I don’t normally like to post big chunks of other people’s text without some commentary, but I really don’t know what to add to this. Sometimes, serendipity means that we come across exactly the right paragraph at exactly the moment we need to read it.

Reflecting on the outcome of the US Presidential Election, Oliver Burkeman wrote in his email newsletter:

You really, really, really don’t know when a given event is, or isn’t, for the best. You can’t know what effect present-day events will have in the long run, and it’s to ignore your status as a limited human being to imagine you ever could. As the old Taoist story has it: “We’ll see.” Remember, it’s one of the normal responses to a diagnosis of critical illness—not the only one, but a commonplace one—to conclude that in the end, it was a wonderful gift, thanks to how it led to a focus on what truly mattered. Seismic political defeats can stoke the fires of renewal or transformation, while victories can breed complacency, leading to worse catastrophe. Of course, the point isn’t that good things always emerge from seemingly bad things—you can’t be sure of that, either! It’s that this radical uncertainty is where you’ve always lived, whether you realized it or not, and the only place from which you’ve ever accomplished anything. You don’t need hope. You can move forward in the dark. You just need to do “with conviction the next and most necessary thing” – which is all you’ve ever been able to do anyway. And there’s room for enjoyment in the middle of it all, too. I come back to John Tarrant’s observation that the average medieval person lived with no understanding of when the next plague, famine or war might come along to utterly upend their lives. If they’d waited until the future looked dependably bright before gathering for festivals, or creating art, or strolling under the stars with friends, they’d have been waiting forever. So they didn’t wait. You don’t need to wait, either.

In the London Review of Books, Donald MacKenzie has a beautifully written and informative article about apps and online advertising.

The only mobile phone games I regularly play are Wordle and Connections from the New York Times (Wendy and I often tackle the latter together), so I’m a bit out of my depth with all of this stuff. I’m not sure I’ve ever played Candy Crush, which is the game MacKenzie leads his piece with:

Playing​ Candy Crush Saga on your phone involves moving brightly coloured sweets around to the sound of cheerful music. Get three or more identical sweets into a line, and they gently explode and disappear. Your score ticks up, and a cascade of further sweets refills the screen. If all goes well, you’ll soon complete a level. A warm, disembodied, male voice offers encouragement: ‘Divine!’, ‘Sweet!’

The iPhone version of Candy Crush was released in November 2012, and an Android version a month later. In December 2013, the BBC reported that train carriages in London, New York and other big cities were full of commuters ‘fixated on one thing only. Getting rows of red jelly beans or orange lozenges to disappear.’ It has always been free to install Candy Crush, and it has been downloaded more than five billion times, which suggests that hundreds of millions of people must have played it. More than two hundred million still do, according to the game’s makers, the Anglo-Swedish games studio King. Those players aren’t going to exhaust the game’s challenges any time soon: Candy Crush has more than fifteen thousand levels, and dozens more are added every week.

Candy Crush is big business. By 2023, it had earned more than $20 billion in total for King and Activision Blizzard, the games conglomerate that bought King in 2016 for $5.9 billion. Activision Blizzard has now itself been bought by Microsoft for $69 billion, a consolidation of the games sector that caused the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, enough concern that it initially tried to block it.

I was surprised to learn that only 3-5% of players typically spend money on these games. I’d understood that microtransactions were a big source of income, but not that so much of the income comes from so-called ‘whales’ who spend tens of dollars a month.

I did not know that a big portion of the income from these games comes from advertising other games within them. Companies are keen not to lose ‘whales’ to other games, which is presumably why buying things in games often comes with the side-benefit of removing ads… for other games where you might otherwise spend your money instead.

I was also surprised—and pleased—to learn that only 20% of iPhone users consent to apps tracking their behaviour, in that pop up which appears when one first installs an app. I had not understood how many job losses this had caused in the gaming industry.

The article is well-worth a few moments of your time.

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

Children who spend time in the care of their Local Authority are more likely to go to prison as adults than they are to go to university. I can’t remember where I first heard that statistic—I guess it was some time in my public health training—but it has remained firmly lodged in my brain, and it hasn’t changed recently.

This week, I learned that there are twice as many people in space as care leavers at Oxford University. I learned that from Matt Taylor, who is himself someone who was in the care system as a child, and who is now studying at Oxford University.

The utterly unnecessary barriers which restrict the choices of the most vulnerable in society still have the power to shock. It’s hard not to think that there would be fewer of them if senior leaders in these organisations were from slightly more diverse backgrounds.

About a month ago, Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic:

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. The truth is, it’s getting hard to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.

It’s a sentiment that reads differently after the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and yet, at the same time, that result makes it a much more pressing issue. Warzel uses Hurricane Milton to frame his argument, pointing out that people chose to lie in ways that put people in harm’s way, and led to the government officials who were trying to help being harrassed and attacked.

Misinformation is not a new problem, and it’s not exclusive to the USA. We all know people who credulously believe ever local bullshit rumour posted on Facebook, in the same way that we all know people who believe ever bit of tittle tattle they overhear. We also all know people who peddle that stuff, even if they probably don’t believe it themselves. The rumour mill spins quickly.

We’ve always told people not to believe this stuff. We tell our children to look for reliable sources—what are officials saying? What are journalists saying?

And yet, Warzel observes that television news was peddling lies, and the people who yesterday became the US President- and Vice President-elect also spread falsehoods. The sources we are supposed to be able to trust have proven their unreliability time and again. This is also not a US-only problem: it has been proven that being sacked for lying is no barrier to becoming Prime Minister, and broadcasting lies that put people at risk of death is not a definitive barrier to retaining a UK broadcast licence.

Here in the UK, the Conservatives have just elected a leader who says that she wants to reduce carbon emissions ‘but not in a way that would damage the economy’—as though she believes that an economy can function without a habitable planet for it to sit on.

It feels increasingly like the world is losing its shared sense of reality.

The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly.

I don’t know how democracy can function in this context—and I don’t know how I’d begin to fix it.

On this morning of all mornings, it feels like I should write something about the elections in the USA. As you might have gathered, though, I write most of these posts in advance, and so have no idea how the vote has shaken out. Depending on how tight the vote turned out to be, perhaps you have no idea what the result is yet either!

But one thing can be said with certainty: whoever takes the oath of office on 20 January, the threat to American democracy will not be resolved.

There’s a tendency in politics for narrow escapes to breed complacency.

The ‘no’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum begat a Tory complacency about referendums which led to a populace voting for Brexit against the Prime Minister’s explicit recommendation.

The resignation of Boris Johnson begat a ‘thank god that’s over’ reaction which did nothing to fix the constitutional problems his period in office exposed. It meant that when his successor was fined for breaking the law in office, eyebrows were barely raised: the standards we expect had been eroded that far, and no attempt was made to repair them.

The electoral defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden begat a complacency about candidate selection. There was much hand-wringing, but no practical action to re-energise either the Republican or Democratic races to truly find the best and the brightest. Lest we forget that the output of the Democratic process was a candidate who failed even to complete the campaign, let alone a term in office.

The resignation of Liz Truss begat a complacency about leader selection in the Conservative Party. This led to the same selection process being repeated this year, resulting in an equally absurd selection of leader. The lesson wasn’t learned.

One of my bugbears in healthcare is that ‘near misses’ are rarely taken as seriously as incidents in which harm occurred. We often miss the opportunity to fix systems before disasters strike. There’s an aphorism among some that ‘a Datix is never investigated like a death is’ (Datix is the error-reporting system in the NHS).

It feels to me like the response of our elected representatives is often based on that same principle. Every time we flirt with constitutional disaster, in the UK or the USA, the response seems to be to shrug and observe that it all worked out in the end.

But unless the underlying problems are fixed, unless the unflashy, unpopular hard miles of constitutional reform are put in, then one day, it won’t all work out in the end. Perhaps that day is today.

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

Unveiled earlier this year, this is Belfast’s statue of Winifred Carney, recognising her role in the 1916 Easter Rising and her commitment to social justice. As she was often described, she is depicted with her typewriter in one hand and her Webley pistol in the other.

The statue was unveiled on International Women’s Day along with one of abolitionist Mary-Ann McCracken. These are the first two statues of non-royal women at Belfast City Hall. In a bizarre twist, they were unveiled in the presence of actors dressed up as them, which was… a choice.

Photobombing in the background is Sir James Haslett, who was Mayor of Belfast from 1887 to 1888. He was also an MP and a chemist.

Next to the McKee clock stands this boondoggle that I’ve walked past many times over the past two decades. I’ve always wondered what it is, but never been able to locate any information about it.

It turns out that it’s a memorial drinking fountain… though the fountain itself has been missing for a very long time. It in fact predates the McKee clock by some decades.

On 29 September 1893, The Northern Whig recorded:

A memorial, of very handsome design, has been erected by the members of the Bangor Corinthians Sailing Club to the memory of the late Mrs. Arthur Hill Coates in the new Esplanade, Bangor. The memorial, which takes the shape of a water fountain of four jets, covered by a handsome dome, and standing upon a solid foundation of concrete, was erected by the firm of Messrs. McFarland & Company, of Glasgow, and bears the following inscription:—“Erected by the members of the Bangor Corinthians Sailing Club in memory of their sincere and true friend Mrs. Arthur Hill Coates, 1893.” The position occupied is the angle adjoining the Sandy Row Promenade, and it is scarcely necessary to mention that the new esplanade is considerably beautified and enhanced by the splendid structure.

The article in The Newtownards Chronicle on 7 October of the same year has fewer words, but I think is more accurate in its naming of the manufacturer as

Messrs. Macfarlane & Company

They at least agree that it is handsome.

The Royal Ulster Yacht Club has in its possession a letter to Mr Arthur Hill Coates which includes the line:

We also desire that at the same time you will convey to Mrs. Coates our warmest thanks for the great interest she has taken in the welfare and prosperity of the Club, and ask her acceptance of the accompanying diamond ring.

This happily suggests that Mrs Coates was aware of the esteem in which she was held before she died… and also rather suggests that there was a lot of money sloshing around sailing clubs in the late 1800s.

This is Bangor’s McKee Clock, unveiled in 1915. It’s known as the McKee clock as the local tax collector, James McKee, contributed £200 towards its cost.

It was not uncontroversial, particularly its location. The site which was eventually chosen formerly hosted the town’s bandstand. The Herald and County Down Independent of 17 April 1914 records some disagreement at a Council meeting about whether the bandstand should really be moved:

“The proper site for the McKee clock is on the present bandstand site … There is no need for a bandstand at all in the esplanade.”

“By no means; oh dear no. Bangor must always have a pierrot troupe and the best obtainable too, at that.”

“But a bandstand is for a BAND.”

This raises a question: what the heck is a pierrot troupe, and is it really so bad for it to be in a bandstand?

Originally, Pierrot was a stock character of a sad clown, frequently appearing in Italian pantomime or comedy from the late 17th century.

In England, the name became adopted for troupes of vaguely clownish entertainers who would put on variety shows of song and comedy. They were a popular feature of seaside towns, often performing on piers, and some troupes travelled across to Ireland to perform. The form mostly died out in England in the 1950s, though National Museums NI has photographs of a show in County Down from 1962, so perhaps they lasted a little longer there. Performing in bandstands doesn’t seem to have been uncommon.

Anyway, the bandstand was moved to make way for the clock: it now stands in Bangor Castle’s Walled Garden. Ironically, the local newspapers feature many advertisements for band concerts at the McKee Clock thereafter, suggesting that—perhaps—the bandstand was better located before it moved.

But the clock was well received too.

Did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Or did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

There is an obvious third option:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’ – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Is the ‘garbage’ the demonisation of Latinos by his support act; his supporters as a group; or the demonisation of Latinos by his supporters as a group?

The context may be offensive and absurd, but there’s something comfortingly twee, normal, and reassuring about a dispute over an apostrophe amid an election of extreme rhetoric.

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

It might be All Saints’ Day today, but I’m afraid I’m picking on just one of their number: St Columbanus, who walked this Earth back in the 500s AD.

He seems to have been a bit of a character: it is said that squirrels used to run down from trees and into the folds of his cowl to be close to him. I think this is supposed to be charming, but it frankly sounds like a massive hassle: he clearly had a lot to contend with.

His life is commemorated through a trail of seven bells in Bangor: the squirrels might have left him alone in death, but the Northern Irish are still keen to knock seven bells out of him. Poor guy.

And, as a rubbish blogger, I’ve only managed to take pictures of six of them. The first one of the trail is a giant bell, and I didn’t notice it, because I was too preoccupied with this: the oldest wall in Bangor:

The commemorative plaque omits to tell us when it was built, beyond a vague ‘13th century’, but it does let us know that the Council did some work on the wall in 2008.

Anyway, this means I can’t show you the first stop on our ‘interpretive art trail’ (not my words). So you’ll just have to imagine a giant bell with a wavy surface, commemorating Columbanus’s childhood journey across Lough Erne to the Island of Cleenish for his early education.

After leaving Cleenish, Columbanus went to Bangor Abbey… a time which is weirdly not commemorated on this Bangor trail. Instead, the second stop on our journey records him leaving Bangor to travel to Brittany.

While in Brittany, Columbanus worked to ‘root out the lusts of the flesh’. I imagine that being covered with squirrels might have helped with that.

He also founded a school in a former Roman fortress in the mountains. It became so oversubscribed that it eventually needed new premises, which he founded at Luxeuil:

While there, he met Gallus—another monk who had been taught at Bangor Abbey—who began to follow him. He originally came from somewhere on the French/German border, which will become important later.

The bells then seem to skip the bit of Columbanus’s life where he hid in a cave for a few years in search of solitude. They also have nothing to say about his spat with some bishops over the date of Easter: he wrote to Pope Gregory I and Pope Boniface IV on the point. Gregory ghosted him, and he folded before Boniface could reply.

I think this is a fascinating bit of his story, with much to say about the interaction between the divine and the human in the making of Christian festivals, and I’d definitely have dedicated a bell to it, but I’ve never been asked to make even one interpretative artistic bell in my entire life (to date).

Anyway, we skip ahead to Columbanus being thrown off a ship following a storm. The captain judged that the storm was god’s punishment for transporting Columbanus. Columbanus ended up at Bregenz in Austria, where he built an oratory:

And this is where Gallus’s heritage becomes important: as he could speak the local language, he played a big role in helping Columbanus convert the locals to Christianity.

And—local connection alert—Bregenz was twinned with Bangor in 1987 ‘in celebration of this important historical connection’ (not my words).

Since 2001, Bangor has also become a ‘sister city’ of Virginia Beach in the United States, though I regret to report a lack of connection to Columbanus. This relationship exists ‘because of the similar port area, military affiliation, and oceanfront tourist attraction’.

Back to Columbanus, whose time at Bregenz wasn’t going so well: a war had resulted in the area being subsumed into Burgundy, and a few of Columbanus’s students had been murdered. So, like any man of God, Columbanus prayed hard for a peaceful resolution and stayed to help defend his adopted community ran off to Italy.

Gallus, however, stayed behind, in hiding in a little cell. Eventually, long after his death, an abbey was built in his honour. Little-by-little, the Swiss city of St Gallen grew up around it, and, in 1983, the abbey area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Oh, and there’s also this:

Meanwhile, Columbanus was living it up in Milan, where he was welcomed by the King and Queen of Lombardy. He once again set about converting the locals:

The Bangor Antiphonary, a historically important 36-leaf book of hymns and prayers put together in Bangor Abbey about a century after Columbanus’s death is somewhat inexplicably in Milan, though no-one seems particularly vexed by that. I suppose to many in Northern Ireland, it’s better than it being in one of the London museums, where it would probably have ended up had it not been taken abroad. Maybe they’d have loaned it back to the locals occasionally, like the Lindisfane Gospel.

The King of Lombardy gave Columbanus a tract of land at Bobbio, near Milan, to build a monastery—where, ultimately, Columbanus died and was buried:

Twenty years after Columbanus’s death, Jonas of Bobbio wrote a biography of him—the first known biography of an Irish person. And in 2002, because of his history of travelling through Europe, the Vatican declared St Columbanus to be the patron saint of motorcyclists… which honestly feels like a stretch.

But as for the bells—well, I think that we have to count them as a success. I’d never heard of the bloke before I saw them, and now know I’ve written (and you’ve read) a 1,000-word treatise about him.

And that’s the power of interpretative art trails… maybe.