This collaborative exhibition by Neil Wilkin and Rachael Woodman, previously exhibited in Wales as ‘Cynhaeaf: Casglu Ffrwythau” was brilliant. I’ve never seen anything quite like these glass sculptures before, and their abstract, colourful nature is right up my street.

While each piece isn’t individually attributed, Wilkin’s usual thing is displaying organic forms through glasswork (the ‘fruits’) where Woodman’s is the collections of tubes (the ‘gatherings’). I was more aesthetically taken with the latter, though the former did strike me as being an especially challenging ‘one shot to get this right’ sort of art-form.

‘Harvest: Fruit Gathering’ continues at the National Glass Centre until 12 March.

I recently had occasion to travel from Newcastle to Amsterdam. This is a journey I’ve taken a few times in the past, sometimes by DFDS ferry and sometimes flying with KLM.

This time, I decided to take the train.

My options were limited.

I couldn’t travel with DFDS as my trip fell during one of their ship’s maintenance periods, meaning that departures were occurring only ever other day.

I could have taken a direct flight with KLM. This would have departed at 0925 and arrived at 1125. The snag was that the economy fare was quoting at £391, which I baulked at.

I could have taken an indirect flight with BA. This would have departed at 0940 and arrived at 1925, with a six-hour layover at Heathrow. I’m not averse to a long layover when the price is right, but at £334 in economy, it wasn’t.

I could have taken a train down to King’s Cross with Lumo (£50) and a Eurostar from St Pancras (£172), which at £222 is a pretty hefty saving over the aerial options.

And the latter is almost what I did, except I decided to take a seat in LNER first class to King’s Cross (£100), break my journey in London for a few hours, and book myself into Eurostar standard premier (£229). At £329, the upgraded train journey still undercut economy flights, and it would be much less environmentally damaging.

Geoff Dyer once wrote:

The best thing to be said about travelling by train is that it’s better than being on a coach.

In the years when I did it more often, the best thing about taking a first class morning seat from Newcastle to King’s Cross was the breakfast: the trolley of fresh pastries, the yoghurts, and most of all the delicious porridge with honey. Porridge is something I eat almost exclusively on trains.

These days, it seems the service has paled a little. There were no pastries on my train. Yoghurt was offered only as an alternative to a hot option. And the porridge was served not with honey, but with maple syrup. What has the world come to?

On the upside, the green tea wasn’t bad, which is high praise indeed, for most green tea served on modes of transport is borderline undrinkable (though substantially better than the typically stewed black tea or coffee). On BA, green tea always involves an extensive rummage in the galley, as though there might be a tea bag somewhere in the back of a tray, possibly first loaded in 1994.

When I made this journey with Lumo a few weeks ago, I noted that they were strict with seat reservations, and I attributed this to their “LumoEats” service. However, for the first time in all the years I’ve been travelling on LNER and its predecessors, the staff on this service were also militant about reservations, even in first class. When tickets were checked, passengers sitting in seats apart from those they had reserved were politely asked to move.

I approve, even though this did screw up the food orders for those who had placed them before the ticket check took place. They won’t make that mistake again, one hopes.

The age of Zoom means that the First Class quiet carriage is more missed than ever.

Along with many more important things in Britain, Brexit has ruined the Eurostar station experience—at least at St Pancras. The combined security screen and passport checks used to be so quick as to be negligible. With passport stamping and suchlike now required, it took the better part of 35 minutes to get from the station concourse to Eurostar departures.

I suppose receiving a ‘Londres’ stamp from French border agents is novel, at least.

The Eurostar train staff make all their PA announcement in three languages. I know this is common all over the world, but on British soil it makes my personal inadequacy in speaking only English feel even more acute.

This was my first journey on one of Eurostar’s newish e320 trains, having always been on e300 trains before. I couldn’t really tell you the difference.

The seats were comfy enough, the stewards kept plying me with free alcohol, there was a socket to charge devices, and we sped along through the UK, France, Brussels, and The Netherlands at nearly 200mph. Even the free wifi was alright. All Eurostar trains are a little wider than standard British trains, so they immediately feel comparatively spacious.

As with all Eurostar journeys, the best bit was arriving in the centre of Amsterdam, a stone’s throw from my hotel, and moseying out of the station: no need to worry about passport checks, baggage reclaim, taxis or transfers.

Bliss.

So, having travelled to Amsterdam by train, plane, and ship, a good blogger would plump for one of the three and say they’ll always travel that way from now on. But not me.

I’d have no hesitation in hopping on the train again when circumstances allow, but that isn’t going to work for a day trip.

The ferry is nice for travelling while asleep and saving on a night’s accommodation, but there’s only one sailing per day, so the timing has to work out, and the carbon footprint isn’t exactly exemplary.

And the plane’s fastest, but it’s also often expensive, and comes with a dose of flygskam.

So… it’s horses for courses, innit.

I’m not sure what could possibly have reminded me of it, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed re-listening to this classic album.

This 2022 book by the noted palliative care physician from Kerala in India was highly praised by my Goodreads friend Richard Smith, and sounded like a book which would be up my street. I found it somewhat hard to get hold of a copy, but eventually tracked on down online.

I very much hope that this book becomes more widely available because Rajagopal gives some clear and important messages. His writing considers the limits of medicine, its potential to do net harm by focusing more on diseases than patients, and the fundamental importance of holistic care. While entirely different in tone, the messages reminded me a little of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine.

Rajagopal was a pioneer of palliative care in India, and that aspect of this book was also fascinating. He tells us his story, from first recognising a substantial lacuna in the care of patients (a lack of proper pain management) to building a coalition of likeminded colleagues to ultimately transforming medical practice. This aspect of the book reminded me of Misbehaving by Richard Thaler, his account of how he transformed the field of economics by integrating human behaviour. In some ways, Walk with the Weary is an account of how Rajagopal transformed the field of medicine, especially in India, by integrating human compassion.

Rajagopal’s view is that palliative care ought not to be restricted to those who are dying, but that it should be there for ‘all illness-related suffering.’ I had never conceived of palliative care in that way before, but found the argument inspiring. It encapsulates something important about how medicine is best practised.

One of my regrets about the way public health is practised in the UK is the siloed nature of the work. I work in health protection and mostly deal with the acute response to cases of significant infectious diseases. Often, the people who are suffering with these diseases have myriad other needs, but there is no overall coordinating ‘sorter of problems’ to tackle that. I found Rajagopal’s account of overcoming broadly similar structural barriers in his work inspiring.

Some notable quotations I took away from this book:

Imagine a researcher, a few centuries from now, going through the history of ‘Modern Medicine.’ What would her verdict be on healthcare in the early twenty-first century? What would she feel about the healthcare system in which, despite all the accumulated medical knowledge, 80% of the world continues not to have access to basic pain relief? Would she not ask herself—how could they be so senseless to invest so much time, energy, and money in research on ‘conquering’ diseases but not focus on channelling that knowledge so as to provide relief to those in suffering?

No therapeutic scan has yet been created that can measure happiness. There is no medical intervention yet that can generate joy, but the love that I give and the love I receive may be able to do that. If I am made physically comfortable within reasonable limits, this love could well be the only thing that matters as death approaches.

The world over, pain seems to be poorly understood and taught. Diseases are given importance; pain or suffering is ignored.

Many people, including many medical and nursing professionals in India, fail to realise the depth and nature of pain. It can be beyond the average person’s imagination. If severe, it affects your personality and changes you from a sociable human being to a selfish being, caring about nothing other than one’s own pain. It fills the mind space, leaving no space for rational decision-making.

This change in behaviour is immediate when a sudden, agonising pain occurs, but generally resolves completely when the pain is relieved. Sadly, and more tragically, long-term pain, such as low back pain, often irrevocably changes a person. The person may manage to put on a normal front to the world at large, but once back in the privacy of his or her own home, the façade crumbles. The irritability surprises, others; and at some point, it wrecks relationships – between spouses, between parents and children, and eventually with colleagues too. 

There was a lot of food for thought in this book.

In the great, over-stuffed pantheon of things I know nothing about, football looms large. It’s a subject on which I’m not even casually conversant, I’m less well-informed than your average six-year-old. It’s only two years since I was stunned to learn that Aston Villa wasn’t a London team.

And yet, I know that the Carabao Cup Final is this afternoon.

I couldn’t explain what the Carabao Cup is, nor pick it out of a line-up, nor explain why it’s named after a buffalo, but there’s still no fooling me: a big match is happening today.

I know this because I live in Newcastle, and I know of no other city where the football club and the city are so closely enmeshed. It’s partly to do with the location of the stadium right in the city centre, which means that the cheers after a goal resonate through the streets. But it’s also something that’s deep within the psyche of the city.

And so, I know it’s the Carabao Cup Final because the city is festooned with black-and-white bunting. The team’s flag has replaced the city flag outside the Civic Centre. Estate agents have turfed every property out of their window to dedicate their entire displays to supporting the club. Even a local care home has decorated their garden with black-and-white ribbons and balloons.

The talk in my office—where, incidentally, roughly 90% of the staff are female—has not been about whether anyone is making the trip to Wembley, but about who is making the trip. Jokes about silverware and absent goalkeepers are ten a penny.

Most shops and businesses in the city are closing early today to release staff to watch the match, as my friendly Caffe Nero barista had the foresight to tell me last Sunday. It’s a citywide bank holiday in all but statute.

And so: I might not be able to name a single Newcastle player and I couldn’t even tell you with certainty who the opposing team is, but I know it’s the Carabao Cup Final today. I hope Newcastle does well.

For the uninitiated, Emily in Paris is a sublimely mindless Netflix comedy series about a young marketing professional who relocates from Chicago to Paris. Its third series was released on Netflix recently. Wendy and I have enjoyed all three series enormously.

There’s much to dislike—offensive cultural stereotypes, casual consequence-less use of tobacco products, the two-dimensional characters. Yet, it is beautifully shot, is filled with absurdly couture fashion worn by characters without a hope of affording or storing it, and the whole series exudes charm and baseless optimism. Wendy sometimes mentions the value of programmes “where nothing bad ever happens,” and I think this fits that bill.

The writing is ropey throughout: by the third series, plots are telegraphed so far in advance that Wendy and I would occasionally forget whether something had happened or was going to happen.

But Emily in Paris is gentle and comforting in the way that only properly mindless TV can be.

‘Faith and Science’ is a small exhibit which forms part of Sunderland Art Gallery’s permanent collection. It gathers works by contemporary glass artists which represent aspects of, well, faith and science.

I very nearly walked straight past this—it’s positioned very close to the door—but two works caught my eye.

This remarkably prescient 2018 sculptural triptych by Luke Jerram illustrates the electron micrographic appearance of smallpox, HIV and an “untitled future mutation” with a more-than-passing resemblance to COVID-19.

In his statement, Jerram asks, “Has this virus been created in the laboratory or evolved naturally?”

Jerram is perhaps better known for his giant sculptures of the moon and the Earth (the latter currently floating in a dock at Canary Wharf)—who knew that he also basically predicted the pandemic?! He has also since made artworks of both the COVID-19 virus and one of the vaccines.

This 2005 triptych by Katharine Dowson demonstrating mitosis also caught my eye. Interestingly enough, Dowson has also created work inspired by vaccines: in her case, A Window to a Future of an HIV Vaccine.

This is an odd little 1922 novella in which the central character’s wife is mysteriously transformed into a fox. They initially continue almost as if nothing has happened, the vixen wearing clothes and sitting at the table to eat.

Over time, her vulpine nature overtakes her human tendencies. The couple drift apart as she moves into a den, though maintain a close affection.

I enjoyed this mostly as a brief curiosity.

A couple of quotations:

Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence. Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea-serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.

This story was made up by his neighbours not because they were fanciful or wanted to deceive, but like most tittle-tattle to fill a gap, as few like to confess ignorance, and if people are asked about such or such a man they must have something to say, or they suffer in everybody’s opinion, are set down as dull or “out of the swim.”

My thanks to the London Library for lending me a beautiful 1922 edition of this book with the original woodcuts by Garnett’s then wife—even though the book is dedicated to Duncan Grant, with whom he’d had an affair. Life was complicated among the Bloomsbury set.

Some people speculate that the novel is about the affair with Grant; others that it’s about the relationship with his wife. Both strike me as perfectly plausible, but then so does virtually every other interpretation, including the idea that it’s just a fantasy story with no allegorical meaning whatsoever.

The gradual shift towards springtime, which means I’m walking to work in the early light rather than the pitch dark, is richly welcome.

‘Black Britain’ was originally—in much rougher form—a blog created by Jhanee Wilkins, a photographer from the West Midland. It’s now an exhibition at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.

The exhibition has a simple, repeating structure. Each series begins with an A4 page of text in which a black person introduces themselves and their experience of racism while growing up and living in Britain. This is followed by a photograph of them looking directly at the camera, one of them looking elsewhere, and a third of an object from their lives.

There is something deeply affecting about staring directly into the eyes of a person immediately after reading about their experience of racism. I was moved by the experience of Kae, born in Wolverhampton, who says,

I do not feel represented in this country, I do not feel welcome even after 42 years.

I can only begin to imagine, and certainly can’t fully appreciate, how fundamentally destabilising it must be to feel unwelcome in the country where you were born and have lived your whole life.

I was struck in a complete different way by Anne Marie’s story:

I think mainly, in the workplace that’s where I find that it is awkward for me to completely be myself. If I would like to bring my own food into work to heat up in the staff room, there’s a whole load of questions about what I’m heating up or the smell of it.

This reminded me of how privileged I am to not have to live with self-consciousness about this sort of thing, and to be able to go through life barely giving it a second thought.

‘Black Britain’ continues at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art until 16 April.