A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The forty-fifth post of a series.

Wendy and I went to see Norwegian favourite Sigrid this week. She’s remarkably talented. She seemed a little taken aback by the warmth of the Geordie welcome.

We also went to see Kazuo Ishiguro’s new film, Living. It’s adapted from the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru (which I’ve never seen), which was in turn adapted from the Tolstoy novel The Death of Ivan Illych (which I’ve never read).

It’s the first film I’ve ever been to where the usher offered tissues as we left. Wendy said it was a little like having one’s heart ripped out and stomped on for a while, but that it was also a quite uplifting. I was surprised by quite how similar the film was to Ishiguro’s novels—possibly moreso than the films of his novels.

I’ve been trying over the last few months to attend training events on things that I know nothing about and which are tangential to my day job. My theory is that knowing a little bit about things that might one day cause major problems in my work is probably better than total ignorance.

To that end, I’ve recently been to a fascinating Met Office session on space weather, and this week have been to a frankly terrifying session on lithium-ion batteries and a remarkably jargon-free one on PSTN switch-off. All three are linked by inducing a similar feeling of “this is a disaster waiting to happen, and nobody has thought it through.”

Which, I suppose, shows the value of attending.

I’ve been trying to buy myself some new glasses this week, but can’t find any that fit my oversized head. This is always an issue, but I don’t think it’s ever been quite this bad before: there are whole websites and high street shops which don’t stock any frames whose legs are as far apart as my temporal bones. At this rate, I’m going to have to go 1880s-style and procure some pince-nez.