Goals for 2025. How I did.

Is crunch-time for my 2025 goals, before setting new ones for 2026. All the reviews and so on are on the blog, so do search if you fancy reading about anything in particular. I didn’t add links as there are so many.

Goals for 2025: Blogs

1. Post regularly. I wanted to continue to post regularly on Coffee and Books and ancaslifestyle and I did. Goal was of 60 posts and I did 99 on ancaslifestyle, including the monthly round-ups which are now slowly becoming a bimonthly thing.

2. Reviews for Vegan or Vegetarian restaurants. I aimed for 4 reviews of restaurants in UK and 4 round-ups or vegan-in-country/city sort of posts. I did 5 reviews of restaurants and 3 “vegan in”, so in total it works just the same.

1. The Herbarium, Lancaster
2. Pure Vegan, Lancaster
3. Mangosteen, Portsmouth
4. Itadakizen, Shrewsbury

1. Vegan in Romania
2. Vegan in Portsmouth
3. Vegan on the Isle of Wight
4. Organica. Vegan restaurant in Lviv

3. Reviews. I wanted to do 4 reviews and I did.
1. Puzzles – Cluedo, Wasgij, My Ravensburger
2. Ashton Hall at Lancaster Golf Club
3. Hencote Vineyard, Shrewsbury
4. Kew Gardens Hotel and Restaurant, London

4. Taste the World. The aim was 2, the result was 0. I am not sharing recipes for some reason, but I will keep adding this until I make it happen.

5. Read the World. The goal was 2 and I did 3.
1. Cat Jarman – read: River kings, awarded 2 stars. She is Norwegian.
2. Ewa M. Thompson – read: Imperial Knowledge, awarded 5 stars. It is a book about russian imperialism and use of culture. She is born in Lithuania.
3. Jason Hickel – read: Less Is More, awarded 1 star. Hickel is from Eswatini. Really bad book, I only finished it because it was for the book club.

Goals for 2025: Personal and Travel

1. Sew. Another year of not sewing anything.

2. Read 89 Books. NO! I read 89 books every year for 4 years in a row, but 2025 was too hectic for me to achieve this number. I lowered it to 70 and I managed that.

3. Visit 3 new places in UK. I wanted to visit 3 new places and I saw 6 new places instead. That was really nice.
1. Portsmouth
2. Salisbury
3. Isle of Wight
4. Portland
5. Sounthampton
6. Lyme Regis

4. Visit a new country. This was a new country or a different city in a country I’ve been to before. Neither of them happened. Because we’ve adopted our cat Volya we couldn’t travel abroad, so no new countries and I didn’t travel within Ukraine because of her, as I adopted her at the beginning of my longest stay in Ukraine of the year.

5. Visit 4 stately homes or castles. I wanted to see 4 new stately homes or castles and managed only 3.
1. Lancaster Castle
2. Carisbrooke Castle
3. Osborne House

6. Visit 9 museums. I thought 9 is not going to be too much and I sort of both completed and missed this goal. I visited 7, but one is made up for 4 ships, which can be considered a museum/attraction on its own, hence the separate pic below for them.
1. Museum of Communism, Bucharest
2. Brontë Parsonage Museum
3. Portsmouth Dockland Museums: HMS Warrior; HMS Victory; Mary Rose; HMS MN 33
4. House of Scientists, Lviv
5. Model Village, Isle of Wight
6. Jam Factory, Lviv
7. Lawnmower Museum

These are the 4 ships I saw within the heritage complex: HMS Warrior; HMS Victory; Mary Rose; HMS MN 33.

7. Go to 4 special exhibitions. I wanted 4 and did 5, so happy with the result.

1. No iconic images, Open Eye Gallery
2. Turner. In Light and Shade, Whitworth, Manchester
3. Unbroken. Behind the Rim, Ukraine
4. Bakhmut, Ukraine
5. Olenivka Exhibition at the Territory of Terror Museum

8. Very Special Exhibitions: These are exhibitions I was involved in (and one that I organised). This was not a goal as I couldn’t imagine this was going to happen.
1. Portsmouth Cathedral Exhibition
2. Capstone Theatre at Liverpool Hope University
3. Parish Church of Liverpool
4. Oxford, Taylorian