I didn’t forget!

A hotel room I recently checked into had a small bookshelf, which was nice. This was one of four volumes squeezed between two unmatched bookends.

I have a vague cultural awareness of The School of Life: I enjoy and follow Alain de Botton’s writing, so I heard about this project when he founded it. The School of Life Press is a small offshoot, and I was mildly intrigued to see what it offered.

I therefore plucked this from the shelf and dived in, reading it from cover to cover in a single sitting (it’s quite short).

It discusses confidence as a learned skill, which is always a helpful reminder. The cover image of a ship being tossed by the waves exemplifies this: the new seafarer will be terrified, whereas the old hand has learned to trust the ship and so is confident in even the roughest waters.

That observation probably isn’t new to you, and that’s typical of this book. It’s a concise summary of well-worn wisdom, but it doesn’t have much new to say. There was one observation that was new to me: that those who see the good in others are likely to be less confident themselves, as they tend to place a higher value on the opinions of others (rather than seeing everyone else as idiotic and therefore relying on one’s own view and drive).

I’d have enjoyed a meatier and more challenging book on the topic, with a little more personality to it… but then again, a book like that would probably be too long and divisive to be left in a hotel room.

It was certainly more welcome than a bedside Bible.

This is an Edificity video covering a minor change to the way that station names are painted in a small number of stations on the Tyne and Wear Metro. It’s a change I hadn’t noticed.

Something ineffable about the video warmed my heart. In a time when it often feels like everything in the country has become a bit slap-dash, it’s lovely to see that there are still people around who care about aesthetic detail. It’s so unusual these days to see a response to something like this that isn’t angry or snarky, but just quietly and persuasively argues that there may have been a better approach.

We could perhaps all learn a thing or two.

This 2011 debut novel was much-acclaimed—but passed me by completely. When I came across some of the extensive praise for it recently, I thought I’d take it out of the library to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s a slim novel in 19 chapters, each of which presents an individual vignette. It is narrated by the youngest of three brothers who were born to teenage parents in 1980s rural New York. The chronologically presented chapters take us through their childhood, exploring their close knit family unit until it loosens as the boys come of age.

I have to confess that I didn’t really enjoy this. There is something about novels narrated by children that I struggle to connect with, even (or perhaps especially) when they are critically acclaimed. I often find their perspective a little unbelievable, and the device of imaging what a child sees in adult relationships tends to come off as a little twee to me. The effect is to reduce the emotional impact of the plot, which seems a shame when it is as loaded as in this book.

I suppose this just wasn’t for me.

In the early days of this blog, the political debate around whether to ban fox hunting was a big deal. Those were, perhaps, simpler times.

I think some would be surprised to read these days that I argued against banning hunting with foxes. It may seem even more surprising that I probably still would—yet I would argue perhaps more forcefully against repealing the ban now that it exists.

My arguments against the ban were essentially liberal: we shouldn’t go around banning stuff, cruelty to animals was already illegal, and we should use the laws that we’ve already got. But there was also a significant dose of priority-setting: it seemed to me that banning an activity as perversely niche as fox hunting could not possibly be the best use of Parliamentary time. There is no way that it could possibly be viewed as ranking among, say, the top hundred problems facing the country.

My arguments against repealing it would be basically the same: we shouldn’t signal through a change of the law that cruelty to animals is okay and it absolutely shouldn’t be anywhere near our list of top priorities.

I think you can read a lot into this. I’m all for a permissive society that tolerates difference. I’d rather see something that I personally disagree with continue than restrict freedoms for us all. And, at least to me, reversing a ban is qualitatively different from being permissive in the first place—even if it’s philosophically equivalent.

I was reflecting on this today when I was trying to figure out why Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to remove tampons and sanitary towels from the men’s toilets at Meta seemed so offensive. After all, I’m not offended when these facilities aren’t offered, as in the vast majority of workplace and public toilets—though I am impressed when a business does offer them, demonstrating that they are thoughtful and inclusive. The same goes, by the way, for sanitary bins in men’s toilets—a rare sight, but one needed by far more than just the trans and non-binary population.

But if I’m not offended when these facilities aren’t offered, then why am I when they are removed?

Well, because while it may return the business to their original position philosophically, the act of making the change is petty, vindictive, persecutory, and fucking cruel. It makes the world a tiny bit worse for all of us—and especially for some of the most marginalised communities in our society. It tells me that the company does not care about the needs of individuals, and would rather see people suffer than stand up for basic values of inclusivity and respect for other human beings.

And that’s not my standard at all.

Middlesbrough’s Royal Exchange building opened in 1868, and quickly became one of the most important sites for industrial deal-making in England at the heart of the town nicknamed ‘Ironopolis’. A very grand Italianate building, it featured all sorts of intricate stonework and decoration.

It was, however, demolished in 1985 to make way for the much uglier A66. As a sop to the historical importance of the site, some of the twiddly bits of stonework are retained on these little poles in Exchange Square, near the original site of the building.

There’s something distinctly and disturbingly Scarfolk about these metal sculptures of children in North Ormesby, now swallowed up by the surrounding foliage.

The FT had a lovely ‘long read’ by Daniel Thomas about the success of the West End last week: footfall is well above pre-pandemic levels and the industry is in rude financial health. But not so on Broadway, where neither footfall nor revenue has recovered from the pandemic.

It feels like we often hear a lot of depressing stories about the financial performance of the arts in the UK, so it’s heartening to read some positive news… and even moreso given the brief mention of Newcastle’s very own Theatre Royal.