I enjoyed this extract from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals, and this imagery in particular:

A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.

The point Burkeman is making is about knuckling down and actually doing the things one wants to do in life, but I liked this imagery more for its root in stoicism. Life is unpredictable, and the best laid scheme gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns had it.

But I think there is something in Burkeman’s recognition that there can be ‘wisdom’ and ‘grace’ in the response. I usually associate those qualities with well-laid plans which come off, but Burkeman helped me to remember that it’s demonstrating them in the face of unexpected challenge which is both the most difficult and the most worthy outcome.

And it’s also a reminder that when we look at others and perceive them to be in their own superyachts gliding towards some goal, we are mistaken: in the end, we’re all in kayaks, and we’re all at the mercy of fortune and the unknown.

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

I have an on-off relationship with physical notebooks. Only last year, I mentioned that I transitioned to using OneNote; yet today, I’m back to using a combination of OneNote and a paper notebook from Papier.

I therefore very much enjoyed this book excerpt by Roland Allen in The Walrus about the history of Moleskine—the notebook manufacturer to whose paper diaries Wendy is especially loyal.

The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level.

My Papier notebook, I note, does not exhibit all of those features, and would be better if it did. I particularly liked the article’s take on the little leaflet that’s tucked inside Moleskine notebooks:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities—usefulness and emotion—to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

It’s one of those articles which is packed with insights and titbits I’ve never thought to wonder about, and I’d highly recommend giving it a few minutes of your time.

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

It’s hard to know what to write about this 2022 novel. It is a reflection on a female writer’s lifelong relationship with her mother, who has recently died. The writer shares some characteristics with McCracken, and there is a lot of reflection in the text about the boundary between a novel and memoir.

This is one of those books where the standout quality is not the plot, nor even the memorable characterisations, but the writing itself: it is lyrical, evocative, funny, and clever. It is a complete pleasure to read, and I found sections of it to be deeply moving.

I have a strong suspicion that this is a book that would divide opinion: some will be turned off by the meta discussion of what it is and isn’t, the ambiguity about fact and fiction. But I found it beguiling, and perhaps you will too.

Here are a few of the many passages I noted down:

The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.

Everyone knows that it’s noble to go to museums unaccompanied. Look at us solitary exhibition gawkers: We pause to read the captions, we wander the rooms at a thoughtful speed, we think things, and therefore we’re allowed to drink early and often.

“You never told me that your mother was a cripple,” a seventh-grade friend once said to me, and I said, shocked, “You never told me that your mother was fat.” I didn’t mean it unkindly. I had a fat father. The shock was partly the nineteenth-century awfulness of the word but also that she thought my mother’s physical self was something I should have mentioned. The point was that neither of us had described our mother’s body to the other. What twelve-year-old girl would? How would we have even brought it up?

I didn’t believe in hell or an afterworld of any sort. What netherworld could be more nether than this one?

I won’t point out the obvious—that my mother never said she loved me—because it’s academic. My mother loved me. It’s not a question. I knew it and she knew it. Her inability to say so felt no different from her inability, her refusal, to speak French.

When you’re old, safety is overrated. Safety is the bossy Irish lady, who is, after all, your employee, taking away your wineglass, saying, “That’s enough, that’s enough now, that’s enough now, darlin’.” Safety puts you in a nursing home and turns you over regularly so that you do not die in your sleep. You could be kept for years if you weren’t careful, like a roped-off chair in a museum that nobody is allowed to sit in, which makes it only something shaped like a chair. Watch out for safety. It will make you no longer yourself, only an object shaped that way.

There was plenty my mother didn’t tell me about being disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa. Her memory for unhappiness and misery was terrible. Maybe she willed this into being and maybe it was neurological, but somehow I have inherited this tendency—of all my inheritances, it is my favorite, the most useful, though I do remember some grudges. She was (have I mentioned this? my mother herself would joke) stubborn. It served her well. She hid a lot of hard work and heartbreak. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t say no or you can’t or don’t or we can’t, all the time. I don’t know what doctors advised her about having children. At some point she decided she wouldn’t be deterred from a single thing she wanted to do, and she did it with good cheer. Not the good cheer of the storybook cripple (as my seventh-grade friend had called her), looking on the bright side, a bird in a cage. My mother’s good cheer was an engine that would burn you if you tried to touch it, hoping to switch it off. Her body was her body. It wasn’t something to overcome or accept any more than yours was.

I remember she was once presented with a piece of toast spread with Marmite, and she ate it all, and when asked how she liked it, she said, “I’m not eager to repeat the experience.”

Wife, daughter, mother, friend, some people write in their social-media biographies. Why on earth? Applying any words to who I am feels like a straight pin aimed at my insect self. I won’t have it. I can’t do it.

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.

I recently began reading The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, first published in 1954. Early on, Jenkins describes a character’s dark eyes, and where I would use the word ‘irises’, Jenkins used the word ‘irids’:

Her skin had the warm whiteness of marble in sunlight, her eyes were so dark the irids were indistinguishable from the pupils; the whites were a pale blue.

Why have I never seen or heard the word ‘irids’ before? Where did it come from? Why don’t we use it anymore?

To the OED!

As it turns out, the distinction between the words is not massively clear: as you’d guess, they share an etymology.

Certainly, ‘iris’ is more common than ‘irid’ these days, though some people prefer ‘irides’—with that extra ‘e’—as a plural form rather than ‘irises’. Indeed, ‘irides’ is listed in the 1900 OED as the preferred plural. There are two iris-related adjectives listed in the OED, both of which prefer a ‘d’ over an ‘s’: ‘iridal’ and ‘iridic’.

Comparing the frequency of usage of ‘irid’ and ‘iris’ is complicated by the fact that ‘irid’ is specific to the structure in the eye and the genus of plants, whereas ‘iris’ can also refer to the Greek goddess, a shape of crystal, and an asteroid—among other things.

One of the other things that can be described as an ‘iris’ is a rainbow. You might think you’ve never heard of this usage, but you probably have—just with a ‘d’ form of the word. The much more common word ‘iridescent’ is used to describe items that show many different colours when seen from different angles. ‘Iridescent’ is an adjective related to ‘iris’ in its ‘rainbow’ sense.

The preference for ‘iris’ as the anatomical term seems to have followed the standardisation of terms as medical publishing became a thing: Gray’s Anatomy has consistently used ‘iris’ since its first publication in 1858, and most textbooks—and latterly medical journals—followed suit. As medical science advanced rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a strong push towards the standardisation of medical terms to ensure clear communication between medical professionals: see also the virtually total replacement of ‘apoplexy’ with ‘stroke’, of ‘consumption’ with ‘tuberculosis’, and of ‘dropsy’ to ‘oedema’.

Curiously, though, ‘irid’ was already pretty uncommon by the time Jenkins’s novel was published: its frequency of usage was similar to today’s. It was, however, much closer to its peak fifty years earlier, when Jenkins would have been growing up—so perhaps it was lodged in her lexis.

Perhaps in a similar way, I sometimes get teased for using certain words in medical notes: ‘don’ and ‘summarily’ are two examples. Both are words whose usage has collapsed since the decade when I was born, but which seem like perfectly ordinary, everyday words to me. As it happens, both were also less common in the 1950s than in the 1980s: the popularity of words can rise as well as fall.

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

In the FT Weekend, Tim Harford recently played with the latest version of ChatGPT and concluded that:

large language models can be phenomenal bullshit engines. The difficulty here is that the bullshit is so terribly plausible. We have seen falsehoods before, and errors, and goodness knows we have seen fluent bluffers. But this? This is something new.

It made me reflect on the types of, erm, lexical nonsense I come across in my day-to-day life.

The kind I find most irritating by far is deliberately obfuscatory language. I recently received an email referring to a ‘pathogen agnostic enabling technology’ and wondered why on Earth someone would write that: I didn’t understand what it meant, I’m fairly certain that most other readers didn’t either, and I’ve a strong suspicion that the author would also be unable to concisely define it. They were hiding their lack of understanding—or perhaps their inability to describe something clearly and concisely—behind a jargon phrase.

Yet, from a reader’s perspective, the advantage of this sort of word salad is that it’s clearly visible: it telegraphs a lack of understanding up front.

Perhaps I really ought to be more exercised about plausible rubbish: the sort of stuff whose clarity of expression lulls one into a false sense of assurance, from which the logical leaps are harder to spot. That seems far more insidious.

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

It’s not an original observation, but I’m of the strong opinion that the role of the doctor and the role of the priest are more closely related than many people realise. I think I’d have made a great priest, though I’m probably better paid as a doctor, and my atheism might have proven a barrier to the alternative.

This is perhaps even more true in public health than other specialties: I often ask people to do things which are to their own detriment—staying of work or isolating themselves—for the benefit of the greater good. The parallels with priesthood are inviolable.

When either role is done well, a large part—perhaps the majority—is listening. The act of simply listening while someone unburdens themselves provides a therapeutic benefit in itself—perhaps most of the benefit in many cases.

But, as Richard Smith reflects, this isn’t easy.

We interrupt because we mistakenly think people want answers, solutions. I’ve been making this mistake most days for 50 years.

Keeping quiet disguises the lack of solutions—but even with that impure motivation, allowing people to express themselves by keeping quiet provides a lot of therapeutic benefit.

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

At work, I was recently briefed on the potential public health effects in the UK of volcano eruptions, one of many threats on the national risk register. I learned the word ‘tephra’, which refers to the fragments of volcanic material that are ejected during an eruption. This includes the ash which caused such a nuisance when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010.

There was a linguistic element to the presentation that caught my eye: some slides referred to ‘volcanos’ and others to ‘volcanoes’. Which is the preferred term?

Quick: to the Oxford English Dictionary!

Linguistically, Mount Etna was the first volcano. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire, and the Romans considered Mount Etna his forge. Italian thus inherited the word ‘vulcano’, which English initially used interchangeably with the anglicised form ‘volcano’. From the 1600s, ‘volcano’ became the standard option. In terms of pluralising, the general approach was to add ‘es’, as with many other nouns ending in ‘o’ inherited from Italian (‘echo’, ‘motto’, and ‘buffalo’, for example).

It was that pesky Samuel Johnson who stole the ‘e’, omitting it from his mid-1700s dictionary. Noah Webster also omitted it when simplifying English for Americans, so ‘volcanos’ has been widely adopted in the USA. As someone born and raised east of the Atlantic, I’m duty-bound to prefer the spelling ‘volcanoes’—and the OED feels the same. The Google Ngram viewer suggests that everyone else does, too, regardless of what Johnson and Webster thought:

Now that I’ve learned that ‘volcanos’ was most popular in the late 1700s, I reserve the right to refer to anyone using that spelling with contemporary language: those who drop the ‘e’ are simply coxcombs and popinjays.

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

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, today is the summer solstice.

I’ve read a lot over the last year about the mental health benefits of rituals—and how, for atheists like me, celebrating the passing of the year through equinoxes and solstices brings psychological benefits. For years now, I’ve marked the vernal equinox by balancing an egg on end. I dare say you’re sick of reading about it.

But I haven’t a ritual to mark the summer solstice, and I thought that, perhaps, I ought to institute one. Given the astronomical event the solstice marks, I initially imagined that I could simply make a habit of watching the sun rise and set. I knocked that idea on the head when I realised quite how early the sun rises at this time of year: I’m not making a pre-5am start an annual event.

Reading about solstice traditions revealed a whole load of water-based activities, including swimming on the day of the solstice, visiting the coast, or visiting a waterfall. I already swim regularly—indeed, I’m publishing this as I’m getting ready to head to the pool—so that doesn’t seem like a special activity. Making a habit of visiting a waterfall or the coast feels like making myself a hostage to fortune: it’s just not always going to be possible.

Many people mark the solstice by leaping over bonfires, but this seems a surefire way to end up in A&E. I’m not a man built for leaping.

And so: I have no good answer. I’ll just have to keep mulling it over for next year.

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

On The Imperfectionist last week, Oliver Burkeman wrote:

If there’s one error of thought that most reliably holds me back from living an absorbing and meaningfully productive life, it’s the idea that certain things really matter, when the truth is that they don’t matter at all. Or at least nowhere near as much as I seem to believe.

This feels a bit thematically connected to my post yesterday about buying a ‘good enough’ fridge-freezer, but Burkeman’s post made me reflect more on understanding what matters in a professional context.

In my professional role, as is the case for most professionals, I’m asked to make hundreds of decisions per day. Most of them, however they may seem to the person who is asking, are pretty insignificant: whatever decision is made will have little impact on the public’s health.

A few years ago, I got into the habit of occasionally saying that ‘I didn’t care’ which option was chosen, often explaining that I didn’t think it would particularly influence the ultimate outcome. A typical example that comes to mind was whether a letter, whose content had been agreed upon by a group, should have my signature or someone else’s appended to the bottom.

One day, a kind colleague gently corrected me, saying that I did care, I just didn’t mind.

It was one of those useful small correctives that revealed to me the potential impact of the casual language I had habitually employed. It forced me to reflect and change my language.

The situation also made me reflect on the skill, wisdom, and kindness of the colleague who gave me that nudge. I hope that I one day have enough of the same qualities to help others.

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