Highlighted by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic Daily yesterday, this first-person account of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 is brilliant and hilarious. It was published in 1956, and written by Thomas P. Curtis. It is stuffed full of moments like this:

For the aquatic events we had on our team a very fast short-distance swimmer, who had won many races in warm American swimming pools. He journeyed to the Piraeus on the day of the first swimming competition blissfully ignorant that even the Mediterranean is bitterly cold in the month of April.

He had traveled 5000 miles for this event, and as he posed with the others on the edge of the float, waiting for the gun, his spirit thrilled with patriotism and determination. At the crack of the pistol, the contestants dived headfirst into the icy water. In a split second his head reappeared. “Jesu Christo! I’m freezing!”; with that shriek of astonished frenzy he lashed back to the float. For him the Olympics were over.

It’s well-worth five minutes of your time.

I know nothing about sport, but even I’m aware that England faces Spain in the World Cup Final this morning.

I enjoyed reading the Economist’s Simply Science newsletter on the subject, written by Abby Bertics. I had no idea, for example, that “women still overwhelmingly wear football boots designed for small men, not women.”

But the most interesting part of the article concerned some research by Arve Vorland Pedersen, who proposed several modifications to the game to scale it to the physiological attributes of women, rather than those of men. Women are shorter, for example, so the pitch and goals ought to be smaller. Women should not have to live in a world designed for men.

And yet the kicker, so to speak, came at the end. The average physiological attributes of men at the time the sport’s rules were codified have more in common with the average physiological attributes of today’s women than today’s men. So really, the challenge ought not to be to scale things down for women, but up for men.

In today’s world, football is a women’s game.

In an old LRB diary, Patrick McGuinness makes an observation about loquacious train announcements:

In Europe what you hear on trains is minimal and informative: you get told your destination and the stops as they approach. In Britain it’s a relentless patter of pseudo-information aimed at pseudo-customers by people running a pseudo-business. You don’t ‘read’ the safety instructions, you ‘take some time to familiarise yourself with’ them. Your belongings must always be ‘personal’, and in case you were wondering, as you neared your ‘station stop’, what to do with them, you are ‘advised to remember to take them with you’. The train is also the only place outside a Classics course where you’ll hear the word ‘vestibule’. That’s OK, it’s nice to hear it again, but they spoil it by saying ‘vestibule area’.

He’s wrong about ‘vestibule’: you can also occasionally hear it in our house, where Wendy and I sometimes playfully use the word to refer to our porch. It’s even what we call the porch in our smart home setup.

This is an anatomical joke: there are many vestibules in the body, which are generally small spaces leading to larger spaces. The anatomical features retain a metaphorical connection to the original Latin vestibulum, the small enclosed room at the entrance to a house… otherwise known today as a porch. But I’d never thought about it enough to realise that we were re-creating the metaphor in reverse.

You’re also possessed of a pair of vestibulocochlear nerves. We occasionally misappropriate the word as an adjective meaning ‘in the porch’—‘Who turned the vestibulocochlear light off?’ There ain’t no humour like anatomical humour, amirite?

Musing on this today, however, made me wonder about the connection between a ‘vestibule’ and a ‘vestry’ in a church. I first wondered if it was maybe a similar metaphorical thing, in that the ‘vestry’ is the area in which one prepares before entering a church. Or perhaps the connection is ‘vesting’, as in donning or doffing clothes.

So I fired up the OED.

As it turns out, they seem to be unrelated, or at least both existed in Latin. As I’ve mentioned, vestibule comes from vestibulum, which retains its meaning today. The history of ‘vestry’ is less certain. It seems to come from the ‘vestments’, from the Latin vestīmentum—clothes. However, it’s not clear if that’s a direct thing—because it’s where the garments are stored—or a metaphorical thing, ‘vesting’ in the sense of endowing someone with something, like ‘investment’.

A ‘vestry’ in the church sense is also sometimes called a ‘revestry’ or a ‘vestiary’—some sources suggest that ‘vestry’ is just a corruption of ‘vestiary’. Interestingly, Wikipedia seems to prefer ’sacristy’, which I would have said was specifically Catholic, but very much isn’t.

The OED provides a whole separate meaning of ‘vestry’: the rubbish associated with a mine, which I think I’d probably naturally refer to as ‘slag’. I would never have previously imagined featuring those two words in the same sentence.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

‘Dechurching’ is an awful word, but Jake Meador has an interesting article in The Atlantic about the decline of church attendance in the USA. I thought this section was particularly interesting:

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go.

The dread of having to explain previous non-attendance—not at church, but anywhere—is a specific feeling. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach as I write this. I think it’s something we’ve all experienced, but which I don’t recall seeing articulated, and certainly not in this context.

I probably need to be better at thinking about how to avoid conjuring that feeling in others. Are there, perhaps, meetings that I invite people to, where they feel guilty if they miss one—guilt which, in turn, makes them less likely to come to the next one?

Keep with the churchy theme: how can I be better at welcoming back the prodigal son rather than making them feel guilty for their prior absence?

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

As I wandered along the coast at Roker and Seaburn, I began wondering about the fate of lighthouse keepers. I can well imagine that they thought their job would be there forever, and that the human aspect of lighthouse-keeping could never be replaced. Even as electricity replaced other modes of power, I can hear their voices musing that a human presence would still be required. Even if the operation of the light could be automated, lighthouse keepers with their local knowledge do so much more than maintain the light, and can understand the local conditions better than any automated system. It may not be their primary function, but lighthouse keepers were responsible for some remarkably heroic rescues over the years: no automated system could replace that.

And yet here we are, a quarter of a century on from having any staffed lighthouses in the UK, after every lighthouse keeper in the country was replaced by automation in a transition lasting less than two decades.

Many experts predict that artificial intelligence will replace numerous professions in the UK within the next few years. I’m sceptical: maybe because I work in health. There is much in my field that could be (and is already) aided by artificial intelligence, but it strikes me that the human-to-human relationship is the most important part of a lot of medicine. It’s hard to see that being replaced.

Perhaps, though, I’m the medical equivalent of a lighthouse keeper, falsely predicting my own continued necessity in the face of the unstoppable march of automation.

Wendy and I have just finished the disturbing and absorbing six-part drama Fifteen—Love on Amazon Prime. It primarily examines the relationship between a brilliant tennis player (played by Ella Lily Hyland) and her coach (played by Aidan Turner).

We found the script to be deftly plotted and the production to be outstanding, as the two combined to peel away layer after layer of complexity in a series where almost nothing is black and white. It is timely, coming as it does after so many stories have come out of abusive behaviour from coaches towards young athletes. Without wanting to spoil anything, it also thoughtfully and cleverly includes a character with dementia in a way that feels integral to the plot.

We did have some quibbles: the contortions the script goes through to avoid mentioning the word “Wimbledon” introduced some unintentional and inappropriate levity in some serious scenes. There is one central character whose writing is so uneven that their inclusion felt vaguely pointless. And there is quite a bit of unnecessary and unnatural scripted exposition: it may be unpredictable, but when revelations occur they are telegraphed rather than hinted at.

But the acting—especially Hyland’s incredible performance—is unmissable.

Across the Tyne and Wear Metro, new signs have appeared.

Previously, the position at which the drivers’ cab of the Metrocars should stop in stations was marked with a diamond-shaped “S” sign. Of course, Metrocars used to differ in length, shorter services operating on Sundays, but the front always stopped in the same position. This practice ended about a decade ago, and the facility to vary the train lengths ended when carriages were permanently coupled together during refurbishment, leaving a redundant drivers’ cab at one end of each.

Recently, the diamonds have been joined by new signs indicating the point in each station where the front of the shiny new trains should stop. These are required as, later this year, the 43-year-old trains will start to be replaced by new Class 555 trains with a fixed length of five carriages. And, I can only assume, slightly longer trains mean slightly different stopping positions.

Weighting Time is an exhibition of Fiona Crisp’s work spread over two different locations on two different sets of dates. I’ve been to see the portion exhibited at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art: the portion at Sunderland Museum has already closed.

This was a small exhibition of photography and film drawn from across Crisp’s thirty-year career. Included were representations of large, deep underground industrial spaces, which contrasted with images of similarly structured above-ground buildings, such as theatres and cathedrals. Both seem like otherworldly spaces.

A film installation took us driving through the Boulby Mine which stretches out under the North Sea, to space imagery travelling through time itself. The industrial aesthetic of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art complemented the work which also includes structures and seating designed by the artist to help viewers to contemplate the work.

I found this intriguing and enjoyable, though perhaps too small to be fully immersed or to completely appreciate all the ideas Crisp had in mind. Though, that feels like unfair criticism when I have effectively only seen half of the exhibition.

Fiona Crisp: Weighting Time continues at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art until 3 September. A virtual version is also available online, if you’re into that sort of thing.

So here’s a thing.

For the last little while, I’ve been running our dishwasher on a short cycle, intending to save energy. This seemed like a no-brainer: why wouldn’t I run the dishwasher on a short cycle if the results were still just as good?

Reader, I was a fool. The instruction manual is explicit:

To obtain optimum cleaning and drying results at a reduced running time, water and energy consumption are increased.

Don’t make my mistake.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Richard Smith recently shared this editorial he wrote more than thirty years ago, on the subject of preventing whistleblowing. It seems entirely relevant to the present day.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

Most organisations eventually have to take tough decisions. Difficult choices, particularly over allocating resources, have long been part of working in the NHS. The choices will become tougher, and there may be more losers than winners. The fear that the losers will tell all to the media is what leads managers to reach for their gags. They make a mistake. Instead, they need to create organisations-be they hospitals or health authorities -where employees feel enough part of the decision making process not to need to blow their whistles.

You begin by letting everybody know what is going on. If the rhetoric is glossy brochures full of the word “quality” and the reality is elderly patients with pressure sores in back wards with peeling paint, then staff will become cynical and demotivated. They need to be convinced that the available resources are used fairly, efficiently, and effectively. The surest way to convince them is to involve them in decision making. The decisions that are made must be clearly and honestly communicated. Staff must have a chance to come back on poor decisions, and managers should not be afraid to reverse decisions that are wrong.

If staff understand the true circumstances of the organisation and feel that their views have been given serious attention then they will accept tough decisions. But if seemingly arbitrary decisions appear from nowhere then staff will be unhappy and one or two will contact the press. Managers who try to create a climate of fear will neither stop whistle blowing nor run an effective health service.

That second paragraph is remarkable: it is common sense, it has been clearly articulated for more than thirty years, yet it is seldom followed.

The difficulty so often seems to come at the point of involving people in decision-making. Frequently, efforts to do this appear as cynical attempts to justify decisions that have already been taken. This isn’t solely a problem in the health service: we can see similar cynicism, for example, towards the ongoing consultation about closing railway ticket offices.

If we choose to be as uncynical as possible, then it strikes me that this often boils down to poor communication. Smith talks about ‘glossy brochures full of the word “quality”’—and I think he’s right. Starting a conversation about funding cuts with rhetoric around ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’ drives cynicism more than collaborative decision-making. Too frequently, managers fear being honest, and too often, managers choose not to be plain-spoken. You cannot have shared decisions if the people sharing in the decision have no idea what you’re talking about.