My former husband liked to email me a report on what he ate when I was away. It sounds dull, but was actually pretty funny. (Cooking wasn’t his thing).
Every evening, I would receive a list like this: “Two slices of white bread, six slices of salami, two and a half cups of tea, four lamb chops and half a cucumber love Steve.”
I’ve always been strangely fond of lists, and this is, after all, the season for list making – serene lists, hectic lists, fervent lists, hopeful lists, poignant lists, the wish lists for things we can’t afford, the happy holiday packing lists, the grocery lists for the houseful of guests, the gift lists, do-not-forget lists, reading lists, best lists, family gift lists which aren’t as long as they used to be, worst lists, viewing lists and the usual avalanche of ‘bouquet and brickbat’ style lists from media opinionistas.
I haven’t read many of these this year, because I need laughs, and funny roundups of 2025 are in short supply.
With one honourable exception. The Spinoff delivered a genuinely amusing end-of-year piece by Greg Bruce: No one had a bigger year than New Zealand’s road cones.
Sample quote: “In Wellington, 110 hotline complaints resulted in the removal of two cones. In Whanganui, more cones were added than removed.”
Even though I am a book reviewer and should know better, I pore over ‘best books’ lists for gifts, a few of them for other people. Notables are The Listener’s ‘100 best books of 2025’, An A to Z of The Spinoff’s ‘Best books of 2025’ (always pointedly different from The Listener’s), the New York Times ‘100 Notable Books of 2025’ and the Guardian’s ‘The best books of 2025’.
Shopping lists are the ephemera of everyday life, so old ones are especially fascinating and rare. Hardly any of the 16th century Italian sculptor, painter and architect Michelangelo’s private documents have survived five centuries. Amongst the few that did is a scrap of scribbled paper, a shopping list from 1518. The great man wanted bread rolls, herring, tortellini, two fennel soups, four anchovies, and some cheap wine. To help his illiterate servant, he drew each item!
In her book Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine (2018), the English mathematician Hannah Fry revealed how online marketing algorithms categorise us by our shopping habits.
A chief data officer for a company that sells insurance told Fry his company used information from a supermarket loyalty scheme to learn more about their customers. “They’d discovered that home cooks were less likely to claim on their insurance, and were therefore more profitable. But how did they know which shoppers were home cooks? Well, there were a few items in someone’s basket that were linked to low claim rates. The most significant, he told me, the one that gives you away as a responsible, houseproud person more than any other, was fresh fennel.”
For list nerds (and we do exist), Wikipedia’s page ‘Wikipedia: Unusual articles/Lists’ is hard to beat. It is a rabbit hole of nerdy strangeness, a listicle of lists.
There’s a list of fictional cat people; the list of English words without rhymes; the list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events; the list of inventors killed by their own invention; the list of potato museums; the list of people who have lived in airports; the list of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia (a risk in some countries), and the list of lists of lists: (in other words, a list of Wikipedia articles that list other list articles, including itself).
There’s a list of animals awarded lofty-sounding human credentials, their names put forward by owners to demonstrate the lax standards of ‘diploma mills’. These are important-sounding organisations which make a fortune from the qualifications they sell, I mean offer.
Henrietta successfully registered as a certified member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants despite being dead, and a cat. Her owner was Ben Goldacre, the British academic and science writer, and he used his pet’s academic success to write a scathing column about ‘wellness influencers’ who parade impressive sounding but hollow qualifications.
Lists can reveal the rich history of linguistic invention, especially euphemisms. In 1927, at the height of The Prohibition in the United States, literary critic Edmund Wilson published The Lexicon of Prohibition, a magnificent collection of words for drunkenness. The list was arranged, “in order of the degrees of intensity of the conditions which they represent”.
Many of these words are still familiar to us 100 years later – like lit, squiffy, oiled, lubricated, fried, stewed, corked, tight, liquored, pickled, pie-eyed, cock-eyed, glassy-eyed, four sheets to the wind, loaded, lathered, plastered, soused, to have a snootfull or a skinful. To ‘burn with a low blue flame’ is a new one on me, as is ‘boiled as an owl’, ‘ossified’, or ‘spifflicated’.
Happy Christmas, and I hope all your lists come true. And you only get a little bit squiffy.
• Jenny Nicholls
