A year ago, I wrote a post about the cost of the cheapest 500g bag of plain white flour at supermarkets near me. If that’s not top-drawer blogging, I don’t know what is.

With perhaps en even greater sense of scintillation, here’s an update:

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. The flour-based economy remains resilient.

The photo is ‘top view of baking background with flour and cooking supplies’ by Marco Verch licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

Having recently enjoyed On Confidence, I decided to delve deeper into the writing from The School of Life, and this charming little volume immediately caught my eye. Physically, it’s delightful: slim, cloth-bound, beautifully designed, and thoroughly pleasing to handle and read.

The book comprises a series of short, reflective chapters, each addressing aspects of emotional maturity, personal development, and growth. Rather than adopting the didactic tone of self-help guides, the writing is thoughtful and gently philosophical. It’s less about prescriptive solutions and more about offering insightful reflections.

While I enjoyed reading this, I didn’t encounter many novel ideas. Instead, its strength lies in how clearly and engagingly familiar concepts are presented. It serves as a valuable reminder of the importance of emotional growth, mindfulness, and self-awareness.

One aspect of the book that gave me pause was its critical stance towards formal education—an inherent theme of the book, suggesting schools overlook essential life lessons. Though I appreciated the book’s viewpoint, I found myself partially disagreeing. Schools might not prepare individuals comprehensively for every emotional or practical challenge in life, but it’s unreasonable to expect they fully should. Personal development is, after all, a lifelong endeavour extending far beyond the classroom.

Overall, What They Forgot to Teach You at School is a thoughtful, attractively presented book that I’d readily recommend. It may not revolutionise your worldview, but it might remind you of valuable lessons worth revisiting.

I was reminded recently of a line from The West Wing:

Toby, the total tonnage of what I know that you don’t could stun a team of oxen in its tracks.

This is almost certainly true in the context of this blog, too. You, dear reader, know an awful lot of things that I don’t know.

When I wandered passively into the V&A’s exhibition on The Great Mughals, I couldn’t have told you the first thing about them. And, to be honest, the explanatory text mostly went above my head. It was only roughly half way through that they explained that one of the Mughals was behind the Taj Mahal, and that they used to be referred to in English as Mongols, that I began to get my bearings a little. Even so, it turned out to be one of those encounters with history that leaves me quietly uncertain about what I’ve taken from it.

The exhibition is beautiful. It’s hard not to admire the level of craftsmanship in the miniature paintings, the jewellery, the manuscripts. There’s a kind of serene intensity to the objects on display, each one a product of unimaginable labour, precision, and—often—wealth. The story of the Mughal Empire is told largely through the lens of splendour: the grandeur of architecture, the opulence of court life, the flourishing of art and science. It is all, in a word, impressive.

And yet, I found myself struggling to settle into the experience, and not just because of my disorientation. I moved through the exhibition more quickly than I’d intended, glancing rather than lingering, admiring rather than absorbing. I often find it difficult to look at exquisite objects created for emperors and princes without also thinking about the systems that made them possible. Who carved the emeralds? Who was pressed into the service of empire so that an emperor might commission a manuscript in gold leaf? These aren’t questions the exhibition ignores, exactly—but nor do they sit at the centre. The narrative is one of cultural flourishing, not of domination or inequality. That’s understandable, perhaps, but I came away feeling that the absence of discomfort had left me a little uncomfortable.

I don’t mean to sound overly cynical. I’ve ranted at length about the British Museum’s insistence on interpreting stolen artefacts from a British perspective, and literally plastering ‘British’ over display cases containing objects which are anything but. I didn’t feel that here: the focus on design dampened the potential for cultural insensitivity, somehow. The objects on display are extraordinary, and there is joy in seeing them up close.

Yet, I wonder if the framing of exhibitions like this one leans too heavily on admiration—at least for a visitor like me, prone to squinting at power structures. I’m left wondering whether I’ve simply failed to meet the exhibition on its own terms.

Still, I’m glad I went. There’s something quietly humanising in grappling with a past that doesn’t neatly align with contemporary instincts—especially one rendered in so much turquoise and lapis. Even if I didn’t quite connect, the effort of trying to felt worthwhile. And perhaps that’s enough for an afternoon.

The photo shows an image of the construction of the Agra fort from a manuscript illuminated in about 1590. I took it quite furtively, as I wasn’t completely sure whether photography was allowed. Nevertheless, the exhibition continues at the V&A until 5 May.

This book had frequently been recommended to me over the years, particularly in medical circles, but somehow I’d never got around to reading it until now. John Berger’s text, accompanied by evocative photographs by Jean Mohr, paints a literary portrait of a rural doctor practising in England in the 1960s.

The book offers a fascinating, often moving insight into the life and work of Dr John Sassall, the independent-minded physician who serves his community through both home visits and work at the local hospital. Sassall emerges as a charismatic, somewhat idiosyncratic figure who embodies the traditional paternalistic notion of a doctor as a pillar of the community, deeply embedded within the social fabric of his village.

Reading an original 1960s library edition added an extra layer of reflection for me, prompting consideration of how dramatically medicine has evolved over the intervening decades, even while the central aim and values of the profession have stayed the same. The absence of today’s omnipresent healthcare bureaucracy—management structures, commissioning—is striking. Sassall operates with remarkable independence, personally determining what’s best for his patients without the layers of accountability and oversight common today. On the one hand, this autonomy clearly benefits the community when a practitioner is dedicated and insightful, as Sassall appears to be. Yet, viewed through a contemporary lens, the lack of checks and balances feels risky, particularly given Sassall’s single-handed practice. Nobody can know everything, and it’s a worry to wonder how Sassall managed patients with conditions he knew less about without evidence-based guidelines to draw upon.

Equally thought-provoking is the book’s portrayal of the doctor’s role as a confidant and central social figure. While it was common during my medical training to hear that doctors had replaced priests as the recipients of people’s innermost worries, I wonder whether that’s still true today. It seems medicine, and perhaps society itself, has moved on. Healthcare feels more transactional and commodified, further from the deeply personal, community-rooted interactions described by Berger.

A Fortunate Man provided me with much food for thought, exploring both the continuity and considerable change in the medical profession. It’s a reflective and engaging work that I’d recommend highly—not just to medical colleagues, but to anyone interested in the shifting relationships between doctors, patients, and the communities they serve.

The photo is a background detail of a photo from the book, noting the times at which smoking is permitted on the ward. It seems strikingly old-fashioned, until I remember that smoking rooms were still common is hospitals when I started my training. It’s amazing how quickly society—and our perceptions of it—can change.

Yesterday, for only the second time in my lifetime, a serving Pope died. Remarkably, I’ve been blogging long enough that I wrote about the last one, too. A couple of years ago, I wondered whether Pope Benedict XVI had reformed how a pontificate ends: it’s still centuries too early to judge, but yesterday’s events suggest that, perhaps, he didn’t.

Perhaps, in the interregnum, you’ll allow me a moment to pontificate.

It has often been said—including by me—that I’d make a great vicar. I even won the Religion Cup a few times at school. The only snag is my complete absence of faith or belief in the existence of a divine creator. There’s much that connects medicine and the priesthood, with a sympathetic ear perhaps the most important organ in both professions.

But I could never, except perhaps in the darkest nightmares, imagine being the Pope. The crushing weight of the role; the need to both harbour doubt (for faith requires doubt) and yet be completely unable to express it; the constant, all-consuming observation; the inability to have a day off. It looks a lot like psychological torture.

Whatever else he might have been or done, Francis’s ability to endure that with grace and humility marks him out as exceptional. But, of course, the Catholic Church causes a great deal of harm in the world, and Francis shares responsibility for that.

It has been revealing to see the coverage of Pope Francis’s death, if only for the way it has balanced its presentation. Figures in the news are too often presented as one-sided—‘good’ or ‘evil’—with too little grey. People contain multitudes, and their qualities can be difficult to reconcile: killer and caring professional; rapist and philanthropist; racist and creative.

Pope Francis probably contained more than most, and it is pleasing that news programmes didn’t rush to judge, as they so frequently do, but instead allowed viewers to make up their own minds… or, indeed, choose not to.

These moments of solemnity and reflection are surprisingly revealing.

What does it say about the modern approach to producing news coverage that Sky News carried a commentator talking about how healthy the Pope looked on Sunday, three minutes before they announced his death? Does asking people who have seen the same pictures as the rest of us to comment on someone’s health really have value? Does it truly shed light on anything? Is it really journalism? Is it fair—either to the commentator or the human being concerned? At least they’re never wrong for long.

And what does it say about the United States that their President offers condolences while standing next to a person wearing a rabbit costume? I dread to think, and don’t even want to speculate.

Yesterday, Wendy and I noticed that much of the news coverage was using the words ‘papacy’ and ‘pontificate’ interchangeably. So let me help out, following a quick consultation with the dictionary.

‘Papacy’ is to the Pope as ‘monarchy’ is to the King.

‘Pontificate’ is to the Pope as ‘reign’ is to the King.

No matter what you may have heard on the news, the papacy didn’t end yesterday—only a pontificate did.

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.