case a dispute over the Guinness World Records for the fastest talker that played out on American television in the late 1980s. In just 11 minutes it opens up a whole world you almost certainly didn’t know about and the central character draws you into his experience and memories completely. I’d love to know what you think.

And I’ll make no comment on why a film about someone who talks really quickly should have jumped out at me as one to watch…!

This has been a typically long round-up so thanks for bearing with me till the end. I hope you’ll find something in here that grabs your fancy - and don’t be shy with any thoughts and observations as it’s always great to hear what you think.