01 Nov 2026 9 min read silly thoughts

How Horrible!

A few years ago my kids went through a big Horrible Histories phase. Like, it was all they watched. They played the blooper reels so many times that I ended up buying them extremely specific fridge magnets for Christmas as a kind of throwback joke. (They did get other things, lest you think I'm a monster.)

two fridge magnets. One is an image of the Shouty Man character from Horrible Histories and text at the bottom says, unsurprisingly, 'HI, I'M A SHOUTY MAN!'. The other magnet is a speech bubble containing the text 'I'm seriously considering not coming to the next aftercution'

All of us were buzzed to see the Ghosts movie. Especially me. It's my comfort show, the TV show I reach for when the world feels particularly cold. It's what I hold in my head as the gold standard of collaboration; how people can evolve creatively together over time, and how sometimes fate pulls people together at just the right moment for the betterment of, well, everyone.

The movie was excellent. Everything the TV show was: heartwarming, silly, and fun. Any worries I had about the transition into the big screen were eased almost immediately; as soon as I saw the crew back together again, it felt right. It was the highlight of the month for me.

But here are some other things I've enjoyed lately:

Books 📚

NGL, I've been in a reading slump. Brain fried by job hunting and medical dramas (TV, not real). But I did read Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Woods, a surreal horror story about a group of women on a quest to the forbidden village of Almanby.

a paperback copy of Lost in the Garden by Adam S.Leslie.

There's a lot to like about this. I like how British it is. If Everybody's Gone to the Rapture taught me anything, it's that picturesque English villages can hide some really dark shit. The contrast of gorgeous sleepy villages and the slowly roaming dead is interesting, especially given that the ghosts are not the actual focus of the story. They're just there, in the background, an ever-present but not completely urgent threat.

Later the book delves into the surreal when the women finally arrive at Almanby. It really nails British folk horror. Unfortunately this comes after an incredibly long road trip in which one of the main characters tediously whines for ice cream the entire time, as though the world isn't slowly collapsing around them. I felt like it was trying to do too many things at once. There was a moment during the road trip in which a strange radio show fades in and out, and you just about pick up on some repeated themes; I found that part very unnerving. I just wish that feeling had built into something, I don't know, scarier.

On a completely different note, I devoured The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson, which I flew through in a couple of days. If you haven't heard the premise: Ronson investigates a strange wannabe king, Chris Mark, and his supposed filming of a reality TV show called 101 Princesses. What follows is an unusual quest, with several pit stops along the way to talk to men who have found themselves unmoored in the modern world and making absolutely bizarre decisions because of it.

A hardback copy of The Castle by Jon Ronson.

This isn't a book about the manosphere. It's about the guys at the fringes of things, the ones who kind of get swept away. It got me thinking (and talking) about a lot of things. I'd recommend listening to his interview on the Culture Study podcast if you want to know more about it. Some of the listener questions for Ronson helped to clarify, for me, some of the questions I had lingering after reading.

Next month I will be a more dedicated reader. I promise both myself and you, specifically.

Films/TV 📺

Still mourning the lack of new episodes of Severence and Widow's Bay, I have resorted to binge watching all 23 seasons of Grey's Anatomy. I have witnessed:

Inappropriate relationships
Affairs
Endless amounts of sex in the on-call room
The reappearance of more than two long lost sisters (so, three. Three long-lost sisters)
Powercuts
Weddings (real ones, pretend ones, stood-up-at-the-altar-ones, etc)
Many, many sackable incidents (that don't resolve in sacking)
A few sackable incidents (that did resolve in sacking)
A few rehirings (after sackings)
Adoptions
Pregnancies
Births
Ghost sex
A bomb exploding
Multiple car accidents
A plane crash
A train crash
A ferry crash
A shooting
A tunnel collapse
Several fires
A murderer loose in the hospital
An inexplicable musical episode, and
An escaped lion wandering the streets of Seattle.

It is, undeniably, cracking television.

a gif from Grey's Anatomy featuring two surgeons. One says 'Oh, come on. Give me a 'woo!'' and the other rolls her eyes and says 'woo.'

Chris and I watched Perfect Blue, the 1997 anime by director Satoshi Kon, about a pop idol who pivots into acting only to face an unhinged reaction from fans. It is startling, interesting, and quite difficult to pause at an appropriate moment when a child wants to come into your room.

We watched it at a kind of prescient time for us as a family, because my eldest is diving deep into the kpop scene and the fan culture that presents. We've had a lot of conversations (with her) about pressure, body image, hypersexualisation, and fan obsession. Are these musical artists, or money-making machines? Are they exploiting their fans, or are they being exploited themselves?

I wonder whether my parents had these conversations about the Spice Girls. Possibly, except the most raunchy thing the Spice Girls ever did was singing about the importance of using condoms, whereas the most raunchy thing Katseye ever did is, well, this kind of thing. The feminist in me says go ahead, the mother in me wants to meet up with these marketing people and demand an explanation, the cynic in me thinks that parents should be watching what their kids get into anyway. (Watch this vlog by Adam Mcintyre, who popped into a Katseye concert after getting last-minute tickets only to find himself the only adult in a sea of small children, to see what I'm talking about.)

But that's besides the point. Perfect Blue is extremely unnerving, a superb depiction of an abusive relationship (not romantic, but still abusive); it gaslights you, takes you on twists and turns until you don't know what is real and what isn't.

We also squeezed in a viewing of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House on Netflix, which has echoes of The Haunting of Hill House, The Yellow Wallpaper, etc. Gothic horror that is all tension. The creeping horror builds in layers, until you find yourself watching static shots of an average house in daylight from between your fingers because you just can't bear the feeling anymore.

Also on the menu was The Substance, the 2024 body horror about an ageing celebrity who tries a mysterious new procedure to make herself look younger. I'm not sure I want to use 'menu' in that sentence because there is not a single film that I can think of that has put me off my food as much as this. Mildly infuriating: I want to love Demi Moore for her desire to delve into the immense pressure of being an older female celebrity; on the other hand, she doesn't look anywhere near 60-odd years old in the first place, which throws me into a tailspin.

We actually only managed to watch half of this. The kids came in and, well, that was that. I've heard the second half only gets worse and now I'm scared to watch it.

Still. Impressively gross movie. The worst eating scene since Denethor eating tomatoes.

Games 🎮

Chris and I are playing the remake of Resident Evil 4. It's good. Textures keep popping in and out at random on the Xbox version, which adds a surreal and quite annoying quality to it, but otherwise it's really enjoyable. Still less scary than the newer games, which I actually appreciate; less jumpscares, more overwhelming combat, which is easier to deal with psychologically.

What I've noticed is that one minute I can be popping zombies off at the kneecaps and kicking them in the face like a badass, and then suddenly I completely lose my head and start running around, screaming, picking up eggs instead of bullets, etc. I don't know what comes over me but once I've lost my head there's no going back.

Other than that, I've picked up Two Point Museum again and I am enjoying grinding my way through all the stars while the worries of the day slowly fizzle out.

And, of course, Dressmaker. But I've already talked about that.

Music 🎵

This month I have really enjoyed Olivia Rodrigo's You Look Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love. I mentioned it in my last Silly Thoughts. I picked it up again a few times this month; The Cure is just such a good song. She's almost insultingly talented.

I'm always looking for new writing albums, and Canadian electronic duo Purity Ring's EP graves popped up out of random for me this month. Something dreamlike about it. It puts me into a kind of trance, which is good for writing, but not so much for getting the housework done.

Carly Rae Jepsen's new album is out which I have been very normal about. Day and Night. Day has some gorgeous tracks (Blue Skies makes me think of wandering in and out of the sea with my kids this summer. Something about it feels light and pure). Night, however, is my exact jam. It's just an ecstatically delicious album. Near or Far, Patience Power Passion, and Super Sage are gorgeous. This is the album of a woman who has found her person and is deeply in love with them, and you can't help but be happy for her. Although I'd love to see her songwriting extend into topics other than sex, but I don't think anyone does romance as well as her.

Good Internet 🌐

I'm trying to limit my YouTube time to an hour a day. Which seems like quite a lot actually, but when you're at home all day and you want something yammering away in the background, it actually goes really fast. I have to be very particular with who I spend my time with.

This month, I've been trying to train my algorithm to feed me lovely videos of people bumbling around learning new skills or exploring new places, rather than a constant barrage of videos about how shit everything is. Which seems like a perfect moment to recommend the YouTube channel of the actor and comedian Marek Larwood. The videos are slow and soothing: he goes for walks, he makes art, he reads some books and talks about them. He's incredibly likeable. 100% recommend.

My son is a big horror guy. (You can watch his Youtube videos if you want to make a kid really happy; no voice or video, it's all Minecraft stories using text and music, fully created and edited by him.) My boy loves to be scared. He loves analog horror and things that feel a bit wrong (like me) and strange, surreal monsters (like Chris). In the nature vs. nurture scale, I do think this might be a point for nurture. He's bonded with a girl in his class over their mutual love of spooky things. He's been nagging me to watch Backrooms, which I will not, because he is nine.

It's a fine line to walk as a parent. When I was a kid, nobody cared what I watched (within reason: I have a memory of asking to watch A Clockwork Orange because the video case looked cool, and my Dad responding with a rare and emphatic 'nope!'). But actually, it wasn't movies like Aracnophobia that scared me the most, it was movies like My Girl, which I think of, I kid you not, every single time I see a bee. Which is quite often.

You never know what will traumatize a kid. I was onced deeply shaken as a preschooler by a troubling episode of Winnie the Pooh. So I do think most of us are feeling in the dark a bit, in terms of scarring our children emotionally with media. You just don't know, you know?

So maybe I'm being a bit mean not letting him see Backrooms until he's a bit older. In the meantime, I don't think there's anything wrong with letting him explore the spooky side of life. In my life, horror functions as a safe space to explore fear. I wish there were more age-appropriate options for tweens and up; we need a kind of middle grade category for scary shit. I mean, look at the popularity of Garten of Banban! And Scary Schawarma! The children yearn for terror.

Anyway. Belated Happy Halloween. May your teeth be especially sugar-resistant. <3