In On Connection, which I read a few years ago, Kae Tempest says:

If you are moved by a rapper that you listen to on YouTube, it’s really not a big deal. You shouldn’t have to apologise for it in literary environments. The same is true if you love a classical poet. It isn’t the case that you need to approach lauded works on bended knee. The pool of influence you draw from does not have to meet the approval of an academy or an institution, or be bound by the parameters of a genre, sub-genre or ‘movement’. Listen to everything. Read as much as you can. Try to stay present and connected with whatever you’re engaging with when you’re engaging with it.

I have a letterpress Faber print from On Connection above my desk, but it isn’t this quotation. Readwise reminded me of this one this morning.

It made me feel briefly guilty about admitting yesterday to abandoning a book. I’m pretty certain that’s the opposite of Tempest’s intention: I think the piece is intended to encourage us to unashamedly lean into the things we enjoy… but I am narrowing my gaze by abandoning a book from a genre I didn’t really enjoy?

I do try to challenge myself—I’ve even tried a bit of science fiction recently, despite it being a genre that I don’t usually enjoy. Indeed, Tempest’s book itself was an example of that, as poetry isn’t normally my thing.

Where’s the balance between leaning into things that we enjoy and continually challenging ourselves to expand our palate and mind?

I can’t remember the last time I gave up on a book. It must be more than a decade ago. I know this is irrational: there are more good books to read than can ever be read in a lifetime, so persisting with a bad book is a waste of time… although it does make me appreciate the good books all the more.

I was recently unexpectedly detained in town for a couple of hours, so popped to Newcastle City Library. Unusually, I didn’t have access to my list of books that I wanted to read, so plucked Pier Review off the shelf based on the cover alone. I liked the pun, and thought a bit of light history of seaside towns would be entertaining and informative.

It turns out that this book doesn’t fit that premise: this is a crowdfunded book about a blokey road trip written by a couple of bloggers. It is written in alternating short sections by the two authors, alternating between a serif and sans-serif typeface. I’ve no doubt that this book will appeal to plenty of people, but humour is subjective, and this just didn’t tickle me.

After the first couple of chapters, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t getting anything out of the book, and decided to abandon it. I did flick forward briefly to see what they had said about the piers I’m familiar with, but didn’t find even that text particularly engaging.

This book wasn’t for me and I couldn’t finish it, but I don’t think I was ever really the target audience. You might well love it: don’t let my negativity put you off.

A lot is often written about the need to adapt our national infrastructure, and particularly that of cities, to manage climate change. Most of what I read is about adapting cities to produce less carbon. For example, by promoting active travel over carbon-fuelled vehicles or by using heat pumps in place of carbon-fuelled central heating.

A lot of this is framed very poorly. Coverage regularly implies a choice, most frequently citing ’economic damage’ as a key barrier to implementing ecologically sound practice. It shouldn’t need saying that making our planet uninhabitable is the ultimate act of economic damage.

As my old friend James O’Malley frequently reminds us, adaptations actually have to be built to make a difference. If every option is blocked because it’s not quite eco-friendly enough, then we’re doomed to end humanity.

One aspect that seems under-discussed is how we need to adapt the built environment to cope with the climate change that is already baked-in through the damage we’ve already done. I was pleased to see an article in Le Monde yesterday about exactly this issue, looking at how Paris needs to adapt.

I think the two issues ought to be considered hand-in-hand: the super-insulated houses required to make heat-pumps work must also support passive cooling, or they will be uninhabitable in the medium term. Building better infrastructure for active travel is a must, but doing it with asphalt is a bad idea. Nice big windows to reduce reliance on powered lighting are unhelpful if they also trap heat.

I worry, though, that this complaint just puts me in the same category as those who oppose developments for not being quite ecologically friendly enough. I don’t think it’s the same complaint: building infrastructure in a way that guarantees a short lifespan can’t be good for the planet… but is it better than nothing?

People who are much more politically savvy than me suggest that the Tory party might run in 2024 on a platform of ‘the recovery plan is working, don’t risk switching to Labour.’ The logic of that is confounding in itself, but this photo of the 1992 Tory campaign from Mark Pinder’s exhibition neatly summed up the more profound problem from a North East perspective… though of course the Tories won in 1992.

Mark Pinder is a photo journalist, and this exhibition selects from his work from Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election win through to the present day. It has a heavy North East focus, and it is brilliant curated.

This photo of miners ending the last production shift at the Vane Tempest Colliery is positioned alongside the photo below, showing the fabrication of the head of the Angel of the North. The latter is often said to be a commemoration of the region’s mining and industrial heritage: the two photos are dated just four years apart.

There was much to enjoy in this exhibition—it’s not solely about political anger and betrayal, even if those were the bits that initially caught my eye. It’s a brilliant collection which provides real insight into the history of the North East region over the last forty years or so, and well worth a visit.

If you haven’t seen this show, then you’ve missed it: Macromancy closed yesterday at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. This probably therefore counts as bad blogging.

Yesterday afternoon, Wendy and I went along to the Sage to see Hyeyoon Park (violin), Benjamin Grosvenor (piano) and Sheku Kaneh-Mason (cello) performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C with the Royal Northern Sinfonia.

I’ve never previously seen a performance of this, or indeed any other, triple concerto. There aren’t that many of them, and they are relatively seldom performed, given the challenge of finding three suitably talented soloists to appear together.

In this case, the challenge was all the greater: the violin part was due to be performed by Nicola Benedetti, but she had to pull out at the last-minute due to illness.

Quite how the RNS managed to pull off getting Hyeyoon Park to fill in, and quite how she managed to give such an incredible performance at the drop of a hat, I’ll never know.

If I’m honest, it was Kaneh-Mason’s name that attracted us to book tickets. He’s probably most famous for his royal wedding turn or that performance to an empty Royal Albert Hall during COVID, though his list of achievements is endless. Yet, in the moment, Park definitely stole the show. The warmth and richness of her playing was astounding, even alongside the other two exceptional soloists.

The RNS were on their usual top form too, giving a passionate and fun rendition of Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony after the interval.

Apart from anything else, it was great to see The Sage packed to the rafters once again: this was a sell-out encore performance, laid on after Friday night’s performance sold out.

This 2022 novel was the first of Wait’s that I have read. It is a family drama set in the present day in a modern, dysfunctional family. The central character is one of two adult twins, and the book explores the relationship with their brother, their parents, and their wider family and friends.

The book opens with the funeral of their mother’s sister. This brings the family together after they have quite dramatically fallen out, and the rest of the book explores what lay behind that falling out, and whether it can be healed.

This all sounds very dramatic, and perhaps it is, but what really stands out is the humour. Wait made me laugh out loud several times, not least because the characters and the absurd situations in which they find themselves are so relatable.

This was a book I thoroughly enjoyed.

Some quotations I noted down:

People, Celia has observed, are not very imaginative and will in almost every case say what is obvious, not what is interesting.

But one day during the summer term, Olivia comes to him with that intense look on her face that always makes Michael nervous. ‘There’s something you should know,’ she says, sitting down on his bed. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘God!’ Michael says. ‘Oh my God. Wow. Wow.’ He can see he isn’t doing particularly well. ‘Whose is it?’

He knows immediately that this is the wrong thing to say, but it is too late to take it back.

Olivia glares at him. ‘Does it matter?’ There is a pause, then she says, ‘It’s yours, if you must know.’

Michael is shocked by this, especially since they’ve never had sex.

‘Not yours literally,’ Olivia says. ‘Yours emotionally. I’m closer to you than any man I’ve ever known. My body is infused with you, and this baby is yours. Its soul is part you and part me.’

I think we just forget when we’re older all the hard things about being a child. I remember feeling anxious a lot of the time. It’s not always true that children are happier than adults. Even if you had a nice childhood.

‘Do you think he didn’t love us at all?’ she says to Hanna.

‘I don’t know,’ Hanna says. She has been unusually quiet since they learned about the will. ‘I think he probably did. But it’s sort of irrelevant what you feel if you don’t act on it, isn’t it?’ She is frowning, looking away from Alice. ‘His kind of love wasn’t worth much in the end.’

Thanks to the London Library for lending me their copy of this book.

Yesterday, Granta published its once-a-decade ‘Best of Young British Writers’ list.

Of the twenty writers on the list, I’ve read books by only two of them: I read Attrib. and Other Stories by Eley Williams a couple of years ago, and Boy Parts by Eliza Clark earlier this year.

I am especially delighted to see the latter on this list. When I read it, I thought that Boy Parts was an exceptional novel, but I perhaps didn’t realise quite how good it was. Even now, months later, the characters pop into my head and I ponder some of the situations Irina found herself in.

Looking back at my own review, and reading those of others, I’m reminded by how dark parts of the book were. It isn’t the darkness that has stayed with me: quite the opposite. I recall the lightness, the absurdity, the humour, and the reflections on photographic art as a medium. I remember the characterisation of my home city. And most of all, I remember some of the characters, as though I knew them personally.

The way Clark’s characters have taken up rent-free residence in my brain reminds me of my response to Kazuo Ishiguro’s books. It’s great to see her get some recognition, especially since the reviews of Boy Parts weren’t universally praising. I’m looking forward with much anticipation to her next book, Penance, due out later in the year.

The Cellist is a one-act ballet choreographed by Cathy Marston with music by Philip Feeney. It tells the story of the life of the noted British cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, who career–and ultimately life–was cut short due to multiple sclerosis. I streamed the 25 February 2020 performance at the Royal Opera House, starring Lauren Cutherbertson, Marcelino Sambé and Matthew Ball via Royal Opera House Stream.

If it weren’t for Wendy, I would probably have no idea who Jacqueline du Pré was, and so this whole ballet would probably have passed me by. I’m also not a regular fan of ballet—I often find the plots quite hard to follow, and find myself distracted by that. So, if this hadn’t been available for streaming, I would almost certainly never have seen it. I logged on more out of curiosity about how Feeney would reference various cello concerti in his score than because of any particular interest in the dancing: the score turned out to be brilliant.

I put this on almost in the background, thinking I’d do other things while I listened, but quickly found myself drawn in. Marston’s masterstroke was to cast a dancer in the role of ‘The Instrument’ rather than using a prop. This turned the entire setup into a love story, contrasting the platonic but inseparable relationship between du Pré and her cello with the profound human love story between du Pré and her husband. This was fascinating to watch.

Cutherbertson’s ability to communicate the complex emotions du Pré must have felt when her symptoms started was remarkable: confusion, anxiety, and fear seemed almost to age her before our eyes. I was less convinced by the personification of some of her symptoms, danced by the chorus surrounding her, which I sometimes found really quite difficult to interpret. But the orchestral scene was excellent, and the three central performances were all so strong throughout the whole piece. Who knew someone could have such impact while pretending to be cello?

The set too, redolent of the inside of a cello, was inspired.

This was a remarkable hour of performance.

A year ago, I wrote:

it does all lead me to wonder if the tide is turning, and whether by this time next year we’ll still see the same constant exhortations by television and radio programmes to follow their people on Twitter and to Tweet out our opinions. Maybe enthusiasm really is waning.

This was based on the toxic nature of the site and the strong evidence around its impact on mental health. And this was six months or so before Elon Musk took control of the site, a development that can’t be said to have improved either of these factors.

If anything, the TV exhortations to use Twitter have only increased. Most bulletins on the BBC News Channel now feature the presenter asking the viewer to follow them on Twitter. When I was growing up, it would have been unimaginable for a BBC newsreader to actively promote a non-BBC service from behind the desk. Now they do it almost hourly, and for free, for a service that seems to cause the BBC endless trouble.

We live in strange times.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Douglas Stuart’s 2022 follow-up to his Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain explores familiar themes in a familiar setting: more domestic violence, more alcoholism, more coming-of-age against among the impoverished Glasgow schemes in the early 1990s.

Like its predecessor, it has sharp social commentary, profound insight, and beautifully lyrical writing. There is, once again, a particular focus on the mother-son relationship. Like Shuggie Bain, Young Mungohas been universally acclaimed, and so my opinion doesn’t really add anything.

But, for what it’s worth, I didn’t enjoy Young Mungo as much as its predecessor.

The character Mungo is a little older than Shuggie Bain, and is struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality. This adds an interesting extra dimension that was only hinted at in the previous novel. It adds a complicated element to descriptions of child abuse in the book, which is sensitively explored.

However, I didn’t really enjoy the structure of Young Mungo, which jumps between two different time periods within the same plot. This is a structure that is used in plenty of books, and when used cleverly it can draw out intriguing and compelling comparisons and reflections. But here, it felt like it was added as a device designed to sell the novel as more complex than it really is. I’m probably wrong, but it didn’t feel as though the chapters were initially written with this structure in mind.

I also didn’t really buy some key elements of the plot, and wasn’t as convinced on some of the characterisation. It’s difficult to discuss the former without spoilers. In the latter case, it’s no spoiler to say that a character who described a couple as ‘phlegmatic’ early in the novel describes another character as a ‘talking bicyclopedia’ later in the novel: maybe that is consistent characterisation in Stuart’s mind, but I can’t reconcile the two.

I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy this: this is one of the better books I’ve read this year, but I thought that it was a little more patchy and unconvincing than its prize-winning predecessor.