This collection of 23 prose stories is based on interviews Judah conducted with people from around Europe. Documentary photographs accompany each story. It aims to build a picture of life in Europe for the ‘ordinary worker’, revealing a diverse community of individuals facing all sorts of challenges in life. Judah’s stories also often reflect life as the COVID-19 pandemic swept Europe; several are stories of refugees fleeing to Europe. Climate change is also a recurring theme.

I’m often intrigued to read about the work lives of others, especially when—like many in this book—the examples are very far removed from my day-to-day experience. It’s fascinating to have an insight into what it is like to take over the family vineyard or to be a pilot who guides cargo ships into harbours. This book provides insight into other worlds that can be found on this continent.

However, it’s taken me about six months to get through this book, which is entirely attributable to the style of writing, which I found very difficult to tolerate on two fronts.

Firstly, Judah writes every single story in the same consistent tone and style. This is a weird choice: when telling different stories from different parts of the continent, you would think it would be natural to vary the tone. For example, I’m sure farmers have particular idiosyncrasies in how they spin a yarn compared to flight attendants. Here, every story is flattened to the same mildly journalistic tone. To me, it feels like that sucks out a lot of the potential pleasure of this book.

Secondly, Judah has an altogether infuriating habit of slipping into the second person for a few sentences now and again. In his afterword, he says that he tried ‘techniques’ to ‘make you feel like any one of these people could be you’, and I think this weird linguistic tic must be what he’s referring to.

This passage provides a good example of Judah using the second person injudiciously:

You tell yourself you’ll never get married.

You tell yourself you know what love looks like.

You don’t expect it to look like a divorced Swedish Finn, who has spent most of his life in Germany, older, with two children over there, giving it a go in Ireland. You also don’t expect them to be called Patrick. Or to be living with his mother in a castle in County Cork.

Maybe it’s my quirk rather than his, but this makes me want to scream: ‘No, I don’t!’

Here’s an example of a random switch from third to second person:

The trolley rattling underneath her.

Her last glimpse of her husband’s face.

You’ll feel much better when this is out.

The doctor smiled. Then the anaesthetist bent over.

The cold gas coming out of the mask.

Count back from ten for me now.

You never make it to seven.

I can only assume that we’re using the second person in the third line as Judah is quoting either the husband or the doctor. I can live with that. But then, by the final line, we’re using the second person for a different reason: presumably as part of Judah’s ‘technique’. It just made me want to fling the book across the room.

Luckily, each of the chapters is a discrete profile of an individual, so it is the sort of book that can be readily appreciated in small chunks.

Despite all of this—and it feels good to get that rant out—I think this book is worth reading. Judah’s stories are varied and thought-provoking, and I think the whole made me feel a little differently about the things that unite people across Europe.

I came across Julia Sanches’s translation of Eva Baltasar’s Catalan 2020 novel after it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It’s a short book, just 112 pages. The main beats of the plot are that the female protagonist falls in love with a woman called Samsa, they form a long-term relationship, and Samsa ultimately decides to have a child.

But, really, this is a book which is character-driven rather than plot-driven. As with the title, there are a lot of metaphors about geological formations and processes, reflecting how the emotional landscape in which we all live shifts over time. Despite the allusions to large expanses, the book feels claustrophobic: we’re stuck in the mind of the protagonist, a mind which is narrowly focused on her personal situation. The claustrophobia is leavened by humour, some of it deliciously dark.

This book perfectly evoked the main character’s feelings: it was a perfect marriage of language and emotion. I found the whole thing quite moving.

Some passages I highlighted:

I’m not a chef, I’m just a mess-hall cook, capable and self-taught. The thing I most enjoy about my job is handling food while it’s still whole, when some part of it still speaks of its place in the world, its point of origin, the zone of exclusion that all creatures need in order to thrive. Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence.

I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.

I look at her and feel woozy, even though she’s Scandinavian and makes her living from a multinational with blood on its hands. I look at her and she fills every corner of me.

The first person who had the idea of building a pyramid must have been insane. What about the guy who thought it made sense to stick someone in a rocket and shoot them at the stars? Samsa is crazier than the two of them put together.

Small children have the power to impose their happiness on the everyday anxieties of grown-ups. Their power is short-lived, a gold dust that dresses the shoulders and reminds you that you’re more than just an ordinary soldier, a sailor. It’s hardly noticeable. Grown-ups have lost all interest in shiny things. A grown-up is the opposite of a magpie.

It’s not that I think small talk is dumb, it’s that I’m pretty sure it’s more reckless than adopting a pet rat during a plague.

This exhibition brings together work by twenty artists from around the world, intending to prompt reflection on how humans interact with the natural world.

Two installations particularly stood out to me.

This is Kaal (Time), a 2023 work by Kamruzzaman Shadhin and the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, which Shadhin founded. It’s a striking collection of seven hand-woven jute sculptures on aluminium frames. They are captured performing Bishahari Pala, a folk theatre work.

The work effectively combines a representation of the land and the people it sustains. There is something quite endearing about the characters; they look like they must have taken many hours to weave.

This is part of a dynamic water installation called Templo del agua, río Tyne by Leonel Vásquez of Colombia. Drops of purified water from the River Tyne fell through the complicated apparatus and created musical notes, which were both audible and physically sensed through the vibration of the benches.

Rocks from the Tyne hung around the space, which Vásquez describes as a ‘temple’.

Despite being in the middle of a crowded gallery of works, the combination of water and acoustics made this space feel quasi-religious or meditative. It was a quite captivating piece.

Stepping Softly on the Earth continues at Baltic until 14 April.

At 2am last Sunday, as the temperature dropped below zero, a four-week-old baby was pulled out of the English Channel, clinging to life. Alongside, a pregnant woman with advanced hypothermia was rescued and admitted to hospital. Four people were found dead in the water; another body washed up hours later. All had been trying to cross the Channel to reach the UK.

Today, just three days later, we have the spectacle of the Conservative party voting to prevent people from claiming asylum in the UK. Instead, applicants will be flown to Rwanda to try their luck there, a country that the Government’s Bill declares safe—contrary to the view of the Supreme Court.

Rishi Sunak calls this ‘an effective deterrent’ to crossing the Channel. For this to be true, the possibility of living safely in Rwanda must be a fate more grave than the possibility of watching your newborn baby drown in freezing seawater in the dead of night. As Sophy Ridge might say: “I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but you can’t possibly believe that, can you?”

The Home Office has suggested that most of those who come to the UK in small boats are likely to have valid asylum claims. They are genuinely fleeing for their lives, and the rules allow them to resettle in the UK. In 2021, the then Home Secretary elected to lie about this, falsely claiming that ‘70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants’. No apology has been forthcoming.

The man who was, until last night, deputy chair of the Conservative Party, says that asylum seekers ought to ‘fuck off back to France’. He pretends not to understand that the UK’s asylum laws are more generous than those in France. In the UK, more than 80% of asylum claims are successful; in France, more than 80% are rejected.

The Rwanda plan maintains the UK rules, cements the underlying calculation and boosts the business model of people traffickers: risking life by crossing the Channel still offers the best hope by far for asylum seekers to be allowed to resettle in a country where they are safe from persecution.

There is a simple way to ‘stop the boats’—or, more accurately, to stop frightened, persecuted people risking their lives. Dangerous crossings of the Channel in small boats are unnecessary, a product solely of Government cruelty: we have ferries and a tunnel. The Government could allow people to apply for asylum before they arrive. If successful, the Government could provide safe passage. Instead, the Government prefers to continue with a system under which the only way that people can claim asylum is by coming to the UK, a fact which literally requires small boat crossings and on which the entire business model of human traffickers across the Channel depends.

Moving to offshore applications wouldn’t be easy: it’s hard for someone who is fleeing persecution to fill in forms and engage with bureaucracy. It would need to be a caring, supportive, accessible, approachable, thoughtfully designed service. It would probably be expensive. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives support this approach.

It takes only a passing acquaintance with history to understand that regret most often stems from treating people unkindly and inhumanely, not the converse. This isn’t a difficult long-term call, but the state of our politics means it’s not necessarily an electorally expedient one.

The politically astute thing for the Conservative party would have been to couple offshore applications with the Rwanda scheme: let people apply before reaching the UK and be given passage straight to Rwanda if successful, or passage to the UK if extenuating circumstances apply. It would still be an appallingly inhumane derogation of international law, but it would have been far more likely actually to stop dangerous crossings.

Instead, we’re invited to believe that the Prime Minister believes that living in Rwanda is a fate worse than death.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This book is the story of social media, but rather than concentrating on the platforms themselves, it focuses on the most popular users. This struck me as a good idea: we wouldn’t, for example, try to tell the history of cinema without including the film stars who drew in audiences in the first place, so why are the star attractions often missing from the history of social media?

In Taylor’s own words,

Extremely Online offers a social history of social media.

Having read the book, it turns out that the problem is that social media stars just aren’t that interesting. Honestly, there is only so much I wanted to know about ‘Grumpy Cat’ and Lorenz vastly over-delivers. Even after Lorenz’s four-page explanation, I don’t understand the wider relevance of ‘Dramageddon’, an incident in which some YouTubers famed for make-up tutorials fell out with one another.

Lorenz’s research also often feels limited: it’s as though she buys into the hype a little too much. Grumpy Cat’s story also provides an excellent example of this flaw. Lorenz writes:

In 2016, she joined the cast of the Broadway musical Cats.

This left me wondering: how could a cat play a meaningful role in Cats? A few minutes of searching online reveals that this event was heavily promoted as such, talked up as a ‘Broadway debut’, but turned out to amount to being a ‘guest of honour’ at a single performance. That doesn’t amount to ‘joining the cast’ in any offline, reality-based view of the world, and it’s disappointing that Lorenz reported it in that way.

I enjoyed some sections and observations in Extremely Online. I hadn’t previously considered the argument that the lowering of production standards in television which necessarily accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic—chat shows filmed on Zoom from hosts’ homes, for example—helped online content with similarly low standards to become more mainstream.

I’m left with a better appreciation for the effort and professionalism of people who create social media content and the loyalty they come to command within their audience. Yet, I’d have preferred an analysis which considered the broader societal impact of this new form of celebrity rather than viewing it only on its own over-hyped terms.

Frankly, this book was not what I anticipated, and it failed to pique my interest as much as I had hoped. It might resonate with those deeply entrenched in social media culture, but I question its relevance to a wider audience.

Having recently seen Connecting Histories, This botanical art installation by Michael Rakowitz ought to have held particular resonance. Like Connecting Histories, there’s a plant-based exploration of colonialism. However, The Waiting Gardens of the North intends to reflect current, rather than historical, experiences.

By planting a ‘garden’ in which different plants are at different stages of the life cycle, Rakowitz intends to explore the strange ‘pause’ in life caused by waiting for asylum applications to be processed: a time when people are caught between the past and an uncertain future.

The central feature of the installation is a collage made of food packaging from local West Asian, South Asian and African grocery stores.

But honestly, I’m telling you most of that from reading the interpretation panels. I don’t think I’d have derived it for myself in a month of Sundays. Wendy commented that it felt like wandering around a particularly good garden department in a branch of B&Q, and I find it hard to disagree.

The nature of art means that, sometimes, the artist’s vision for an installation won’t meaningfully connect with some viewers. This was the case for me with this one. I don’t think I would ever have appreciated that Rakowitz was aiming for ‘a metaphorical space where the potential for growth, transformation, and resistance can take root.’

But that’s okay because I’m sure some viewers will love it.

The Waiting Gardens of the North continues at Baltic until 26 May.

Some weeks, I think more about local journalism. This has been one of those weeks, as I’ve been thinking quite hard with my comms colleagues at work about whether and how to include public health messages in statements relating to a minor local news story. It’s sometimes a trickier call than you’d think.

When I saw James O’Malley’s most recent Substack post was about saving local news, the topic was already on my mind. He suggests that local news might be sustainably delivered through ‘paywalled newsletters’, initially supported by the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) funds, which currently pay for local newspaper journalists.

In an instant, this would mean that many more pockets of the country once again have quality reporting in a quality publication, covering the nuts and bolts of their local democracy. And with a LDRS subsidy, it would mitigate the chicken-and-egg problem that newsletters have, of needing to sign up enough people to be viable while still paying the wages of the writers.

Over time, some newsletters might even become profitable or sustainable – like the Mill. Others may need to be subsidised for slightly longer.

But ultimately, it would stimulate an ecosystem of viable local newsletters, with the reach and distribution to serve communities with real, meaningful news – with all of the civic positive-externalities that implies: Better democracy, better accountability, and better media.

As I read this, I immediately thought this was both a brilliant and terrible idea, and I haven’t entirely managed to reconcile my thoughts on it since.

The downside is, of course, the paywall. I’m not sure that content whose accessibility is limited to a few paid subscribers really does deliver better democracy or accountability. At the very least, it’s harder to counter misinformation and disinformation that is not out in the open in the first place. I’m also not confident that it’s ethically sound to use LRDS public money to fund journalism that’s only—or at least preferentially—available to those willing to pay a subscription fee.

And yet, if a product like that existed locally, I wouldn’t hesitate to sign up, so I’m not that ethically opposed to it. Heck, I even subscribe to the apps of some local newspapers so that I can view the less ridiculous content without a deluge of advertising. And surely a sustainable future for local journalism, even if it is a little less open, is better than no local journalism at all?

It’s a quandary.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery isn’t an immediately obvious place to host an exhibition of photographs of architecture, but there is an exciting resonance here. While the rest of the building is dedicated to representations of people, this exhibition comments on how physical space impacts people’s lives.

You don’t need a medical degree, nor even a Victoria Wood sketch of a medical school interview, to know that architecture can have a lasting impact on the life changes of individuals: poor housing exacerbates health inequalities, for example. Perhaps because of my profession, it was Chris Leslie’s photographs of Glasgow which particularly caught my eye.

We all know how the city’s 1960s towerblocks of ‘urban renewal’ turned out not to be a lasting solution, with many of the blocks being demolished after as little as forty years. It’s the backstory to any number of novels I’ve read in recent years if nothing else! Yet Leslie’s work brings home the human aspect of transforming the city’s landscape in a way that other representations haven’t. There is something about documentary photography that brings home the folly of the timescale and the impact of the displacement. It also made me wonder about the appalling ecological footprint of the schemes.

Leslie’s photograph Bird Man of Red Road drew out the social exclusion of the last residents of many of the flats, asylum seekers. I didn’t know of that particular temporary afterlife of the blocks, and it adds another strand to their story.

There was much more to contemplate in the exhibition, including a dizzying large-print photograph of a San Francisco lobby by Andreas Gursky, but I know that Leslie’s work will stay with me.

Making Space continues at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery until 3 March.