Like me, you may have been wondering why you’ve been feeling exhausted this Easter weekend. If so, this section of Friday’s Politico London Playbook may hold an explanation:

Easter is a time for reflection — the perfect time, then, to cast one’s mind back to Boris Johnson’s Easter Sunday message last year. Johnson said the U.K. “bursts with new life and new hope” and “beyond the suffering lies redemption.” The jury might be out on the redemption front, but there’s sure been plenty of suffering for the Conservatives — Playbook’s ace reporter Noah Keate has rounded up a few of the year’s highlights.

Since last Easter: More than 100 Downing Street fixed penalty notices … 485 lost Tory seats at the local elections … Second place for the U.K. to Ukraine in Eurovision … One Sue Gray report … One MP resigning for watching porn in the Commons … One platinum jubilee … One (survived) vote of confidence in Johnson … Two Tory by-election defeats … 62 resignations in early July 2022 … Two Tory leadership contests … Two new PMs … Two new home secretaries … Three new chancellors … Four new education secretaries … 15 housing ministers since 2010 … One new monarch … Around 250,000 members of “The Queue” … One mini-budget … Over 1,000 mortgage products withdrawn from the market … Eightunforgettable BBC local radio interviews … Gavin Williamson’s third departure from government … Another NHS winter crisis … One Windsor Framework … One new Met Police commissioner … 

And breathe: … Twitter almost collapsing several times … 40C temperatures in July … OneCommonwealth Games … One “Wagatha Christie” trial … Countless Matt Hancock moments on “I’m a Celeb” … Over 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages … Six episodes of “Harry & Meghan” on Netflix … OnePrince Harry tome … One U-turn on privatizing Channel 4 … Over 1 million job vacancies … Eight Bank of England interest rate rises … The highest inflation for decades … Skyrocketing energy bills … No new nuclear power stations opened … One coal mine approved … HS2 delayed … One new Scottish first minister … One new Australian prime minister … One new New Zealand prime minister … One U.S. presidential indictment … No return to Northern Ireland power-sharing … and zero migrants sent to Rwanda. So far.

Hardly any of this has a direct impact on me personally, but I think there’s a palpable drag on the public mood when the new cycle is so packed with such misery, dishonesty, incompetence, and fear. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like much of it is going to get better any time soon.

But despondency doesn’t really help. Perhaps we ought to use spring to count our blessings and to seek the joy in everyday life, and to try to focus on that for a while. Or, as it’s Easter Sunday, maybe I’ll just stuff my face with chocolate for a while.

One of the reasons I, like many others, enjoy reading the FT Weekend is that it seems impossible not to learn something from every edition. Often, the lessons are unexpected.

Today’s edition has a magazine cover-feature by Henry Mance called The search for a non-toxic masculinity¹

Much of the article focuses on YouTube and its influence on young boys. YouTube is a site that I only occasionally use. I’m not up-to-date with YouTube culture, and the article’s opening question—‘Do you know who KSI is?’—won a resounding ‘no’ from me.

But quite apart from the obvious, there were three things in this article that have given me new and unexpected perspectives—and ones that I never thought this week’s FT Weekend would provide when I started reading.

YouTubers are mainly blokes hanging out with blokes. One reason is that many began in gaming, which is predominantly male. “I’ve never seen a group of girls have a YouTube show,” a 12-year-old called Rose told me. Her friend Flo added: “It’s what’s normal now. It’s so weird.”

I had no idea that YouTube was predominantly male: in fact, I’d have predicted the opposite. I haven’t previously given it much thought, but I probably conflate social media platforms, which is probably a side effect of not using any of them with any frequency.

When I think of a ‘social media video’, the heuristic which comes to mind is make-up tutorials, dance videos and self-filmed videos of women on holidays. That’s probably partly because it’s this sort of video which is referenced most often in discussions of social media. But I suppose social media refers to a diverse range of platforms, and it’s foolish of me to conflate Instagram with TikTok with YouTube. Each probably serves different needs with different audiences and different popular material.

Of course, I’m culturally aware of Andrew Tate and MrBeast and Marcus Brownlee and Tom Scott and PewDiePie as hugely successful YouTube creators.² Yet somehow that’s never filtered through to influence my view of what YouTube is, and what is popular on the platform.

Mance’s article has challenged me to think again.

In Britain, children aged between 12 and 15 say that they spend more time on social media than with their friends. One boy told me of Tate: “I feel like some of his stuff is really helpful. Some of the stuff he says is bad. It’s a separate part, that’s how I see it.” But the algorithm won’t make that distinction: it will keep serving up Tate videos, and maybe you will start agreeing with them. The influencers know that provocation boosts numbers. The algorithm pushes boys to similar, and often more extreme, content.

I’ve previously listened to an entire podcast series about the YouTube recommendation algorithm, but it was this paragraph in Mance’s article that somehow made me think differently about it.

For some utterly ill-informed reason, when I think of YouTube, I think of Google, and then think of PageRank. PageRank was the secret sauce of the original Google search engine, based on the insight that the more pages that link to a given page online, the more likely it is to be the page that someone is searching for. One of the clever things about that insight is that if you search for a subject on which opinion is split, the results are likely to be equally split: it essentially has an (obviously imperfect) inbuilt anti-bias feature—or, perhaps, a pro-populism feature.

The YouTube recommendation algorithm is engineered to do exactly the opposite: it aims to serve up videos of similar appeal to the one the user is watching. This naturally tends towards reinforcing any given set of opinions, and actively hiding the opposing view. This was the whole point of the Rabbit Hole podcast—but somehow, it’s Mance’s writing that has helped me to mentally re-categorise recommendation algorithms as something thoroughly different from search engines. I now see much more clearly why they are problematic.

I grew up before the internet was a thing. My influencers came on printed pages. Loaded magazine launched in the UK in 1994, when I was 11, with the strapline “For men who should know better”. FHM (For Him Magazine) relaunched that same year, announcing: “It’s a guy thing”.

To my generation, these magazines came as close as anything to suggesting what it meant to be a man. Loaded “captured the reality of what men were like when we were together”, its first editor James Brown tells me. Its ethos was summed up by the comedian Frank Skinner, who told the sixth issue: “I’ve never gone along with all this new man bollocks . . . I think you can talk openly about how much you like a woman’s tits without being sexist.”

Perhaps the lads’ mags ethos hadn’t faded; it had just moved online, fragmented and mutated. A secondary school teacher I spoke to drew the distinction: we grew up with casual sexism; what exists now is pseudo-intellectualised sexism. Tate doesn’t make lazy jokes about women drivers or overweight women; he preaches about the innate superiority of men and the virtues of physical fitness. And he may not be a blip.

I was nine in 1994: whether it’s because I’m slightly younger than Mance, or whether it’s just because we had different childhoods, I don’t remember these magazines having any real influence on me or my friends. Of course, we were aware of them, but I don’t think we really paid them any attention.

And perhaps that explains why I would never have thought about the continuity between magazines like that and YouTube content—nor the insidious differences between the two.

1. The online version has a different heading: ‘What does it mean to be a boy online in 2023?’ ↩
2. KSI has still passed me by, but now I know the pseudonym stands for ‘Knowledge, Strength, Integrity’ ↩

When I decided to post every day in 2023, I didn’t expect to be on my third Egypt-themed post by March. Yet, last year’s centenary of the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb has sparked a renewed fascination in all things ancient Egypt, and so after Hieroglyphs and a coffin, I’ve been to see some art.

This exhibition by the Sainsbury Centre explores artistic responses to ancient Egypt, including all sorts of objects from paintings to pottery, and dresses to neon lights.

The first pair of objects in the exhibition make a clear statement of intent for the exhibition as a whole. Joshua Reynolds’s 1759 oil painting, Kitty fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl (to demonstrate her wealth) shows Cleopatra as we hear about her in Western myth: an extravagant, white seductress. Using the same medium in 1992, Chris Offil paints Cleopatra as a black African queen, shorn of the imposed Western myth.

This exhibition taught me how much of what we imagine to be ‘ancient Egyptian’ is anything but: much of it is actually reflective of other cultures. Before this exhibition, I didn’t know how much of ‘Egyptian’ style was actually Roman, the Romans having conquered Egypt in 30BC and Roman objects having been misattributed to ancient Egypt. Wedgwood, who pioneered ‘Egyptian’ designs in pottery, was actually (unknowingly) working from Roman artefacts–and never actually visited Egypt himself.

Before I visited this exhibition, I think I vaguely knew that The Times had an exclusive deal with Howard Carter for the photographs of his excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It’s the sort of thing newspapers like to celebrate. But I hadn’t previously understood that this exclusivity applied even within Egypt, depriving Egyptians of coverage of one of the most significant archeological findings in their country’s history… hardly something to be proud of in retrospect.

This exhibition features several watercolour paintings by Howard Carter, recording decorations that he uncovered during excavations, necessary in his early career as photography wasn’t an option. I had no idea that he was a talented artist, and I’d never really considered the necessity for archeologists to be able to paint and draw.

The exhibition closed with David Hockney’s 1961 Egyptian Head Disappearing Into Descending Clouds. This was an inspired choice. I wandered through the doors and tried to ponder exactly how I’d think of ancient Egypt in the future, given that all of my existing pre-conceptions had been blown away.

This was an exhibition that taught me things, corrected my misconceptions, and made me think: more than either of the other Egyptian things I’ve seen this year. I thought it was excellent.

Visions of Ancient Egypt continues at The Laing until 29 April.

A quick note about the photos in this post. The one at the bottom is a picture I’ve ‘borrowed’ from the David Hockney Foundation. The one at the top is a photo I took during the exhibition, before I realised that photography was banned… oops. I’m ummed and ahhed about whether I should include it given that I shouldn’t have taken it, but decided that it was such a great piece of curation that it deserved celebrating. Sorry, if you think I shouldn’t have done that.

Let me say up front: I’m not a fan of a pasty. You can keep your flaky pastry. But I do like a Greggs hot baguette, or a coffee, or a cake or two.

Greggs is based here in Newcastle, and I walk past the original Gosforth High Street shop most days. One of the interesting aspects about living in Greggsland has been watching their gradual transformation from a bakery to a takeaway-cum-coffee-shop.

Greggs has long had a handful of ‘Greggs Café’ branches: a large seating area with a pretty standard Greggs counter. These exist mostly, or perhaps even exclusively, in big shopping centres.

If I remember rightly, their first recent major push into a coffee shop model was the launch of ‘Greggs Moment’. This was a short-lived North East chain of coffee shops similar to a high street Costa or Caffé Nero, which also carried a range of Greggs food. These didn’t work. I don’t have any great insight into why, but I suspect the business model was flawed in that the sales volume wasn’t high enough to make a decent profit at the Greggs pricing level. Coffee shop customers tend to hang around.

The next push was into a chain of Greggs branches that were given a bit of an upmarket makeover and had seating installed, branded as ‘Greggs Bakery’. These seemed to work pretty well, combining the high-throughput of the bakery counter with the option for people to buy and eat hot stuff on the premises. A version of this—more extensive hot food plus some seats, minus the upmarket makeover—has now been rolled out to a large proportion of Greggs shops.

‘tasty by Greggs’ seems to be a new approach to creating a coffee shop style business. They are located within Primark stores, and I popped down to the third branch, which has just opened in Newcastle. This branch replaced and extended a former Costa concession within Primark, and the clothing shop has placed a range of Greggs-branded apparel for sale right by the café.

The branch I saw—which I’m assuming was representative—was filled with ‘Instagrammable’ features, like the large neon bridge pictured above, a themed phone box, a branded swing, and seating booths designed to look like giant doughnuts. Beyond the decor, though, they seem to be a standard Greggs outlet with much more seating (114 seats at the Newcastle one). They heavily advertise that ‘take out’ is available, but I can’t imagine this being a roaring trade: nobody is going to trek up to the second floor of a Primark for a Greggs takeaway when the shop is within spitting distance of three ordinary ground-level Greggs branches.

It was very busy, and I didn’t stick around for food or drink, though was disappointed to note that they use disposable coffee cups, even for those dining in. Emmanuel Macron would not approve, though it may be the least of his worries.

Logically, this would seem destined for the same outcome as Greggs Moment given the lack of passing traffic… except for the fact that I don’t think these branches are designed for cash generation. They seem like they are actually there as brand-building tools, generating positive associations with the brand and building cachet through people sharing social media posts.

This seems to play into the Greggs strategy at the moment, which seems to be all about building the brand. It seems to be working for them… but it does feel a bit time-limited to me. Fashions change, and it’s hard to see a bakery riding that wave for long.

But what do I know? I’m only in it for the okay coffee and the alright southern fried chicken baguette.

Wendy and I have always shared eclectic musical tastes, and when we recently took a road trip, our two most-played songs perhaps summed up that eclecticism.

2wei’s cover of Faithless’s Insomnia:

The Postmodern Jukebox cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On:

I maintain that it’s impossible not to smile during either of those tracks.

The Dead is the final story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, but it is also sometimes issued as a single-volume novella, which is what I read. Published in 1914, it centres on a teacher called Gabriel Conroy attending a Christmas party hosted by his aunts. It is easily short enough to read in a single sitting, as I did, and has been cited by TS Eliot and others as literature’s finest short story.

It becomes a meditation on the relationship between life and death, and particularly, how all of our lives are influenced by people who are now dead. There’s also some reflection of how little we know about what goes on inside others’ heads, even those we know intimately.

If I had been reading this blind, I’m not convinced that I would have dated it at more than a century old. I would have said that it was well crafted, and did a good job of drawing out quite complex ideas through a relatable real-world situation in a few pages. However, I don’t think I would have ever imagined it to be considered one of the best short stories of all time… but then that judgement is based on a century of other works building on these ideas.

This is a book that’s well-quoted elsewhere, but I particularly enjoyed the line:

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Today is April Fools’ Day, and so some scepticism about the world is probably warranted. But cynicism is probably best avoided as much today as everyday, even if we all sometimes fall into it.

My iPhone 12 Mini is 25 months old. While Wendy and I were nursing lattes in a local deli recently, I spotted an ‘important message’ telling me that the phone’s battery had ‘significantly degraded’ and my heart sank.

The cynic in me decided that it was no coincidence that this had happened just after the warranty had expired. Surely, this was a ploy to get me to upgrade? But I don’t want a massive phone, so I knew without really checking that the latest and greatest iPhone 14 series wasn’t for me—it doesn’t have a ‘mini’ model.

And so, I resigned myself to taking my phone to the Apple Store and parting with £100 or so for a new battery—and having the hassle of them wiping my phone and having to restore a backup. I assumed that would play havoc with my eSIM, and that I’d be spending an afternoon trying to reverify Apple Pay cards.

I was entirely wrong. I scheduled an appointment at the Apple Store, and they replaced the battery in about an hour, for free, without wiping the phone. They didn’t even take my screen protector off. It really wasn’t any hassle at all, and the staff couldn’t have been friendlier.

Sometimes, tech support can be a pain, and even Apple doesn’t get it right all the time. But when they do, the experience can be superb.