I’ve long been a bit sceptical of filmed stage plays, but I’d heard so much about the power of Judie Comer’s performance in this one-woman play that I thought I’d stream it.

The plot concerns a barrister who specialises in defending sexual assault cases, but is then assaulted herself. For the first two-thirds, this felt like an virtuoso performance of a well-scripted but humdrum plot. It felt like a legal equivalent of the doctor-turned-patient cliché, with much the same by-rote conclusions about not giving enough consideration to the perspective of the victim/patient.

This impression wasn’t helped by the sound design, which is also a cliché: heartbeat-driven tension beds, which feel as though they do more to undermine the raw honesty of Comer’s performance than to support it.

But then: that final section! Emotion meets polemic meets rage meets eloquence meets honesty. Never mind the theatre, you could have heard a pin drop in my carpeted living room.

This turned out to be an astonishing performance of an excellent script.

’Prima Facie’ is available to stream via National Theatre at Home until 9 March.

I’m currently reading Heaven on Earth, a book about cathedrals by Emma J Wells. In it, she frequently makes the point that cathedrals have historical importance in secular as well as religious terms. A moment’s thought makes this obvious, most of all in this coronation year, but it’s something that’s never previously given me pause for thought.

It should have done. I feel a degree of personal connection to Durham Cathedral not because of any religious connection, but because it was where I matriculated.

It leads me to wonder: do we have enough secular oversight of these ‘religious’ buildings? Is there a clear separation of, well, ‘church’ and ‘state’ in terms of finances? Are we celebrating their secular functions sufficiently?

As religion continues its inexorable decline, I suppose these questions will steadily grow in importance if we are to protect key historical sites.

I wasn’t familiar with Caycedo’s work before visiting this survey exhibition. Her practice considers the connections between nature and humankind, with a particular focus on drawing parallels between natural forces and human protest movements.

The exhibition is mostly beneath Plomo y Brea, an arresting set of nine traditional circular fishing nets suspended from the ceiling. The title—translated as lead and tar—reveals some commonly used components. Caycedo reflects that these can be used responsibly and endlessly recycled—as by the fishermen—or as sources of conflict, or weapons in those conflicts.

A large triptych video installation, Patron Mono, illustrates the relationship between a community and its river, with the extraction of both fish and gold but only at a rate which preserves the river’s natural beauty. There was something physically representative about the way in which it wasn’t quite possible to turn one’s back completely on any of the three videos, helped by the integrated soundscape.

I also found inspiration in the video installation Spaniards Named Her Magdelena, But Natives Call Her Yuma, which juxtaposed imagery of rivers and dams with urban protest marches. Just as water will always win over dams on a planetary timescale, perhaps society always progresses in the end, too. At least we can hope it does.

I was less taken by Caycedo’s inclusion of Durham Gala Banners and the like. I had intended a short rant in this post about a pandering connection of the exhibition to its location. It turns out that I’m just an idiot: I missed the fact that these artefacts were represented in Caycedo’s Tyne Catchment, exhibited exactly opposite them. I’m obviously no good at art galleries.

’Land of Friends’ continues at the Baltic until 29 January.

Wendy and I have been for a wonderful winter wander alongside a short section of Hadrian’s Wall. We started at Housesteads Fort and walked a couple of miles to Sycamore Gap, before about-turning and wending our way back.

We feel so lucky to live so close to such spectacular and historic landscape. When we got up in the morning, we had no particular plans, but fancied a bit of a walk—and within 40 minutes or so, we were strolling a World Heritage Site.

The walk was five fairly easy miles, though with lots of undulations and on quite muddy and slippery ground.

Just as we were finishing our walk and trying to dredge up our Key Stage 3 history to remember when Hadrian’s Wall was built, we spotted the AD122 bus, which solved that mystery for us.

I know I’m late to the party, but I very much enjoyed the BBC series The Traitors; far more in the end than I initially thought I would.

For those who haven’t seen it: from a group of players who undertake tasks to earn a large prize fund, a small number are selected as “traitors” who must “murder” the other contestants in secret. The whole group also eliminates contestants based on votes as to whom they believe to be a traitor. At the end of the series, the remaining players share the prize fund, although if any traitors remain, then only they share it.

The obvious gameshow structure from a gameplay perspective would have been to challenge the “traitors” to sabotage the prize fund tasks, in the manner of The Mole. When I read about the format, I thought missing this point was a considerable flaw in the show. However, from a television perspective, having the players work collaboratively while also scheming against each other makes for greatly heightened drama.

It worked beautifully. The series also had a brilliant soundtrack and some stunning cinematography, plus a pitch-perfect host in Claudia Winkleman. It had twists that—at least to me—came as complete surprises.

I don’t think it’s a series that will run and run, if only because the novelty of the format is important to the gameplay. But we shall see.

‘The Traitors’ is available on BBC iPlayer until the end of the year… when maybe, hopefully, there will be a second series.

I was inspired to read this short memoir, published last April, after seeing a positive review in The TLS. It is a short account, mostly extracted from Freddy’s journal, of his experience as the 21-year-old son of a man diagnosed with, and ultimately dying from, glioblastoma.

While Freddy’s experience is singular and recounted with both wit and tenderness, I found that it didn’t really resonate with me. It struck me that Freddy seemed a very “young” 21-year-old, and it made me reflect on our very different paths in life. At the same age as he was struggling to deal with awful news, I was being trained to deliver it. Death was unfamiliar to him at 21, while I’d spent years with cadavers. Some of the conversations that struck Freddy as beautifully expressed struck me as medical cliché.

There was just, somehow, too much medicine in here for me to really separate off that part of my brain and allow myself to feel the humanity. I think that’s more my failing than Freddy’s.

There has only been one funeral for a Pope during my lifetime: John Paul II, in 2005, one of history’s longest serving popes. Today will see my second, this time of the longest lived pope—and the first Papal funeral in modern history to be presided over by another Pope.

They say the Vatican works to a schedule of centuries rather than days or weeks. We know that today’s events (however ‘low-key’) will be historic. Yet, it may be centuries before we can judge with clarity whether the funeral brings to a close an aberrance in which a Pope succeeded a living Pope, or whether Benedict XVI has reformed how Papacy ends.

I’m not going to bet on it—not least as I don’t plan to be around a few centuries hence to collect my winnings—but I think the latter is more likely. Once the genie of resignation is released, it quickly becomes an expectation, especially as health declines. I suspect today won’t be the only occasion in my lifetime that a Pope conducts the funeral of his predecessor.

This is Wahid’s first institutional exhibition, which brings together three works into a single space.

The first and most immediately arresting is the sculpture Baba Gurgur. This is a gigantic, stylised reproduction of a Salvia spinosa flower, which is common in the Baba Gurgur oilfield in Iraq. It also represents the first moment at which oil gushed from the Baba Gurgur oilfield.

Set behind the sculpture is Sick Pink Sun, a projected pinkish circle which represents the strange appearance of the sun during the bombing of oil wells, resulting from filtration through the toxic smoke plumes.

The room is filled with the arresting sound of Naptha Maqam, a series of English poems in the style of Kurdish maqams performed by a contemporary Kurdish singer. The music is overlaid by occasional snatches of commentary from the artist.

As a whole, Conflagration is apparently about the relationship between Britain and Kurdistan. I wouldn’t have known that from my wander around. I found both the sculpture and the overall exhibition arresting, but only read the explanatory text on my way out. I had decided that it was about the exploitation of oil wealth and the connection with suppression of women, which isn’t at all what the artist intended. I’m obviously no good at art galleries.

’Conflagration’ continues at the Baltic until 30 April.

As the NHS continues to collapse, you will hear a lot over coming days about 7,000 ‘extra’ hospital beds—the number the Government has pledged to ‘create’ to reduce A&E waits. This appears to be part of a conscious strategy, perhaps best described as ‘political numberwang’: bandy around a big number, and political journalists seem to freeze, with perhaps the only follow-up being ‘and how are you going to pay for it?’

Matt Hancock was a master of this art. By counting individual gloves separately, despite them being neither sold nor used as separate items, he was able to quote ridiculous figures for the ‘number of items of PPE distributed’. His inflated numbers made little difference to social care staff left wearing ‘aprons’ fashioned from bin bags.

7,000 beds sounds like a lot—but is, in fact, about half of one percent of the total number of beds available in the NHS. It’s far less than the 12,000 NHS beds occupied on Christmas Day by people fit for discharge but for whom no social care placement was available. It’s also less than 20% of the 37,000 beds cut from the NHS over the period since the 2010 General Election. And there’s no answer as to how these will be staffed when we’re already 40,000 nurses short of a full complement.

You’ll also hear a lot about an ‘extra’ £14.1bn of support the Government has pledged over the next two years to help ‘tackle the backlog’. That’s a roughly 4% of the NHS budget—a fraction of the cost of inflation alone.

Numberwang cannot fix health and social care, and I’m not even sure it’s a successful strategy for propping up electoral support any more. We can’t go on like this.

Wendy and I recently had occasion to buy two Merseyrail Day Savers, which set us back a total of £11.20.

“Blimey,” we thought, “that’s so much cheaper than the Metro!”

But it’s not. The equivalent Tyne & Wear Metro Day Tickets would have cost us £11.40, and—unlike the Merseyrail ticket—our fare would have additionally covered up to six children. It would have also allowed travel during the morning peak, which the Merseyrail ticket did not. And it would have permitted travel not just on the Metro, but also on local rail services and the Shields Ferry.

It’s funny how perceptions of fares don’t always match reality. Deals can be better (or worse) than they seem.