This 2019 coming-of-age novel is narrated by Lucy. She grows up in a working-class household in Sunderland, goes to university in London, and moves to rural Ireland following her graduation.

The novel is written in fragments which are mostly, but not completely, arranged chronologically. The style reminded me a lot of Jenny Offill’s novels, though I found Andrews’s writing more immediately relatable.

This is Andrews’s first novel, though she has published another since. Her writing is beautiful, almost poetic at times. I think she captures particularly well the North/South relationship, and the way that people from the North are often “othered” in London.

Andrews is also good at needling the class divide and the different frames of reference privilege brings: there is one closely observed section where she is challenged about working in a bar while also preparing for her A-Levels.

I wasn’t completely won over by the plot of this novel: it’s a coming-of-age novel, and I’m uncertain whether I got the sense that the character was really developing. There was a whole plot about Lucy’s relationship with her father that seemed designed to do the heavy lifting on this, but felt a bit ‘tacked on’ to me.

However, I was so thoroughly taken with the writing that I didn’t honestly mind about the rest, and I’ll certainly look out for Andrews’s second book.

Some particularly striking quotations from Saltwater:

London is built on money and ambition, and I didn’t have enough of either of those things.

I would like to have something to believe in, but it is difficult. Everything my generation was promised got blown away like clouds of smoke curling from the ends of cigarettes in the mouths of politicians and bankers. It is hard not to be cynical and critical of everything, and yet perhaps there is an opening, too. When the present begins to fracture, there is room for the future to be written.

High-rise tower blocks and the despondency of stale, squat houses are aesthetically pleasing when you are removed from them. Middle-class architects with utopian ideals might be able to appreciate the solidity and the magnitude of a huge hunk of concrete with lives carved unapologetically into it, but when that becomes your reality and you have no choice and no way out, when you’re living every day under the shadow of someone else’s vision, it becomes oppressive, the weight of their dreams crushing the life out of you.

Many thanks to Newcastle City Library for lending me a copy of this book.

My employer, like many, is very keen to encourage employees to bring their ‘whole self’ to work. The idea, I have always assumed, is to encourage honesty, openness, trust, and respect. It is, I’ve long thought, supposed to signal that each of us is about more than our work lives. Everyone ought to feel welcome, and no one ought to face discrimination based on personal characteristics.

I’m not especially keen, though, on the particular phrase. Nobody really wants to deal with my ‘whole self’ at work. No-one really wants to put up with me having a senselessly grumpy morning. Nobody really benefits from knowing about the entirety of my life outside work, not least because it’s sometimes inconsistent with the advice I give in a professional capacity: we’re none of us saints. What everyone really wants is a reliable, personable, moderated professional—which of course is best achieved without feeling the need to hide aspects of who you are.

Sometimes, I get frustrated with the poor expression of these ideas, which often descends into something close to parody. My employer ventures so far into questionable lifestyle topics from time to time that I included a (surprisingly tricky) ‘Intranet or Goop?’ round in our Christmas quiz. I fear that cack-handed attempts at inclusivity like this undermine the wider aim: I probably end up rolling my eyes more often than I should.

An article in the latest Kinfolk helped me to re-connect the rhetoric with the underlying goals and possible alternative actions. We all want to work in a psychologically safe environment, one which fosters:

the feeling that you can speak out, push back and open up without the risk of punishment or humiliation, whether explicit or indirect.

I can see how valuing the ‘whole person’ becomes shorthand for that—and also how that shorthand generates nonsense that is unrelated to the underlying idea. The underlying idea remains valuable.

Actions speak louder than buzzwords. Generous parental leave policies, for example, may encourage parents to be more frank about their struggles with childcare; while a diverse C-suite and targeted hiring and retention strategies may show people that difference is valued.

I’m lucky that my employer does a lot of these things exceptionally well… so maybe I should give them a break on the well-meant, harmless nonsense that comes along with it.

I’ve finally caught up with this much-lauded 2021 film starring Stephen Graham, and really wasn’t taken with it. It is a film set in a restaurant during a pre-Christmas rush, and is seemingly filmed in a single continuous take. As the name implies, it follows Graham’s character as the stress and tension slowly build to, well, boiling point.

I felt that there was far too much foreshadowing through the film, to the point where it became predictable. The responses to events in the film didn’t strike me as especially authentic, with minor inconveniences sometimes seeming to cause a larger response than major events. And I wasn’t convinced by the filming method either: there were ponderous scenes outside the main setting, which felt like they were inserted solely to give the main actors a break. I did not get the sense of a convincing continuity of action at times when the camera was elsewhere.

So, unfortunately, this didn’t do it for me. If, for some godforsaken reason, you are desperate to see a film set in a restaurant, The Menu—admittedly a very different type of film—knocks the socks (or perhaps the chef’s hat) off this one.

Boiling Point is available to stream on Netflix.

I didn’t really know anything about Alexander the Great. I could have told you with a low level of certainty that he was an ancient Greek ruler, and that he led his army in a lot of wars to expand his territory, but that’s probably about my limit. Judging by the conversations I overheard, I’m fairly certain I was one of the least informed people walking into the exhibition about him at the British Library. The trouble is, I’m not convinced that I knew that much more when I left.

The first section of the exhibition attempts to pin down Alexander’s life. This is not easy: as is demonstrated through books and artefacts, Alexander was all things to all people, even his lineage varying to suit the country in which the story was being told. He was a man about whom legends flourished even while he was alive. This reminded me of modern shape-shifting politicians. Rather than professing a set of deeply held values, they pretend to be whatever they need to be to impress the audience they are before at any given moment. They use dog whistles to signal certain unpalatable views without putting off the audiences who don’t hear them.

For Alexander, this proved to be a remarkably sound strategy–if indeed it was a strategy. Perhaps he had no part in it, and it was the conquered who wanted to lessen the humiliation of their defeat by welcoming their new ruler as ‘one of them’ after all. The impetus for the creation of the myths wasn’t explored in the exhibition.

It is pointed out that Alexander the Great is featured in the key texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He was also being acknowledged in some places as a son of an Egyptian god, and in others as the destroyer of Zoroastrianism. Quite the reputation. We’re also told that Alexander was polygamous, and in addition to his wives also had relationships with men… which is a lot of putting it about for someone celebrated in so many religions.

It felt as though the bulk of the exhibition focused on the myths that have been cultivated around Alexander since his life: that he dived to the bottom of the sea, that he flew in a cage carried by birds, that he conversed with the gods, and so on. Again, the exhibition seemed to concentrate on repeating these myths and showing me books in which they appeared, rather than exploring how and why they arose.

I know this is a British Library exhibition, but there is something remarkably dull about looking at a load of books in glass cases with a paragraph of printed text about the contents of the books. Admittedly, some books are beautiful objects, like this 13th century Secretum secretorum, a Latin translation of what was considered at the time to be a genuine book of advice given to Alexander by Aristotle:

But some featured books are rather less historically remarkable. I can’t remember the last time I saw a 2015 novel that I could pick up on Amazon for £7.99 in a museum’s glass case:

The exhibition closes with one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in some time. Admittedly, part of my surprise was attributable to the fact that I had no idea that Alexander the Great crossed over into the world of video games. As someone who knows very little about Alexander and very little about video games, I suppose that’s to be expected.

The exhibition ends with a life-sized diorama in which imagery of Alexander’s ‘tomb chamber’ from the game Assassin’s Creed Origins is projected onto the walls. The space is occupied by a 2022 replica of the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, once thought to have housed Alexander’s body. The original is less than a mile away in the British Museum.

The replica is of the object as it is now, including the holes drilled in the bottom in Medieval times to support its use as a ritual bath. I don’t comprehend why anyone would go to the trouble of borrowing imagery from a video game set millennia ago to surround a replica of something as it appears today. Why have the object be from a different period to the setting? It’s baffling.

I think this exhibition is probably targeted more at Alexander’s fans than at me, so it possibly isn’t that surprising that I didn’t get much out of it. I suppose I did learn that Alexander has fans. The exhibition was also quite crowded, and I was short on time, so perhaps I’m judging it more harshly than it really deserves… but I wouldn’t go back.

If you want to see it, you’ll have to hurry: Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth continues at the British Library until Sunday.

This is a beautiful, singular, short novel published in 2022, which I decided to read after seeing good reviews on Goodreads.

It is in two halves: in the first, we follow the recreational swimmers at a local pool, getting to know each of their habits and motivations. We also follow the response of the swimmers as a crack appears in one of the lanes. This section is particularly beautifully written. I am a recreational swimmer, and Otsuka’s writing is so insightful that she seemed somehow to have a better understanding of my motivations than I have.

Only one of the swimmers is named: Alice.

In the second part of the book, we follow Alice’s development of dementia, mostly from the perspective of her daughter. Alice is admitted to a care home, and Otsuka’s account of this has emotional depth and close observation. The main focus of this section is on Alice’s experience of memory loss, including the effects of this on her relationship with her daughter.

The reader is left to draw the parallels between the events described in the swimming pool, and people’s reactions to them, and the story of Alice’s decline.

The Swimmers was unique, poetic, and beautiful.

In Platformer last Tuesday, Casey Newton reported on CNET’s use of artificial intelligence tools to publish news stories.

Newton’s piece led me to Futurism, which pointed out serious errors in CNET’s AI-generated prose. Futurism argued that the tone of the piece was significant in disguising the errors:

The AI is writing with the panache of a knowledgable financial advisor. But as a human expert would know, it’s making another ignorant mistake.

If I were to develop an AI model, I would probably start with the writing style and hope the factual content would come later… and really, that’s quite human behaviour.

❧

Technical writing often includes numerous technical terms. Despite this, good technical writing remains clear. It is as simple as possible, concise and unambiguous.

Good writing is a skill. It is not something that is easy to master. When reading Jeanette Winterson’s 12 Bytes last year, I was particularly taken with her plea that scientists ought to work closely with writers to ensure that their ideas were communicated with precision and, perhaps, beauty.

Yet, when people are trying to imitate this style of writing, perhaps when starting out, they frequently do it badly. They confuse technical terms for obfuscatory terms. When I am marking scientific assignments, words like ‘whilst’ or ‘utilise’ are red flags for this: these are not words people typically use in everyday life, and they can signify that someone is intentionally trying to make their writing sound more complicated than necessary. This is the antithesis of communicating complex ideas as simply as they can.

Good students—and good writers—grow out of this. But some don’t. Some people just slip into using ridiculous language as a habitual thing.

Others—stereotypically in the corporate world or the Civil Service—intentionally use obfuscatory language to hide their own confusion or to avoid pinning down a particular meaning. Why say something plainly if it might turn out to be plainly wrong? Why give a hard deadline when you can just ‘work at pace’? ‘We’re going as fast as we can’ doesn’t have quite the same sense of vague authority, and also might turn out to be provably false.¹

❧

When I reflect on my own professional practice, it occurs to me that when something is written in an obfuscatory style, I tend to assume it is, in the Harry Frankfurt sense, bullshit. This is not always fair, but it is my automatic response, and I find it difficult to overcome.

Let’s imagine, for example, that a chief executive talks about their organisation having an ‘integral role’ in ‘tackling incidents’ and providing ‘world-leading insights.’ I can’t help but automatically assume that this is bullshit. It gives the impression that the chief executive’s purpose is not really to inform, but perhaps to attempt to impress blindly.

None of the bold words is a technical term, and none of them can be interpreted as meaning anything specific. These phrases are empty, devoid of meaning.

But my automatic assumption that the whole text is bullshit may be false, and is really no more helpful than a response of ‘ooh, this person is using clever words and so really knows what they’re talking about.’

❧

I once worked with someone who was completely ruthless with challenging this sort of thing. I remember one particular charged discussion where the feedback to one unfortunate communications officer was, ‘Look, if you want me to include any of this, then bring it back when you’ve translated it. I speak English, not McKinsey.’

You may only be able to get away with that sort of challenge when you reach a certain level of organisational seniority; I would argue that it then becomes something akin to a prerequisite for good management.

❧

If AI mimics the style of this text while making fundamental errors, then perhaps readers will come round to my way of thinking. Perhaps the assumption that obfuscation and bullshit are closely related will become more commonly entrenched.

If so, this could have the wonderful side effect of spurring people to put extra effort into writing concisely and precisely, lest their work be automatically assumed to be an AI output riddled with errors.

I can hope.

1. The shot at the Civil Service is a bit cheap. For all I whinge about gov.uk from time to time, they do have top-notch style guide which includes ‘words to avoid’ for exactly these reasons. Unfortunately, it is not always followed. ↩

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image for the prompt ‘a robot talking nonsense, digital art’ created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Elif Shafak is an extraordinary writer. Her books The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World were lyrical, beautiful, and brilliant.

She is also Turkish, and she wrote this weekend’s FT Weekend Essay on the subject of last week’s devastating earthquake, which hit south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria. Her excoriating essay, which makes the point that inequality and government corruption have proven to be more deadly than nature alone, is well worth your time.

They have never learnt from the sorrows and mistakes of the past. They have never let go of their hubris. Greed and cronyism have been the dominant guidelines.

There is so much anger, so much sorrow. Whether we are in Turkey or across the diaspora, we oscillate between grief and rage. One minute we are crying uncontrollably, another minute burning with outrage, consumed by a sense of brokenness.

Today, I walked past a tribute on the side of the street with pictures of some of those killed in this disaster. A solo violinist played nearby, taking donations to the relief effort. The pain is worsened by Shafak’s description of how government decisions have contributed to the suffering and death.

When I did a stint on an elderly care ward a decade or so ago, it wasn’t uncommon to send older people to a care home or similar seeing for “a period of convalescence.”

I remember discussing this with my consultant supervisor and suggesting that it seemed strange that we did this for elderly patients, but not for younger patients. I reflected on how I thought I’d benefit from a period of convalescence if I were ill, but that the hospital would want me back on the ward as soon as I was capable of maintaining an approximately vertical position.

I’d forgotten all about that conversation until I saw Richard Smith’s review of Recovery, a short book published last year by Edinburgh GP and writer Gavin Francis. His review inspired me to buy the book.

It’s possible that in one of those feedback loops of reading at the moment: Francis references Suzanne O’Sullivan’s It’s All in Your Head which I very recently read, and Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without its Flow which I read relatively recently.

Francis’s argument in Recovery is that we all need time to convalesce and heal following illness.

The medicine I was trained in often assumes that once a crisis has passed, the body and mind find ways to heal themselves – there’s almost nothing more to be said on the matter. But after nearly twenty years as a GP I’ve often found that the reverse is true: guidance and encouragement through the process of recovery can be indispensable. Odd as it seems, my patients often need to be granted permission to take the time to recover that they need.

This much seems reasonably obvious, even if society pretends to have forgotten it (and certainly doesn’t practise it). Francis argues that we all need time following illness to regain as much independence as we can, and to find a balance in life.

Francis goes on to logically develop his argument, firstly making a case for convalescence even in chronic illness (we still need time to regain independence and balance), and even suggests that we would benefit from sabbaticals every seven years or so to convalescence from work. I think he is probably right.

Francis also talks about the importance of nature to recovery. I was particularly taken by his image of doctor-as-gardener:

A doctor who sets out to ‘heal’ is in truth more like a gardener who sets out to ‘grow’ – actually, nature does almost all of the work. Even when I stitch a patient’s wound the suture material itself does not knit the tissues – that thread is simply a trellis to guide the body in its own work of recovery.

This is well worth reading.

When I posted my review of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts on Monday, I didn’t notice that it was the 600th book I’d reviewed on this blog. I only noticed when I got around to updating my mildly obsessive spreadsheet.

As far as I can tell, my first review was of (sigh) The Da Vinci Code, posted in January 2005. I note in that post that I read the book on my (cringe) Pocket PC, which is a reading experience I have no memory of whatsoever. In the intervening (gasp) eighteen years, I’ve reviewed books by everyone from Adam Buxton to Zoë Heller, from A Chess Story to You Are What You Read.

The authors I’ve read most are David Sedaris, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro. Only 51 books were translations, mostly commonly of French, Italian or Japanese works. Perhaps I need to expand my range.

At this point, a good blogger would link to an index of all the books they’ve reviewed to allow readers to click through and see what I made of their favourites. I don’t have one of those. Some posts don’t even have the book’s author tagged—I don’t think WordPress allowed tags when I started using it.

At this point, an average blogger would wang on about what they’ve learned, and about the joy of reading. But that just strikes me as a little worthily dull.

As a rubbish blogger, I’ll just make myself a hostage to fortune by saying that my 601st book review will be along tomorrow.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image for the prompt ‘a painting by Vermeer of a library of 600 books’ created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

I have written previously about visiting Heiroglyphs at the British Museum. The exhibition includes the coffin and mummified remains of Bakt en hor, which are normally on display at the Great North Museum. In return for the loan, the British Museum has sent the inner coffin of Seshepenmehyt up to Newcastle.

After my discomfort at the Hieroglyphs exhibition, I was keen to see whether a British Museum artefact displayed elsewhere would feel any better.

As you can see, the coffin is strikingly beautiful. The absence of crowds meant that I could take some time to contemplate the coffin, and to view it closely from all four sides.

The interpretation text concentrated on the imagery of the afterlife carved into the coffin, which is appropriate as it is on display in a part of the museum dedicated to cultural and religious responses to death.

It was slightly strange that the interpretation was given in The British Museum’s house style and colour scheme rather than that of the Great North Museum—the same certainly didn’t apply in reverse for the loan of Bakt en hor.

But the oddest thing of all was that the display was labelled prominently, in large logos on every side, as being from The British Museum. The word ‘British’ appears more frequently and in bigger letters in the exhibit than the word ‘Egyptian’, which is baffling. Why should the country that holds the artefact be more boldly highlighted than the place where the coffin’s occupant lived, and from where the coffin was pilfered?

Even the museum’s webpage mentions the British Museum ten times, and Egypt only seven times—and two of the mentions of Egypt are referring to parts of the museum.

I can’t help but feel that we’re overdue for a proper reckoning with our country’s past, and a reconsideration of how we treat treasures we’ve stolen from other countries.

Seshepenmehyt is at the Great North Museum: Hancock for just a few more days, until 19 February.