Hello. It is December 2025. Christmas lurks, ready to devour us all. It’s more than a holiday. It’s also an ivyday and a mistletoeday. This is the thirty-sixth monthly issue of Interesting Skull, a newsletter that nobody should ever look at the numbers of. It’s by me, award-losing author, violent cougher, shower-noseblower and damp adult Mike Rampton. Merry Christmas!

During my first degree I barely researched honey-based alcoholic drinks at all. Then I did an MA in meadier studies.

I didn’t win an award. My book There Are No Silly Questions wasn’t Barnes & Noble’s Book Of The Year 2025. I thought maybe they’d send me a $25 book token for still being quite good, but no. It definitely got the book out there though, if the amount of scam emails I’m getting from fake book clubs is anything to go by!

But! It was named as one of the ten best children’s books of the year by Smithsonian Magazine, which is, I reckon, not too shabby. I think this probably gets me the key to the city or something.

My books make excellent Christmas presents. There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question is big and beautiful and looks great being unwrapped. Become A Genius In A Year is designed as a January—December journey of magnificence-ing, so is a perfect stocking-filler. Poo! What? Where? is out on January 15th, which doesn’t work for Christmas at all, but you could spend your Christmas book tokens on it if you wanted.

It might be too late for delivery from some outlets and depending where you are, but there are shops, damn it. Here is that message in rhyming video form.

"I'm sending some local basalt to a city in Slovakia."
"British lava?"
"No, Košice."

"Did you know a member of 5ive was taught to play a medieval stringed instrument by the star of Gone With The Wind?"
"Abz? A lute? Leigh?"
"Really? You knew Ritchie Neville took gittern lessons from Olivia de Havilland? How?"

Will Ferrell and the filmmakers behind Uncut Gems have put a lot of rules and regulations in place preventing me from leading a normal life. It's Elf and Safdie gone mad.

I don’t think I had a bath in 2025. If I decide, though, that my new year’s resolution was to give up baths, then I did really well. Good work, me! I’ve also decided in hindsight that I resolved to:

I kept all of those! What a champion! I also did literary festivals and school appearances for the first time, performed stand-up in a proper theatre, published three books and wrote four. Spoke in my first council meeting, led my first Woodcraft Folk session, became a charity trustee. Broke a phone, cried in a Wetherspoons, fell off a bike, lost £7 in a very silly scam and spent many hours arguing with employees of APCOA, the parking company that is the absolute scum of the earth. Let’s pretend I vowed to do all of those things back in January. What a towering achievement!

I think my main aim in 2026 is to continue to believe that I could be massively successful, rich and famous if I tried. All I’d need to do is foreground the charisma I’m almost certain I have in deeply-buried bucketloads, make some friends, put some work in and superstardom would await. Just, you know, the hours in superstardom aren’t great for parenting so I simply won’t. I’m also — and I don’t like to boast, but it’s true — not passionate about anything at all, and I wouldn’t want to make the people who were trying really hard and properly cared about stuff feel bad.

"I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem. I'll be your dream, I'll be your wish, I'll be your fantasy. I'll be your hope, I'll be your love, be everything that you need." — Slavoj Garden

There’s a huge fog and a small fog. Which has the most spouses? The huge fog, as it’s a bigger mist.

"I've just been to a village near the Norfolk-Cambridgeshire border, by the River Great Ouse."
"Feltwell?"
"No, funnily enough my visit to Littleport was unpleasant because I had such bad diarrhoea."

Won £100 in a pub quiz. Well, between six of us, and after failing to win on five prior occasions. Still though. Champ.

Spent a while wearing caffeine patches instead of drinking coffee. They’re quite good, sort of, but the headline ended up being something like “I’m a stinky pig who smells, maybe it’s the coffee.”

I think I might stop pitching freelance articles next year. I’m not very good at it. Most of the commissions I get are along the lines of, “Hi Mike, we hated all your pitches but here’s an idea we had that none of us want to write”. So maybe I’ll still pitch, but in a slapdash manner involving minimal thought or time, which is how the stuff I currently pitch seems to come across anyway. Whatever I’m doing currently isn’t working, anyway.

Arranged about five things for 2026. I know that’s not many things and it’s 2026 quite soon, but it made me feel impossibly organised. I’m going to earn at least four hundred pounds! Yeah, look impressed. That’s more than £1 a day (before tax) (oh god I need to sort my tax out).

"I've just been discussing the goal of the 1980s chess computer Deep Blue with a famous Swedish-born interior designer."
"Beata Heuman?"
"That's what it was built for, yes."

"I've moved to a town in south-east Hampshire."
"Havant?"
"Yes, I have."

E.M. Forster describing vision-obstructing conjunctivitis: "Rheum within view."