Yesterday, I promised to share some more from the latest Monocle Companion, so here are some thoughts on a grab-bag of essays.

An article on sleep by Claudia Jacob has some admirably straightforward advice:

So how can we simplify our sleep? The science tells us that the signs are abundant and free to see. Do you depend on an alarm to wake you? Do you need naps during the day and crave caffeine? Have you fallen asleep while hearing about a colleague’s weekend plans? If so, it’s probably time to get an early night to replenish your reserves. While the science of sleep is galloping ahead, you don’t need an app to understand it.

If only all journalistic health advice was so clear-minded.

In her essay on blame, Sally O’Sullivan says

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, sets up the mistaken idea that there is one right story, one truth. I’m sorry to say that this is never the case.

Every family member will see a situation differently and this multiplicity of truths is invariably complex. But no family is immune from these tussles. Indeed, the closer the relationship, the more likely it is that we will revert to blame.

This made me feel sorry for the Prince. I’ve seen so much vitriol directed at him for the phrase “my truth” often—wrongly, in my view—being taken to suggest that multiple truths are possible, rather than one singular truth. Here, he’s being criticised for exactly the opposite, based on exactly the same text.

The capacity of commentators to find fault may be infinite… this blogger included.

In an essay on reforming the modern approach to business, Josh Fehnert writes:

To conduct your business in good faith, in a way that’s transparent, rigorous and fairly managed, is a job in itself and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Remember that it is OK to forgive people. That said, distant targets, such as decarbonising by 2050 or improving the gender balance of your board within a decade, ring hollow. Isn’t it better to get going right away, even if that means making a few missteps, and reach your goal rather than kicking the can down the road?

Bravo. I’ve been involved in too many tedious arguments about long-term plans for organisations, which everyone knows no-one will stick to. This sometimes boils down to confusing strategy with implementation. It’s good to have a long-term strategy which guides an organisation’s approach. It’s also essential to have a separate plan for implementation with a much shorter time horizon and tangible staging posts. The vicissitudes of life will necessitate changes in implementations, which the strategy ought to float above.

I recently read a ten-year strategy for an organisation which—for sound reasons—no-one reasonably expects to exist ten years hence. So, apart from hubris, what was the point in giving the strategy a decade?

In an essay on the recycling symbol, Richard Spencer Powell suggests adding

a visible green circle on the front of all recyclable packaging. That means no ifs, buts, or claims of being “partially recyclable”; it either is or isn’t.

Alternatively, if your plastic packaging isn’t recyclable (or doing so involves very specific efforts from the consumer) then brands should be obliged to put a red dot on it.

I appreciate the problem Powell is trying to solve: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to fish crisp packets out of recycling bins, a problem excavated by claims on the packaging that it is recyclable… but only via a specific scheme.

But it’s evidence that Powell underestimates the challenge: even within the UK alone, the items which are recyclable in local council bins vary enormously, as do the conditions in which the recycling must be presented. It’s clearly not feasible to have regional packaging dots.

But quite apart from that, the byline makes clear that Powell oversaw the design of this very edition of Monocle Companion. The book not only omits any recycling guidance, but also is perhaps the only one I’ve read this year containing no information on the sustainability of its paper source.

Perhaps he ought to start closer to home?

Albert Read writes:

I believe that imagination is something you can work at. If we’re attentive to ours, we can find all sorts of potential within ourselves. We should pay attention to our imaginative health in the same way that we look after our physical health and emotional wellbeing. All the studies show that being imaginative and creative makes us happier and more fulfilled. It’s the root of being alive.

I’m not keen on the ‘medicalisation’ of the topic, and I’m turned-off by the phrase ‘all the studies show’. But I completely concur with the wider point. Imagination and creativity are undervalued assets in life.

I’m not sure what made me relate this essay to work—I’m starting to see a bit of a theme in this post. Yet, I think that a little less adherence to change theory or management models in some health organisations, and a little more deep creative thought and engagement, would go a long way.

In a fantastic essay on friendship, David Sax says, in the context of the workplace:

Humans remain a social species and trust is the only currency that matters.

I reflected a lot on this. It’s obviously true: if I have a tricky professional decision to make, I run it past people I trust, not necessarily people with particular titles. Similarly, my close colleagues will often ask, ‘Who’s a sensible person to ask about X?’—which is really a question about whom I would trust.

I think I’m often critical of others for trying to use hierarchy in place of trust. But this made me reflect that perhaps I have become a bit slack in fostering trust too. It’s easy to get frustrated with being asked to explain principles repeatedly to different people, but perhaps I don’t spend enough time considering that it’s only the first time I’m explaining it to the latest person. Using it as an opportunity to patiently foster trust is probably a better approach than getting frustrated.

In an essay on commuting, Lilian Fawcett writes:

It’s a liminal time between commitments that gives our minds space to wander.

I know I’m not alone in finding solace in liminal spaces: sitting on a train, in an airport departure lounge, in a hotel lobby. I find it uniquely relaxing to be anywhere where I have a right and necessity to be, but where there is no expectation on me.

I also thoroughly enjoy my walks into work, but I hadn’t really connected these two preferences until I read Fawcett’s essay. Now I see that they are essentially the same thing… albeit walking is a little more active.

I’ve recently read the latest Monocle Companion while on holiday, its slightly battered appearance being testament to the not-quite-library conditions in which I read it. These paperbacks, of which this is the third, are collections of short essays by Monocle contributors, many of them previously published elsewhere. This is the first collection that I’ve read.

I’m milking two posts out of this, so you’ll be getting more tomorrow. Firstly, I want to tell you about an essay by Andrew Mueller which gave me pause for thought. Mueller is sharing his lessons from 35 years as a journalist.

Online, everything is forever. Every so often, some outraged archivist will dig up something stupid or obnoxious that I wrote for the music press when I was much younger, and much less clever than I thought, and brandish it angrily at me via email or Twitter, demanding to know whether I penned the offending snippet. Yes, I’ll tell them, I did. I wouldn’t write it now, and I won’t defend it now, but that is indeed my byline and, while there are probably more productive uses of everyone’s energy, I am accountable for it.

I occasionally doubt my own decision to keep over 20 years’ worth of blog posts on this site. Like Mueller, I wrote some stuff when I was younger that feels embarrassing today. But even if I were to delete the back catalogue, “online, everything is forever”: it’s not like it would be hard to find cached copies. And, in the end, to delete it is just to disown it, and I’m not confident that changes anything.

There is a lot on here that I wouldn’t write today. But I did write it, it is out there, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to delete it now rather than trying to maintain it in some sort of context.

Even with the best will, and the most meticulous diligence, you are going to get things wrong. In journalism, if all works as it should, a sub-editor will catch it between your keyboard and the page (and if they do, thank them). But if they don’t spot it, a reader will and they will write in to make it known. So always respond gratefully and humbly. This life offers few more exultant joys that being proved right and you should not wish to deprive anybody else of that.

I’m a doctor, not a journalist, by my goodness this felt familiar. Some of the most frustrating professional experiences of my life have come about through people being unwilling to admit errors, even when they are plainly visible.

We all get things wrong. It is when we get things wrong that we’re most able to learn, both from the error itself, and from understanding how the error arose. Was it a misjudgement? A misunderstanding? A lack of knowledge? A simple slip? A systemic issue?

It’s rare in any part of medicine that we can implement a change that will have a lasting impact on numerous people: mistakes are a golden opportunity to do exactly that, by preventing others from experiencing the effects of the same error repeated. To ignore mistakes, or to pretend they don’t exist, is to pass up a golden opportunity.

The best result of all is where the error is solely mine, perhaps because I misunderstood something or misread something or failed to take something into account. Those situations provide the opportunity for personal growth, to share learning, and to be open, allowing me to cultivate precisely the culture in which I’d prefer to work.

You should do the best you can at what you do, of course. But you don’t get to decide its, or your, value to anybody else.

Hurrah for that statement. My professional life would be much less enervating if I wasn’t regularly told that ‘service changes’ or ‘modernisations’ or ‘system improvements’ were extremely valuable in terms of making my life easier when the opposite is true.

I know Luke O’Neil from his email newsletter Welcome to Hell World, where he has been heavily promoting this recently published book. It is the most unsettling book I’ve read in a long time. The book is a collection of short stories and poems which I think I’d broadly categorise as ‘horror’, but horror which is grounded in contemporary reality. This is a book about climate change, the breakdown of society, racism, police brutality, gun violence… essentially, all the catastrophes that stalk the Western world, and the USA in particular.

O’Neil writes in a distinctive style which eschews commas, and often other punctuation marks as well. I went backwards and forwards on how I felt about this: his style gives his text urgency and pressure, but it did become a little frustrating at times that everything had urgency and pressure.

The content, though, is both breathtakingly imaginative and yet also very much based in the contemporary real world. It is filled with myriad offbeat observations: O’Neils short section on the distance that the people killed by gun violence in the USA in a year would stretch if their bodies were laid end-to-end created imagery in my mind that I’ll never forget. Similarly, his climate change allegory about a pair of scuba divers accidentally abandoned at sea.

This book was quite unlike anything else I can ever remember reading, and I’d highly recommend it. Not every story within in resonated with me, and I found that the style of writing meant that I could only stand to read it in short chunks, but it will live long in my memory.

Some quotations… quite a few quotations… it’s very quotable…

Something is wrong with me but I think it’s probably the same thing that’s wrong with everyone so maybe it doesn’t matter.

The average adult in America is about 66 inches tall. Around 40,000 people die from gun violence here a year. 2,000 or so of them are children or teenagers so they won’t be that tall but we’re doing rough math here.

66 inches per body

x

40,000

=

2,640,000 inches

That’s roughly 42 miles of bodies a year.

Does that seem like a lot or a little to you because I guess I was thinking it would be more than that but then again I’ve never thought about it in these terms before so I have no frame of reference.

It would take you about an hour to drive from the beginning of the bodies to the end depending on traffic. Your kids would get bored and rambunctious on the trip in the back of the car and you’d have to turn around and be like alright you two that’s enough.

The average person would have a very hard time walking that far in one go. They’d have to make a lot of stops along the way and stay hydrated.

Imagine the biggest house on your block was always in flames and it burned all the time and it burned so often that you eventually just accepted as a given that there was going to be a house down the street that would be burning no matter what anyone did which was in any case not much. If firefighters were cops and when they came they just stood around and were like I don’t know what to tell you champ and got pissed off about you asking them to do anything at all then kicked your asshole in.

We have to address Fire House the stern mayor would say on TV and then they would get it under control for a while until they didn’t and the mayor would have to come on TV again. Goddamnit he’d say. This time I mean it.

You would get used to the smoke after a while right? It’s probably not going to get me you’d think then you’d go run your errands at the store and the mayor would get in trouble for fucking someone he wasn’t supposed to fuck and everyone would get preoccupied about that for a week or two.

We dragged the tree inside from the cold like it owed us money and set a bowl of water out for it so it could drink and pretend it was still alive for a little while longer pretend it had a future and then a few days passed and we still couldn’t find the goddamned box of lights in the wet basement so it stood there in the corner in its nakedness.

When the hornets were attacking me I dumped off my bike and ran back to my mother and she told me to take the jacket off. Take the jacket off she yelled at me but I couldn’t. I decided to roll around on the ground like I was on fire which I sort of was and thereby squishing all of the stingers into me. Stop drop and roll would have been one of the only things they taught kids about not dying at that point in history. Not getting into strange vans too I suppose. They didn’t even teach kids how to hide from gunmen yet when I was young that wasn’t invented yet.

I never used to understand in dystopian stories why people seemed to be racist against robots very early on in the narrative like before they had even switched to being evil but then I realized that in their fictional world they probably had some odious billionaire that everybody had long already hated for exploiting them by the time he invented the robots so then I got it. It’s humiliating enough just being ambiently enslaved by these guys I can only imagine what it feels like when the transaction becomes literal.

I read the comments under the video and some people said it was a shark but then other people said it was a dogfish and then other people still said a dogfish is actually a type of shark fucking dumbass why don’t you go kill yourself etc. You know how conversations go online.

Due to a miscount by the person leading the scuba expedition the couple emerge from the depths to realize the boat has left them behind. At first they presume that the mistake will be rectified in the way we all do when something goes wrong. Well this is fucked but certainly order will be restored presently we think.

She didn’t pay attention at first because she was busy cultivating her maladies.

A friend called that I haven’t spoken to since the early days of the pandemic back when you would call your friends or Facetime them and such and they’d go like what the fuck is going on ha ha ha and you’d go I don’t know ha ha ha back before millions of people died.

The Mall of Louisiana was trending and she thought oh here we go again and then she clicked on it and it turned out it was because a python was on the loose and she let out a sigh of relief because it was only a twelve-foot-long monster and not some guy. At least a monster will only attack when it’s hungry.

Every so often I’ll go in to see a new orthopedist or spine doctor and this thirty-two-year-old guy in his comfortable sneakers will go oh yeah I have a bad back too I know how you’re feeling bro and it’s like wait did I come to the wrong place? You literally work at the back store.

I don’t know maybe they want you to register their capacity for empathy or something but it always feels like eating at an emaciated chef’s restaurant.

This doctor today told me about his back but I wasn’t seeing him for that kind of pain it was on the other side. Front pain. No one calls it front pain. No one says I’ve got a bad front. I happen to have a bad front but no one says that.

The Bible was basically a Google doc where everyone had editing permission turned on.

This book, published a couple of months ago, is the first of Claire Kilroy’s novels I’ve read.

Kilroy is an Irish writer, and this book’s main characters are a new mother and her child who are living in Ireland. Despite the intensity of the bond with her child, the protagonist struggles with the transition from a working life and an independent identity to adopting the full-time role of ‘mother’. This also creates new tensions (or perhaps reveals existing tensions?) in her relationship with her husband, who continues to work. I mentioned a particularly striking passage a few days ago.

This was an intense, tough read: there isn’t a lot of plot, but the book brims with powerful emotion. Kilroy’s writing was transporting and gave me new insight into a tough life experience. It felt true. It felt like it explored an aspect of motherhood that is, perhaps, under-explored in contemporary literature: not a dislike of motherhood, exactly, but something more like a trapped ambivalence.

Another key character in the book is a stay-at-home father, a schoolfriend who the central character meets again in a playground. This provides another interesting set of insights into a relatively uncommon social situation. Kilroy incorporates this so naturally that it wasn’t until after I’d read the book that it really registered as a thoughtful bit of plot development.

This is well worth reading.

Some quotations I noted down:

Well Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another’s arms. The Earth moves beneath us and all is well, for now. You don’t understand yet that what we share is temporary. But I do. I close my eyes and I understand.

I saw in the small hours of Good Friday in a black rage, a malevolent force pacing the corridors of my own home. I was an exhausted woman exhausting myself further and I seem to have broken through some barrier that night because reality ceased to be reality, not that I understood that at the time. To my mind I had experienced a staggering revelation. Namely: I was just a woman. I was just a woman! How had this not registered before?

I sat on the couch. ‘How was your day?’ I asked him and he embarked on tales of valour and derring-do from a distant galaxy. Things he had said, problems he had solved, names, many names, people I would never meet. It was too tiring to try to imagine them. ‘You’re not listening.’ I opened my eyes. May or may not have been asleep. ‘Sorry. How was your day?’ ‘I just told you.’ ‘Oh. You did. Sorry.’ ‘How was your day?’ ‘My day?’ I wondered, drawing a blank. Nothing recorded. Vegetative state. ‘Em,’ I said, ‘long.’

The day you were born a door appeared—or was revealed, really, having been there all along—the door out of life, the door when it’s over, you’re done, thank you: next, and I have to go through it first.

I always knew that, as the mother, I would get the blame for everything. If you grow up to be a serial killer, if you stash decapitated heads in your fridge like half-eaten turnips, they will say it was the mother’s fault.

In 2019, the journalist and (then) editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell, decided to write a diary of the books that he read on the train to work. This book is a collection of those diary entries, mostly focusing on the books, but also on some significant events in his life and in the news.

I didn’t really enjoy this. I think this was a problem of the medium more than anything else: this felt like a blog that had been printed and bound. It felt performative rather than introspective. I like reading this sort of thing in small chunks online, but reading a year’s worth of one person’s slightly random thoughts about a slightly random selection of books in one go is a bit much.

Some of Abell’s observations were interesting and some of his anecdotes were genuinely amusing, but this just didn’t feel like a particularly coherent whole to me.

Nevertheless, here are some quotations I enjoyed:

My emails—unlike my spoken words—have become a nauseating thicket of exclamation marks: ‘Hi! Thanks!’ Sounds Good!’ and so on. Exclamation marks, those miniature distress flares of chumminess, are awful, I know they are awful, and yet the medium seems to compel their usage.

A quick check of my manuscript so far shows I have used more than 620 semicolons, at a rate of about one every 180 words. Herman Melville would be scoffing right now: he used one every 52. The final word, though, on all this (as it does in the TLS article) must go to Irvine Welsh, a fine exponent of the semicolon: ‘I’ve no feelings about it—it’s just there. People actually get worked up about that kind of thing, do they? I don’t fucking believe it. They should get a fucking life or a proper job. They’ve got too much time on their hands, to think about nonsense.’

I do think it can be risky to over-fetishise books, and I am always suspicious of people who want to preserve them in sterile perfection. I constantly scribble on or bend or drop in the bath things I am reading. And I don’t mind seeing the surface damage of prior readings. Sylvia Plath would not agree. She once lent someone a book, and got it back a bit torn. This was her diary entry: ‘It was so horrifying and it was as if my children had been raped or beaten by an alien.’ Which we can all agree is an over-reaction, I think.

I have a theory (I always have a theory) that there are three main things in life: family; work; friends. And it is possible to do only two of them well. So I am friendless, in that I spend no time socialising with people outside work or family. My colleagues and my family have become my friends in a sense, and I am fine with that. I don’t think my dad had friends when he worked either. If I have a problem, there is nobody other than my wife I would speak to; if I have an evening free, there is nobody I would go out with other than her.

The interior designer Nicky Hallam (who, let us be clear, is no Mitford) came up with a list of ‘things he found common’. They are, one hopes, tongue-in-cheek, and are very funny: breakfast meetings; being on time; tours of the house; conservatories; self-pity; swans; mindfulness; Bono; rinsing fruit; loving your parents; not eating carbs; organic food; being ill; using dog walkers. That is not even all of them. I love the fact that loving your parents is common.

Three years ago, I enjoyed Naoise Dolan’s first novel, Exciting Times. Her second, The Happy Couple, is a rather different novel in scope and setting, but is no less enjoyable.

The Happy Couple begins with the engagement of Celine, a professional pianist, and Luke, whose exact occupation I can’t recall, but it was something like investment banking. The novel then follows the couple as their wedding approaches, with the central question being whether they will actually end up marrying.

The narrative perspective shifts several times through the novel between different members of their friendship group and the wedding party. Archie, the best man and Luke’s ex; Phoebe, the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister, who is uncertain about Luke; and Vivian, a wedding guest and another of Luke’s exes. This isn’t nearly as complicated in practice as I’ve made it sound.

As with her first novel, Dolan’s writing is razor sharp, and yet still warm. The characters—and especially the way they relate to one another—feel true to life, and the novel feels very current.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

I noted down far too many quotations to paste in this post, but here’s a selection. The first is a lovely line from the acknowledgements, the rest are from the main body of the text:

As a child, I read hundreds of novels before it even occurred to me that people had written them, let alone that I could be one such person. I learned my craft from fellow authors, most of them long-dead. So thank you to fiction, my favourite thing, my thing that I somehow get to do.

I only ever say good morning if someone else has decided that we’re doing this. Sleeves up, let’s deem the morning good. But all mornings are good to good morning people, making it really a statement of pessimism. We give the day that greets us a participation trophy because we assume it can’t do better.

Both parents were from Dublin, but I was born in London when my mother’s plan to go off to England and get an abortion had been executed partly but not fully.

I find it irksome when book blurbs say right at the end: ‘It’s also very funny’, as if humour were an afterthought and not the central force that prevents us from killing a) each other, and b) ourselves.

Loneliness wasn’t having no one. Loneliness was the gap between what you hoped for and what you got.

‘I don’t want you to fuck off for months at a time without checking if I mind.’

‘Okay, yeah, sorry,’ Luke said.

Confirmed: truly impossible to make Luke fight.

Archie said: ‘Sorry and you’ll change, or sorry and you won’t?’

‘Sorry, I won’t, Luke said. I mean, I probably won’t. I’m not good with relationships.’

‘But that’s not a mysterious… you’re talking about your own actions like it’s a weather forecast. You’re you. You’re management. You decide if you’ll be “good with relationships” or not.’

They did not, as a rule, ‘share feelings’.

Celine’s family had never taught her how. To see the tint of your internal mood ring as warranting disclosure, and to expect a rapt audience—no, no.

Ever since those prep classes, the phrase ‘Jesus died to save our sins’ has bothered me. I mean even just the grammar. Shouldn’t it be ‘save us from our sins’? If the sins themselves were the subject of salvation, wouldn’t that mean Jesus died to save your gambling addiction, i.e. to keep you gambling? Wouldn’t that make him an enabler? Or Him, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I’m only happy when doing something that makes me forget I exist.

As well as his outstanding journalism over the past thirty years, including many years as Diplomatic Editor for Sky News, Tim Marhsall has written a couple of books which I’ve previously devoured. 2016’s Prisoners of Geography presented ten maps and explained how the geography displayed influenced the development of nations and the political relationships between countries. I was enthralled, so much so that I read 2017’s Worth Dying For the very next month. This was an utterly brilliant exploration of different flags and the ideas they intend to communicate—not just those of countries, but also institutions like the United Nations and the Olympic movement, and even ideas, like the white flag of surrender.

I skipped 2019’s memoir Shadowplay, mostly because it was described as ‘harrowing’, and I wasn’t in the frame of mind to cope with that. And the news of 2021’s The Power of Geography—a return to the ‘ten maps’ format—entirely passed me by until I came to write this review.

Back in April, Marshall’s latest book—The Future of Geography— was published. I was in two minds whether to buy it. It was sold as an exploration of geopolitics in space, or ‘astropolitics’ as it’s known, and I thought that maybe this would be a little removed from Marshall’s area of expertise and interest. I worried that the book might be a disappointment. In the end, Wendy convinced me to buy it.

Wendy was right. I thought this was an absolute tour de force, my favourite of the three Marshall books I’ve read. This was a fascinating account of the history of space exploration to date and the underlying international politics. Marshall has a real gift for bringing such apparently dry subjects to life, and to squeeze a little humour out of them. I felt like I learned loads from this book, and gained a whole new insight into an aspect of space exploration which I’ve never really thought about before. It’s never occurred to me, for example, that attacks on satellites which have the effect of ‘blinding’ nuclear early-warning systems have the potential to precipitate nuclear war.

I was particularly fond of Marshall’s frequent references to the early days of seafaring, and his comparison of space law to maritime law. Casting early spacefarers as equivalent to early seafarers helped me to think much more clearly about the issues which space exploration is likely to raise. It also helped me to better orientate myself as to where humanity finds itself in ‘space history’.

It was also just really refreshing to read a book on space which isn’t primarily concerned with technology, but rather with some of the wider societal issues the technological developments precipitate.

Without a doubt, this is one of my favourite non-fiction books of the year so far, and I’d highly recommend it.

This is Rob Burley’s account of his 25-year-long career making political television programmes, mostly for the BBC. He starts with the political interviews that he watched as a child between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher, and concludes with thoughts on the start of Rishi Sunak’s term as Prime Minister.

There were some great insights into the work that goes into making such programmes, with a particular focus on long-form interviews. Burley’s views on many of the topics he discusses are almost diametrically opposed to my own, and his passionate arguments were therefore interesting to read.

Burley believes that television interviews are particularly important, and perhaps the best way of testing political candidates. I think that radio, television, and press interviews and profiles all have equally significant roles to play. Burley argues that the failure of Truss and Johnson to participate in set-piece 30-minute television interviews is almost an affront to democracy—I don’t think they would have changed a thing. I don’t think it’s reasonable to argue that the electorate didn’t know what they were getting from the acres of coverage and dissection of both of their campaigns. I think their choice not to face a forensic interview was revealing in its own way. Burley didn’t convince me of his perspective, but I appreciated his insights.

The book was also very funny in parts. It was light and very readable. I enjoyed it.

Ruby Wax has written many books; this is the first I’ve read. I decided to read it because I’d seen from a two-line newspaper review that it was about Wax’s admission to an in-patient psychiatric hospital for a depressive episode, and was an account of her time there. I’m often interested in reading first-person accounts of this sort of thing, particularly as my experience in these settings has been entirely from the professional perspective, and it’s interesting to get the other perspective. Although fictional, Jasper Gibon’s The Octopus Man did this very well, and I enjoyed reading it back in February.

Unfortunately, this is only a small part of this book. The bulk of it is a collection of autobiographical anecdotes, many of which have no obvious connection with the mental health aspect. It’s a bit like a celebrity autobiography: a chunk of the book is a behind-the-scenes account of the making of a television documentary about Isabella Bird, there’s another chunk about working with refugees, and so on. This isn’t what I was expecting, and I’m not certain that I would have picked up the book if I’d understood the content to be so varied, but there were some interesting observations in there.

This didn’t inspire me to explore the back catalogue.

I didn’t find out until after I read this book that Alejandro Varela is a specialist in public health. That explains the focus of many of the short stories in this collection, and also why they intersected with many of my own interests.

Verela is based in New York, which serves as the setting for these interconnected stories. The focus is on people who are at the margins of society, either as a result of being quietly introverted or due to more structural issues. The main themes in the book are around romantic relationships (particularly among men), parenting, and everyday racism.

The ‘book is also very funny. ‘Carlitos in Charge,’ a comedic piece about the absurdity of the United Nations (and the sexual encounters between the staff) stood out to me as riotously good fun, not least because the satire had the sting of underlying truth to it.

As in any collection, some stories were more successful than others. Short stories are not my favourite medium, but I enjoyed this book, and will add Varela’s much praised first book, The Town of Babylon, to my list.

Some quotations I noted down:

That doesn’t matter, Dear. My grandmother said this in response to almost everything: marital spats, earthquakes, authoritarianism, late-stage cancer. Whether it was the tone or the pith that made her words so persuasive was unclear. But whomever heard her say them understood that she knew well the distinction between problems and pain.

The transportation app on my phone flashes a warning about the F train: it’s been rerouted and delayed. In other words, one can be late for a place they never intended to visit.

In a short period of time, I learned that the United States was immune to easily interpretable, common-sense data on everything -pollution, tuberculosis, birth control, abortion, breastfeeding, war, rape, white phosphorous, blue phosphorous, red phosphorous, lithium, PTSD, GMOs, slavery, winged migration, lions, tigers, polar bears, grizzly bears, panda bears, capital punishment, corporal punishment, spanking, poverty, drug decriminalization, incarceration, labor unions, cooperative business structures, racist mascots, climate change, Puerto Rico, Yemen, Syria, Flint, Michigan, women, children, wheelchairs, factory farms, bees, whales, sharks, daylight saving, roman numerals, centimeters, condoms, coal, cockfighting, horse betting, dog racing, doping, wealth redistribution, mass transit, the IMF, CIA, IDF, MI5, MI6, TNT, snap bracelets, Pez dispensers, Banksy. It didn’t matter what it was. If the Human Rights Council (or Cuba) advocated one way, the United States went the other.

She’s wearing a gold band, but no engagement ring. I’m relieved. Literate women who wear engagement rings destabilize all my notions of feminism. I’m grateful this tradition seems to be falling by the wayside.

As if on cue, my little wombat skulks into the room with a guilty but also aggrieved turbulence in his eyes and brow. We adopted Julio, and he looks nothing like me, not his hair, not his teeth, not his marshmallow face, but he is me, almost more so than I am.

“Did you hear that, Julio?” I shout toward my son as he and his friend take off down the hallway. “One hour. I don’t want to hear any crying or screaming. I’m setting a timer too.”

Timers. Christ.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for any tools or techniques that facilitate the trauma-free domestication of our small, wild humans, but the gulf between my childhood and my children’s is vast and vertigo inducing. My parents used to set timers with the backs of their hands. Sometimes, the timers were made of leather. But those were different times, I’ve heard people say. I assume they meant different income brackets.