First published in 1954, this is a story of the end of a marriage. Evelyn, a distinguished barrister, has a beautiful wife 15 years his junior called Imogen. She is submissive and passive to the point that she almost has no character of her own, and becomes more so the longer the novel goes on.

Their plain neighbour, Blanche, is two years older than Evelyn. She’s presented as unremarkable in every respect, but becomes an object of fascination for Evelyn, and also an 11-year-old boy, in a weird narrative choice. The fascination is attributable to the fact that she actually has a character of her own, some opinions, and can converse reasonably.

Evelyn and Blanche start an affair; it takes forever for Imogen to realise what’s going on, and she just sort of subserviently leaves.

I did not enjoy this. The characters are all thoroughly unlikable, and are living in unthinkable social straitjackets. Almost everything they did or said made me want to fling the book across the room—though I didn’t because it was a rather lovely original from the London Library.

But mostly, this book is slow. It’s not slow in the sense of contemplative and reflective, it’s just stuffed with loquacious description and scene-setting.

This was absolutely not for me.

I recently visited MIMA for the first time: I came perilously close to visiting more than a decade ago but didn’t quite make it through the door.

The exhibition I popped in to see was ‘Working Lives’, which brings together works from the Middlesbrough Collection with newer pieces by contemporary artists in the Cleveland Art Society.

The curation didn’t do much for me—it seemed a bit random—but I think that’s probably because this was a pretty speedy visit without time to consider and reflect the choices that the curator, Alan Morley, had made. I perhaps didn’t give him a chance.

But two works did catch my eye.

At the top of this post is Sandhaven , a 1983 work by Ken Cozens, the late and much-celebrated local artist who contributed much to the local art scene by working for the local museum service, including as Fine Arts Officer at Middlesbrough Art Gallery. My photo is rubbish, but I was absorbed by the drama of the image, and also liked the colour scheme.

Below is the 2020 work Fractured Land 5 by Derek English, a much-loved local artist and art teacher. I liked the abstraction in this one, and found the lines and shapes intriguing.

The two paintings were exhibited beside one another, and I reflected that, if I’d had to guess, I’d have dated them the other way around—though I can’t really explain why!

Working Lives continues at MIMA until 29 September.

You know how on QVC, there’s never a gadget that performs only one function? Everything has to be multi-purpose, even if some of those purposes are a little bit questionable? William Bell (1844-1919) was once Chief Architect of the North Eastern railway, and I reckon he’d have loved QVC.

By Middlesbrough Dock, there was a need for a simple accumulator tower: a big tower containing water to provide hydraulic pressure to operate things like lock gates. William Bell’s team were on it in 1903. They decided not only to make an accumulator tower, but also to whack a clock tower on top. Why not?

Well, because the local ironworks didn’t want workers clock-watching, that’s why not. But Bell’s team weren’t to be defeated: they simply installed three clock faces, and left the fourth face—in the direction of the ironworks—blank.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way…

In celebration of its bicentennial, the National Gallery has deigned to send some of its works out of London and out to visit the nation that owns them. Newcastle has been ‘loaned’ The Fighting Temeraire, Turner’s 1893 masterpiece which Radio 4 listeners once voted ‘the greatest painting in Britain’. If I’m totally honest, I’m so ignorant about art that I’d probably not have recognised it.

I wrote recently about the grief of aging, and it was that feeling that came to mind as I contemplated this painting: the outmoded sailing ship being pulled along to its final destruction by new-fangled Tyneside-built tug boats. The exhibition, though, made me note the brightness of the sunset, which perhaps represents hope for the future. The grief of aging is often paired with the joy of a new generation taking over.

This being the Laing, they haven’t just stuck The Fighting Termeraire on the wall and left it at that: they’ve built an ambitious and absorbing exhibition around it, featuring dozens of Turner paintings alongside other works. They even—and here’s a bit of lateral thinking—have displayed a piece of wood from the actual Temeraire.

I particularly liked how the exhibition unpicked Turner’s technique, featuring colour studies and sketches that would go on to inform his future work. I’ve never really thought about the artistic process of watercolour painting before, nor really of the way an artist would want to plan out both the colours and the objects in this way.

There was some interesting discussion on Turner’s view on the ethics of the sea battles he painted: was he a patriotic supporter, or more interested in the abhorrent loss of life? I find it difficult to look at his paintings and see anything but the latter—they all feel tinged by sad reflections on humanity. But for this to be a point of academic disagreement, there must be another way of seeing them, and I must just be projecting my views.

The exhibition also made the point that steamships are now as old-fashioned as sailing ships were in Turner’s time. That made me think about whether there is any art being made now, chronicling the ‘industrial revolution’ we are going through in terms of artificial intelligence putting people out of work. Are the Turners of today making brilliant works about that revolution which will be revered in centuries to come? We can only hope.

Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia continues at The Laing until 7 September.

I recently came across this 2013 article by Adee Braun in The Atlantic, which takes a historical perspective on the perceived medical benefits of time spent at the seaside. From a British perspective, there wasn’t much here that was particularly new: I’m sure we all learned in school history lessons about the Victorian obsession with the seaside.

The seaside resort was where the serious healing took place. The sea air along with the ocean views and warm weather were considered critical to a patient’s recovery, especially when treating tuberculosis.

Something about the presentation of the article, though, made me reflect on how restoring a walk at the seaside is for me—and how, in its own way, that’s a modern perspective on the health-giving benefits of the seaside.

Wendy and I love a walk along the coast or the beach, and we are therefore particularly lucky to live in the North East, where many miles of spectacular coastline are close by. If we’re feeling down or not quite ourselves, a bracing walk by the sea always helps. This is undoubtedly partly due to the physical exertion, but I think it’s also to do with the perspective that the coastline brings: the vast scope and the view out to an impossibly distant horizon serve as a reminder about how small we and our problems are in reality.

We have many friends and colleagues who dip into the North Sea year-round, as Braun describes people doing for hundreds of years. Braun says that a dunk in the freezing sea can resemble ‘waterboarding far more than a spa treatment,’ with ‘the twin effects of cold and suffocation causing terror and panic.’

That’s not for me, but I continue to enjoy a long stroll along the coast.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3. I not sure what’s going on with the doctor’s teeth, and can confirm that I’ve never worn a stethoscope at the beach.

In the North East, we seem to like saving odd bits of old buildings: consider the Doxford Arch, for example, or the sign from the Crown Works site. In that spirit, allow me to present to you the last remaining wall of the Cleveland Salt Works:

But how did we end up with a salt works in Middlesbrough—hardly the most typical location?

In 1859, the Bolckow, Vaughan & Co Ironworks got fed up of dirty water from the Tees blocking up their boilers. They decided that a better solution would be to drill a borehole and extract clean water from underground. After a few years of boring, they unexpectedly discovered a huge bed of rock salt some 1200ft underground.

Rock salt, as it happens, is useful in all sorts of chemical processes being undertaken on nearby sites, so by 1887, the Cleveland Salt Company was founded to extract it, pumping water into wells and then using the heat of the ironworks to evaporate out the salt. Over the following six decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of salt were extracted through four different wells.

In fact, the salt mine ended up outlasting the ironworks: the ironworks collapsed in 1929, but the salt kept flowing until after the Second World War, with the works having been converted to run off their own coal supply rather than the waste heat of the ironworks.

Sometimes, I suppose one’s side-hustle outlasts one’s primary employment.

Published in 1967, McPhee’s book on oranges was recently recommended in The Economist as a particularly good bit of non-fiction writing. In its first form, it was a much shorter article in The New Yorker, but the author felt that he had too much fascinating material to keep to a single article, and so the book grew out of it.

Oranges is an esoteric and lightly humorous history of the relationship between humans and oranges. It focuses in particular on the development of orange juice made from pasteurised concentrate, which was a huge shift the industry was undergoing at the time the book was published.

I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about oranges before I read this book. They are berries. They are not ‘true from seed’, so if you plant the seeds from an orange, you might get a tree that bears lemons or limes or grapefruit or any other citrus: most Florida oranges are grown via grafts onto lemon trees. There’s a whole weird history about women and oranges, with a remarkably persistent belief that if a woman touched an orange tree, it would die.

This is a book that is strange and charming, clearly crafted with love by someone who just wanted to share information that he found fascinating. The enthusiasm shines through on every page. And, more than that, it’s easy to see how the modern work of non-fiction authors like Jon Ronson and Will Storr flows directly from the innovative style McPhee adopted in his early work.

If I could summarise in only one word, then I’d describe this book as ‘delightful’.

Yesterday, I wrote about a quirky construction in Middlehaven: the only one of an intended set of five which was actually constructed. I visited it back in 2012, and had returned twelve years on to see how it was doing.

All of the above also apply to today’s post, which is about Anish Kapoor’s Temenos.

Twelve years ago, I called this massive artwork ‘soulless and bland’—which is very much how it felt on this visit, too. The demolition of the crane which previously stood behind it at least gives Temenos room to breathe, but it doesn’t really say much to me.

It was intended to be the first of five ‘Tees Valley Giants’, humongous sculptures spread between Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Hartlepool, Redcar and Darlington. None of the others have been built, and it doesn’t feel like Temenos has become a local landmark in the way that was perhaps anticipated.

I wrote yesterday about the benefit of whimsy in life, and I think I actually prefer this much cheaper artwork nearby: a giant stick of rock.

In 2012, I went for a look at Middlesbrough’s newly constructed Community in a Cube (CIAC), a bizarre residential building with startling architecture, including some houses perched on the roof. Seven years later, I went back to see how it had settled in. After 21 years of blogging, there are no new ideas left. So, five years after my last visit, I’ve been back again.

CIAC is in Middlehaven, the bit of Middlesbrough which surrounds the dock. The area had an ambitious masterplan by Will Alsop. In the initial phase, CIAC was intended to be one of five cuboidal residential blocks, each to be designed by a different architectural firm and employing ‘statement’ architecture. They were commonly referred to as the ‘sugar cubes’. Eventually, more cubes would be built, expanding the quirky residential provision. Here’s an idea of what it was supposed to look like, eventually:

When CIAC was constructed, as part of Middlehaven’s commitment to sustainability, it was built with a sustainable biomass boiler system to provide heating and hot water to the initial five residential blocks. But you can guess where this is going.

Only CIAC was built, and for a long while—including when I first visited—it felt a bit isolated and alien. Partly through familiarity, and partly through the limited development of Middlehaven, it feels more like it belongs these days.

When I visited five years ago, I commented on the issues that had arisen due to the flammable cladding that had been used in the building. This has led to the most visible change to the building’s appearance: the aspect shown at the top, with the geometric inset windows, has lost its cladding. I’m not sure whether there’s an intention to replace it, but I actually prefer the current appearance: the geometric shapes being formed through industrial steel feel a bit more in keeping with the area than the previous wooden effect.

Originally, the block was surrounded by naked streets: these have long since closed, replaced with traditional roads and footpaths. Some sections, like the one above, are now so overgrown that it’s quite difficult to pick out where the grass verge ends and the former street begins.

The traditional roads are perhaps not quite as well-connected with public transport as they might be. The juxtaposition of ‘no public services’ and ‘let’s journey together’ made me chuckle.

Back in 2012, I noted the unique appearance of the development’s marketing suite. One might have thought that this would be a temporary structure, but it is still going strong twelve years on, now occupied by a firm of commercial property consultants.

No-one has quite got around to updating the signage promoting the marketing suite, but the greenery is doing a good job of absorbing it.

In 2012, I said that CIAC wasn’t quite to my taste, but I’ve rather warmed to it over time. A bit of quirkiness goes a long way.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that there’s simply not enough out-and-out whimsy in life. The Middlehaven masterplan was stuffed full of whimsy, and it’s a shame that more of it didn’t come off.

There was much talk at the time of its initial unveiling—and even a bit of ribbing in The Guardian about the ‘Kerplunk hotel’—a proposed hotel which bore more than a passing resemblance to the children’s game.

I recently discovered that the scale model of the masterplan is on display in MIMA, and let me tell you, sugar-cube residential blocks and a Kerplunk hotel have nothing on my favourite proposed but unrealised project in Middlehaven.

Friends: the toaster on the right of this photograph of the masterplan, just across from Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium, was to be a theatre. Yes, we live in a world where a toaster-shaped theatre was proposed but never built. As Liz Truss might say: That. Is. A. Disgrace.

In the final seconds of BBC One’s Weekend News bulletin yesterday, Reeta Chakrabarti squeezed in an extra story in just 25 words:

Just before we go, President Biden has just tweeted that he intends to address the nation later this week, saying that it has been a great privilege to serve. We’ll bring you more at ten.

We know now, of course, that in the judgement of mere seconds, the team had perhaps overlooked the more significant message of Biden’s message: his decision to withdraw from his re-election campaign.

It’s not hard to see why: Biden’s statement refers only to standing down, without complete clarity on what from. It’s a letter that’s hard to parse on a scan-read, with the eyes of a nation watching.

Wendy and I switched over to the news channels, and after minutes of slightly desperate filling, the airwaves were thick with discussion of the political consequences of the decision, with hot takes and commentary on who might replace him and what it may mean for an election that’s still months away.

Nobody seemed keen to take a step back. It’s not hard to imagine the sense of profound grief Biden must feel at this moment. This is surely a moment that marks a painful shift in the way Biden sees himself: judged irreversibly incapable by dint of age of doing something he’s done before.

As Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic last night:

Coming to terms with mortality is never easy. We rage against the dying of the light. Many elderly people face the painful moment of letting go, of losing independence and human agency, when they are told by family they have to give up the keys to the car; Biden was told by his party to give up the keys to the presidency.

It must cut deep; I hope he’s okay.

It’s funny, really, how little attention the news pays to the universal aspects of stories like this. How the immediate reaction focuses on predicting what might happen next, rather than on sitting with what’s just happened. How it refuses to dwell on the humanity, those moments of insufficiency most of us have faced and will continue to face in life.

The news runs away from the lessons of others’ experience, the things we might take and apply in our own lives. And that seems like a shame.