The Exorcist is a film with obvious cultural relevance: I haven’t seen it (obviously), but I’m aware of the key points. The gods of cinema scheduling mean that I’ve now seen its recent sequel, The Exorcist: Believer.

I don’t think I’ve seen a horror film at the cinema before, and I’m tempted to say that I still haven’t. This was not a scary film: I did not hear a single scream, yelp, nor even a sharp intake of breath. It was really just a dull film: I did see quite a few people walk out.

In the film, two children become possessed by the devil, for reasons unclear, and become violent as a result. They require an absurd Catholic exorcism which serves as the penultimate act of the film. The script is clunky and predictable, with none of the actors really given much scope to make an impact.

The exception was Ann Dowd, playing a character called—I’m not kidding—Ann. Her character’s backstory was uniquely contrived, and it seemed to me that she had a twinkle in her eye which acknowledged the absurdity. There was even a knowing line in the script about how the coincidences were all part of god’s plan, or some similarly droll wording.

I also enjoyed Ellen Burstyn’s performance for the way she seemed to float above it all, mostly in scenes that were clearly filmed separately from the rest of the movie. The plot used the most absurd device to remove her from the main action that caused one person to loudly sigh ‘for fuck’s sake,’ and I enjoyed the ridiculousness of that.

There was a cameo at the end that was foreshadowed in a way that not only ruined any sense of surprise, but also made no sense in the context of the film. Part of the misbehaviour of the possessed children is to violently confront people with uncomfortable truths. In the case of the foreshadowing, they shout an obvious falsehood which is immediately credibly denied, undermining the power of that behaviour in the first place. It’s an astoundingly misconceived device.

Basically: this isn’t worth two hours of your time.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was reflecting on the terrible news of the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap, I mentioned that

Sycamore Gap also features on endless bits of North East merchandise: often the option left over once the Tyne Bridge, Millennium Bridge and Angel of the North tat has been sold. It always felt like the North East’s symbol for the North East, not necessarily known or appreciated to the same degree by outsiders.

To prove the point, here are six examples I’ve recently seen while wandering the city.

The Economist had a lovely obituary. I particularly liked their line about the tree ‘bearing a pastoral load’, which feels like a neat way of communicating a feeling which is quite difficult to put into words.

When I worked as a hospital doctor, I often had to dictate letters. I was terrible at this: it was far faster for me to type them myself than to dictate, but this wasn’t always possible.

Like most people, the way I express myself when I speak is quite distinct from the way I express myself when I write. Seemingly unlike most people, I found it impossibly challenging to adapt to composing written text through the medium of speech. The two feel like completely unconnected systems: it’s like trying to rub my tummy and pat my head.

Back in February, I felt a little sceptical about how useful people believed ChatGPT to be.:

Much of the overhyped discussion about ChatGPT seems to be confusing this language model for something approaching artificial general intelligence.

This week, I’ve changed my mind: I think I’ve underestimated it. The difference has been the addition of voice chat to the model. The voices are impressively lifelike: they have intonation, they use filler words, they sometimes vocally trip, and all of that adds to the effect.

But more importantly: talking is different from seeing writing on a page. I don’t have the same basic expectation of factual accuracy in speech as in writing: I expect a bit of extemporisation, reference to half-remembered facts, a bit of loose interpretation here and there. In conversation, it’s natural to say “that doesn’t sound quite right” and to dig a little deeper into the background; in writing, it’s normal to expect the black-and-white content to be checked and accurate. In other words, the flaws in ChatGPT’s abilities seem to me to fit more naturally with speech than with writing.

I can well imagine phoning a version of ChatGPT to book a restaurant table and being entirely satisfied with the experience—and perhaps even uncertain as to whether I was talking to a person. Similarly for ordering takeaway. I may be writing this on an empty stomach, but there are all manner of customer service interactions that I could imagine using the voice version of ChatGPT for where the text version may seem a little—well—robotic.

I can also imagine it being useful for things like supported professional reflection. For example, only today, I’ve written a reflection about what I’d learned from a course I’d recently attended and how I’ve applied it in practice, as required by the medical regulator. I actually think that having a somewhat more probing voice chat on the same topic with a version of ChatGPT could stimulate deeper reflection and greater thought than simply writing down my own thoughts.

Essentially: I think I considerably underestimated the tool in February. ChatGPT is still a million miles away from artificial general intelligence, but I can now see much more clearly that large language models may have many more far-reaching applications than I’d been able to see back then. Chatting with ChatGPT has broadened my perspective.

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

This is Ken Loach’s last film, and the first one I’ve seen. As a Newcastle resident, this admission is tantamount to a criminal offence, but you ought not be surprised. I have thought about going to see Ken Loach films in the past, particularly the almost unavoidable I, Daniel Blake, but I was a little put off by the earnestness of other people’s recommendations. It made me think that his work must be a bit worthy, a bit focused on social justice over critical thought, and who needs worthiness in life?

If it hadn’t been for my cinema-going experiment, I also wouldn’t have gone to see The Old Oak. I had seen trailers and thought they were advertising a pat film about some asylum seekers moving to a small town in County Durham, meeting initial resistance fuelled by a cultural clash, and everyone getting along swimmingly in the end.

My understanding of the set-up was correct, but Loach’s treatment was a good deal more thoughtful than I’d anticipated. There is no straightforward resolution, and there are plenty of subtle touches, though it’s fair to say that the film has a clear moral viewpoint which doesn’t leave much room for uncertainty and exploration. The plot was a little contrived. This is also the kind of film where people talk in full sentences stuffed with exposition, and where thoughts and feelings are voiced more than they are hinted at.

In acting terms, it felt like Ebla Mari (who played the female lead) carried the film: I’d like to see her in other roles, but some of the other performances were a bit less convincing, which I think is attributable to the writing style as much as to the acting.

But I was swept up into the world of the film, suspended my disbelief, and went with it. That’s an achievement. It didn’t change my world, but the film’s positivity did give me a little boost. I enjoyed it, and I think it’s probably worth seeing.

Whenever I’m at Schiphol, provided I’m in the non-Schengen zone, I try to make time to pop into the tiny branch of the Rijksmuseum. The current exhibition is ‘Longing for Nature’, and I thought it made quite a nice partner to the ‘Essence of Nature’ exhibition I saw at The Laing earlier this summer.

Whereas ‘Essence of Nature’ was about the changing artistic representations of nature, ‘Longing for Nature’ is about the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world. The exhibition focuses on the 19th century, which was a period of immense change in this relationship. The exhibition posits that, in the early 19th century, nature was considered indestructible and immutable. The Industrial Revolution clearly challenged that perception.

I think that’s a hard case to demonstrate with such a small exhibition. Yet, I was struck by this painting: Orchard at Eemnes by Richard Roland Holst. From ‘Essence of Nature’ I’d learned about how art moved from aiming to be photorealistic in the pre-Raphaelite era to being more about character and atmosphere later on. Seeing this in the context of ‘Longing for Nature’ made me realise that the latter is filtering the scene through the human experience.

Just as popular perception shifts from nature being immutable to humans having an impact, we also started to consider nature in art through the human experience, rather than appreciating its essential quality. That surely can’t be coincidental.

‘Longing for Nature’ doesn’t have a publicly advertised end date but is on now at Rijksmuseum Schiphol.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

Sometimes, a newspaper story just takes my breath away, and a great example was published online yesterday: The Financial Times story about Sarah de Lagarde’s horrific accident on the Tube last year. This is partly because it’s a story that I’d completely missed previously, and because the story itself is so alarming, but it’s also attributable to Madison Marriage’s brilliant writing.

I would have guessed that people falling between a train and a platform was an exceptionally rare event: it’s the stuff of nightmares. To find out that it happens on the Underground every other day feels alarming, even considering the huge number of journeys.

After an epidemic of epidemics, you may have been wondering whether another rhetorician’s unsettling (and slightly weird) reference to a hurricane was part of a trend.

Hansard lists eighteen references in Parliament to a ‘hurricane’ in the last twelve months. Here’s a breakdown of what each mention was about:

• Windy weather (18)

I’m not blown away.

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

Here in Newcastle, there’s been a long-running saga about a massive new housing estate—Great Park. In fact, ‘massive housing estate’ considerably undersells it: with more than 4,000 homes planned, it is essentially a whole new suburb of the city.

Construction started in 2001 and has continued apace. A town centre was constructed some years ago, but until recently it was the subject of great controversy because there were virtually no shops or services open in the units built along it. Residents were very upset that they had no local services. Earlier this year, Morrisons opened in the town centre to great fanfare.

It’s against this backdrop that I read over the weekend that Rishi Sunak disapproves of services being close to where people live. To quote BBC News:

The Government said its plan would stop councils implementing “15-minute cities”, where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk.

Apparently, Sunak considers building essential amenities close to people’s homes to be part of a

war on motorists

A war we can only assume is being waged by the Government. Imagine how angry he will be when he realises who’s in charge of that.

Now, Newcastle hasn’t had so much as a Conservative councillor for almost three decades, so perhaps I’m out of touch. Indeed, in the latest round of local elections, their percentage share of the vote didn’t make it into double figures, their 27 candidates averaging fewer than 300 votes apiece. I walk past my local Conservative club most days, and their brass plaque is frequently defaced with amusing, topically critical slogans written on masking tape, which always strikes me as a politely British form of protest.

Yet: I can’t imagine that a desire to put essential amenities further away from people’s houses is likely to be a vote-winner. I don’t know anyone who has ever said “I can’t rent this place, the GP is less than 15 minutes’ walk away!”

This is Sunak pandering to ridiculous conspiracy theorists, seemingly without any insight into the fact that the Government is assumed to be part of the conspiracy. It is literally laughable: I was sitting on a park bench when I read that BBC line, and I laughed out loud.

Today, we get to see whether he has enough similarly insane policy ideas to turn his first—and, I’d happily wager, last—conference party leader speech into a stand-up comedy act.

Here’s hoping.

Eleanor Catton is a much-loved, Booker-winning author. This is Catton’s third novel, but the first I’ve read. The plot, set in New Zealand, concerns a dispute between a guerrilla gardening collective of stereotypical eco-warriors and a stereotypical tech billionaire.

This book has received rave reviews elsewhere, so I think the fault is with me rather than the book, but I just didn’t get it. The writing in the first part of the novel is great, and there is a lot of fun as Catton introduces her well-meaning but essentially ridiculous group of eco-warriors. There’s a particularly memorable scene where the group discusses translating their name—Birnam Wood—into an indigenous language. The group gets into an insane argument over whether that’s a way of showing respect, or whether using someone else’s language is cultural appropriation.

The problem is that the later parts of the book—which are a sort of plot-driven thriller—require me to care about people who have been set up as cartoons. Then the book also ends cartoonishly, sort of reverting to type. I couldn’t make those shifts, and didn’t really care about the characters, losing interest in the slightly silly plot.

Most upsettingly of all, especially for a literary novel, I didn’t feel like I came away from this book with any new perspective on anything. It felt like the novel relied on well-worn tropes without doing anything to subvert them.

So, in summary, this wasn’t for me.