The stage is set for the Great North Run, which remains the world’s largest half-marathon. Starting in Newcastle, the participants run down to the coast at South Shields.

It’s the first ‘proper’ Great North Run weekend in several years: 2020 was cancelled due to the pandemic, 2021 took a ‘modified’ pandemic-friendly route, 2022 saw a sombre event with the associated smaller runs cancelled due to Elizabeth II’s death.

Sir Mo Farah has also chosen this year’s race to be the finale of his career as a professional athlete. He’s won the Great North Run six times to date, and the Metro has changed the cubic sign en route at Heworth to feature his silhouette. Local radio wags have called it the Metmo.

The Red Arrows will fly past at 1135, and shake our house as they do so.

I don’t think there’s been a year in the decades I’ve lived in the North East when I haven’t known and sponsored at least one person in the run. I’ve never taken part myself… obviously… but Wendy has done one of the shorter runs before. Perhaps more shockingly, despite living within spitting distance of the route, neither of us has ventured out to spectate at the main Great North Run.

Will that change today? We’ll see…

In the two decades over which I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve covered—at least in passing—five general elections. In the intervening times, I’ve written more than even I would care to read about UK politics.

And yet, it is only today that I’ve realised that we use the word ‘majority’ in UK politics to mean two entirely different things.

The first, and to me, the most intuitive, is defined by the OED as

The greater number or part; a number which is more than half the total number, esp. of votes; spec. (in a deliberative assembly or electoral body) the group or party whose votes amount to more than half the total number, or which has the largest share of votes; the fact of having such a share.

The outcome of the general election held in 2019 was that the Conservative Party won a majority of 80 seats in the House of Commons. That is, they had 80 more seats than all the other parties combined: the Conservatives had 365 of the 650 seats, while all other parties together had 285. The excess number of seats—the majority—was 80 seats.

But—set your phasers to ‘stun’—we use the word ‘majority’ to mean something completely different at the individual constituency level. We use this, more recent, OED definition:

The number by which the votes cast for one party, etc., exceed those for the next in rank.

To take a topical example, Nadine Dorries won her Mid Bedfordshire seat with a reported majority of 24,664. Dorries garnered 38,692 votes, her nearest competitor won 14,028 votes, and the difference is reported as the majority. We ignore the rest of the votes.

This leads to some oddities. For example, in the 2005 election, Dorries won 23,345 votes—that was 11,355 more votes than her nearest competitor. She therefore won a ‘majority’ of 11,355. Yet, a much larger number of votes—27,075—were for other candidates. Like many candidates, Dorries therefore simultaneously won a minority of the votes, yet secured a stonking five-figure majority.

This weird convention makes sense in terms of the numbers it prioritises. A government with a healthy majority can command increased confidence in its ability to pass legislation. Similarly, a legislator with a health majority can command increased confidence in their re-election prospects. It makes little difference how far ahead the government is compared to the official opposition, and it makes little difference how far ahead (or not) the legislator is versus the entire field of opponents.

But, blimey, how have I lived for thirty-eight years without noticing this quirk?

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

This is a newly published book, but not a newly published story: it was published in The New Yorker last year, and even translated into French and published as a hardback. For Faber, this feels a bit like a cash-in on Keegan’s Booker shortlisting, like money for old rope, admittedly with the odd word changed. It’s 6,000 words or thereabouts: it would be hard not to read it in a single sitting.

None of which says anything at all about the work itself, which happens to be brilliant. I’ve previously enjoyed Foster and Small Things Like These by the same author, though was left unmoved by The Forester’s Daughter, so my praise for Keegan hasn’t been universal. But I thought So Late in the Day was exceptional. The tone reminded me a bit of the pervasive regret of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels.

It’s hard to write anything meaningful about such a slight novel without giving everything away. Its French title was Misogynie. Our narrator is Cathal, an Irish Civil Servant, and we find him contemplating the history of his relationship with his ex-fiancee. The prose is understated and precisely written.

I would highly recommend it.

There are many, many things in this world that I know very little about, a fair proportion of which are things that you probably know quite a lot about. One area in which I’m woefully lacking in even rudimentary knowledge is cinema… as you may have noticed over the last two decades of this blog.

I can’t remember the last year when I read less than 52 books (averaging one a week). Yet, in my thirty-eight years, I suspect I’ve seen fewer than 52 films at the cinema in total. In 2023 to date, I’ve seen three. I wrote ropey reviews for each of them: Tár, The Laureate and Barbie. If watching a film while a live orchestra performs the score counts, I can add City Lights to this list too… but I expect that cinema purists would cringe at the very notion.

My knowledge of film stars is essentially non-existent. I’m one of those irritating people who exclaims “who?!” as Graham Norton lists his guests of the week… or I would be, if I ever watched his chat show, which I don’t, because I don’t know who anyone on it is. I stream films a little, but probably not substantially more than I see in the cinema, and I entirely understand the argument that productions made for the big screen are best seen there.

I’m not anti-cinema. I’m essentially ambivalent: I don’t think I’ve seen enough of it to have a well-formed opinion. I’m not even sure why I’ve seen so little. I might plead a lack of time if, nine years ago, I hadn’t made a big thing about no-one ever having time to do anything.

As there’s little as satisfying in life as filling a knowledge gap, I’ve decided to take drastic action. I’m going to follow the Stephen Bush mantra:

I think in general, beyond screening out some genres that aren’t for you — I never watch horror or anything involving fixing or racing cars — just going to whatever’s on is a pretty good way of having, at the least, a not-terrible time.

I’m going to make an effort to go to the cinema more often, and just see whatever. This might be a terrible idea, and I might give up on it after about a fortnight. Alternatively, if I’m not bored out of my skull or finding ways to avoid the flicks, then trying to see 52 films in a year might become a ‘thing’ for 2024.

This post is really my way of saying… there might be some unexpected film reviews coming up.

Watch this space.

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

When flicking through Apple’s iOS App Store on my iPhone this morning, I noticed that of the ‘top ten’ free apps, I have only two installed. Of the ‘top twenty’, I have only six installed. And of the ‘top twenty’ paid apps, I have none installed.

Digging deeper into the lists, I have 22 of the ‘top fifty’ free apps installed, and one of the ‘top fifty’ paid apps.

In the early days of the App Store, I would typically have a high proportion of the most popular apps installed.

I’ve been pondering what this might mean. Perhaps I am an outlier who doesn’t use the things most people use? Or perhaps the explosion of apps over the years now means that the variety people install tends to be broader, and the most popular apps are installed on a much smaller proportion of devices.

A lot of the apps on the ‘paid’ list strike me as fairly niche: three of the ‘top ten’ are apps for those learning to drive, which surely makes up only a small proportion of iPhone users. This supports the hypothesis that installations have become more varied, and that the ‘top ten’ has less pull. But that observation doesn’t carry over to the ‘free’ list, with the most popular apps seemingly having broad appeal.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to try to draw conclusions based on a sample size of one.

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

Benedict Evans wrote an interesting blog post recently. It discussed why, when new regulations are passed, the tech industry’s first response is always negative. He made a wider point:

Whenever anyone proposes new rules or regulations, the people affected always have reasons why this is a terrible idea that will cause huge damage. This applies to bankers, doctors, farmers, lawyers, academics… and indeed software engineers. They always say ‘no’ and policy-makers can’t take that at face value: they discount it by some percentage, as a form of bargaining. But when people say ‘no’, they might actually mean one of three different things, and it’s important to understand the difference.

The three meanings are: that they just don’t like the change; that the change will have grave negative consequences that haven’t been understood; and that the change is misconceived and impossible to implement.

I think this is more generally applicable to the process of change, and that doctors are probably more likely to say “no” to change than other groups. Because it was a tech article, it made me think of times when tech changes had been imposed on my medical work.

I can think of two notable tech changes over my consultant career to date which I thought fell into the third category, but—when they were introduced anyway—turned out to fall into the first category.

I can also think of two which I thought fell into the third category, and where I turned out to be correct, and rollout was abandoned at the very last minute. In one case, this was even after staff members had been trained to use the new system. In the other, which was cancelled after it was supposed to have rolled out, I was vaguely threatened by someone saying “I’m not asking you to use this system, I’m instructing you to”—as though that made any difference to the fact that I could not have access to their system.

And this makes me reflect that perhaps, like so many things in life, the problem boils down to failures of communication. If the concerns I raised weren’t genuinely showstoppers, then I would have felt better about the rollout if someone had helped me to understand the flaw in my thinking. For the two which were showstoppers, perhaps a conversation along similar lines would have revealed that I wasn’t talking nonsense.

And, of course, that assumes that those performing the rollout have the time and resources available to have those conversations.

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

I was tickled this week when I noticed that Donald Trump’s supporters were selling merchandise with his mugshot on it, with the text “never surrender”. The juxtaposition of a photograph of someone taken as part of the process of surrendering with an exhortation never to do so was simply too much.

But then I came to understand that the Trump campaign itself was selling this merchandise… and it became a lot less amusing.

I sometimes have reflective moments when I wonder whether I’m too critical of politicians: after all, I wouldn’t want to be one, so it seems a bit petulant to be critical of those who do step forward.

It’s in that spirit that I’m choosing to assume that Grant Shapps is genuinely the best person in the country to have held no fewer than five Cabinet positions in the last twelve months:

• Secretary of State for Transport
• Home Secretary
• Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
• Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
• Secretary of State for Defence

There may be those who say he is the ‘Minister for the Today Programme’, a useful mouthpiece who will repeat whatever lines he is given while in front of a microphone. He is, they say, being promoted in a ‘jobs for friends’ culture of rewarding loyalty.

I’m choosing not to believe that. I’m choosing to believe that he is a multi-talented superstar politician able to turn his hand to anything from boats to power stations to aircraft carriers as the moment demands.

Our nation is lucky to have him.

The Times front page had a headline yesterday morning proclaiming that “most people die while on NHS waiting list”. The opening paragraph:

More than half of all people who died in England last year were on an NHS waiting list, research indicates.

I didn’t get a chance to read beyond that point, but as I walked to work, it played on my mind. I thought a lot about how it was a sad inditement of modern medicine. How depressing, I thought, that so many people are dying in limbo, expecting some kind of treatment for something, rather than being supported to achieve a good death. People who are at the end of their life should not be worrying about clinic appointments and waiting lists.

On the other hand, I thought that perhaps this news was perversely positive: it was good, I thought, to see realistic medicine enter the national conversation as never before.

And then I read the full article. And The Guardian’s coverage.

And ho-hum, I’d got it very wrong. It turns out that I was supposed to be thinking:

Record numbers of people are spending their final months in agony, waiting for treatment that never arrives. The basic promise of the NHS — that it will be there for us when we need it — has been broken.

And that the statistics represent a:

terrible indictment of this government’s mismanagement of our health services.

And:

These figures are a stark reminder about the potential repercussions of long waits for care. They are heartbreaking for the families who will have lost loved ones and are deeply dismaying for NHS leaders who continue to do all they can in extremely difficult circumstances.

I suppose my reaction differed from that of the various spokespeople because they assumed that most patients were dying while on waiting lists for treatment for the thing that killed them.

That seems so unlikely that it simply never occurred to me, and there’s nothing in the cited data to challenge my view. It’s not uncommon for someone to languish on a waiting list because they are being treated for something else: people don’t get hip replacements while they’re going through chemotherapy, for example. Certainly, some people are referred for treatment for a condition, deteriorate unexpectedly quickly, and die while waiting, but those events strike me as quite exceptional, quite far from the norm, not least because lists are generally arranged by clinical urgency.

But really, this statistic is intriguing for being an interesting combination of meaningless and significant. It’s meaningless because it is extrapolated from a small data set, we have no evidence of any causal link, and it’s not immediately obvious that improving it would improve patient care. Yet, it is significant because it helps to give some emotional context to bland waiting list statistics and reminds us that people’s lives continue while they wait.

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