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

Walking past a coffee shop on a university campus this week, I heard a student regaling a small group of friends. As I walked past, I caught the exclamation: “I was in the middle of a crematorium with fire alarms going off, what would you expect!?”

This week, I’ve been reading some Gore Vidal. In one of his novels, a character mentions a “streptococcic infection.”

I deal with cases of streptococcal infection all the time, but have never come across that alternative form of the adjective. Google Books Ngrams shows that “streptococcal” has always been the commoner form, but that “streptococcic” was used a little in the first half of the twentieth century.

Wendy and I have wanted to replace the wall lights in our living room for years, but have never spotted ones that were quite right. We did this week, though… and despite imagining that it would be difficult, the DIY job of replacing them only took me about 15 minutes. By sheer fluke, the brackets already attached to the wall for the old lamps were identical to the brackets for the new ones, so didn’t require removal and replacement.

I’ve been irritated this week by the Tory leadership candidates talking about “NHS efficiency”. I think there are scarcely any people who want an efficient NHS; I think most people want a gloriously, wonderfully inefficient NHS.

I think people want an NHS where staff have the time to sit and hold the hands of those dying alone. I think people want an NHS where staff have the time to give tea and sympathy to the bereaved. I think people want an NHS where staff have time for a little chat with the lonely patient without any visitors.

Of course, efficiency should be a consideration, but it shouldn’t be the top priority. I’d much rather be looked after by a caring service than an efficient one, and I’d much rather pay for the former too.

Wendy and I went to our first wedding of the year this week. Either fewer people are getting married or we’re getting old… or both. We saw the Perseid meteor shower as we walked home.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a painting of a group of friends drinking coffee at a wedding with a wall light in the background” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.

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

I’ve moaned more than enough on here about ridiculous imprecise business jargon, but I’m being invited to a rash of “birdtable meetings” at the moment. This phrase manages to be both linguistically excruciating as well as grammatically irritating. I can accept “birdtable” as a non-standard compound adjective in the phrase “birdtable meeting”—but the moment people use “birdtable” as a noun, and continue to omit the space, it really makes my teeth itch.

I’m fully aware that this makes me a ludicrous human being, that the rules of grammar aren’t fixed in any case, that I make much worse grammatical errors all the time, and that I should just breathe through it: but it still irritates me.

I’ve been reading Caroline Knowles’s Serious Money this week. She mentions that when wealthy people dig out multi-storey basements below their central London houses, the digger used is often left in situ, because to extract it again is uneconomic. I think I’d heard that before, but I’d never really pondered the details.

Presumably, one has to be quite careful about removing all the fuel to prevent a fire hazard. Does the digger get walled in, or is an access point left just in case? If the latter, do you finish the room where the digger is, or is it just a dark and dusty dug-out dungeon? Do people try and make a feature of it, like some of the London Underground tunnelling machinery? So many questions…

I’ve long been irritated by self-censorship in the news which leads to scripts referring to “the n-word” or “the p-word” or whatever. It irritates me because it omits a key fact from the story and fails to educate the reader or listener that the term under discussion is inappropriate. Language changes over time and these are “teachable” moments—and no-one can be reasonably offended by an appropriately couched single mention. I’m not calling for offensive advice words in banner headlines.

This has reached a fresh nadir this week, with BBC News publishing an article about the removal of a word from some lyrics. The only clues given are that the word “has been used to demean people with spastic cerebral palsy” and that it has a variety of other meanings. I can think of multiple words that fit those criteria—words I wouldn’t use—but what if this is a new usage of a word I would normally use?

Even The Guardian, which has a specific policy of stating words “when necessary to the facts of the piece”—which is surely the case here—kept it secret.

This could have been an article that helped me to be more sensitive to others’ perceptions of language. Instead, because they haven’t told me which word is offensive, it’s essentially just noise.

This week, an expansion to the Guggenheim in Bilbao has been approved, with two extensions on sites 5km apart connected by a greenway, and connected to the main museum—40km away—through a brand new tunnel bored through a mountain.

Having never even been to Bilbao, and having seen only a couple of paragraphs about the plan in the press, I’m really not at all qualified to have an opinion. Nevertheless, I got a little thrill at the sheer audacity of the plan when I first read about it this week. I felt a little boosted by the confidence the plan projects about the world… even though, on the face of it, it doesn’t sound environmentally ideal, and even though we all know that few such grand projects ever reach fruition.

Also from Serious Money comes the revelation that there are more people employed in domestic service in the UK now than there were during the Victorian era.

The largest and most elaborate houses employ cleaners, waiters, maintenance staff, housekeepers, security staff, drivers, gardeners, chefs, nannies, tutors, PAs and, sometimes, multiple butlers. The twenty-first century domestic service labour force is as complex and specialised in its own way as its nineteenth-century predecessor.

Of course, the population has grown by 2-5 times (depending on what we’re calling “the Victorian era”, but even so… I wouldn’t have expected that.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “brightly coloured painting of a bird on a bird table with money” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE.

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

It was in last Sunday’s paper, but I read this article about coffee this week, which has this comment in the first paragraph:

The mother-of-one, 36, who works in a lettings agency, is such a fan that she often makes the 20-minute round trip in her car to pick up a caramel latte if she’s working from home.

My initial reaction was a mildly judgemental one, wondering why someone would drive for a drink while working at home, and wasn’t that terrible for the environment, and so on and so righteous. And then I realised that I sometimes get a sandwich or salad delivered when I’m working from home, and that’s more expensive, more replicable at home without special equipment, and possibly worse for the environment. I promptly dismounted my high horse.

I’ve written before (11) about my worry that my complete absence of desire to ever enter politics is part of a wider problem:

If I’m not willing to engage, why should anyone else bother? Are people who enjoy party politics really the people we want making decisions on our behalf? Shouldn’t we all engage more for the good of society? Is “I don’t want to” just a selfish whinge? How can things improve if we leave politics only to those who can be bothered? Aren’t decisions made by those who show up?

The spectacle of the Tory leadership contest just illustrates why I could never bring myself to try.

It’s painful to watch the candidates contort themselves into arguing that they will bring “change” through “continuity” with the party’s 2019 manifesto; performing sleight of hand to impress a tiny unrepresented selectorate without alienating the Tory voting base; trying to dodge sledgehammers thrown by colleagues who, in a short time, will be telling us that the candidate they currently despise is the best Prime Minister since Thatcher.

It’s unedifying, but worse than that, nobody but nobody could sensibly argue that leaving the selection to a small cadre of self-selecting unelected fee-paying loyalists is the best way to find the right person to unite and lead a nation. And yet, there is consensus on that element of the process for replacing a Prime Minister across both main parties. It is absurd, and it shows that neither party truly values good Government over party management and membership.

Why would anyone with solid principles and a real drive to do the right thing by the population debase themselves by participating in this sort of vaudeville trash?

I know most politicians will never in their life enter a leadership competition, I know that most MPs quietly beaver away, I know local politics is different, I know party membership isn’t a prerequisite for political impact. But the system is patently broken, there appears to be a collective decision to pretend it’s not. I don’t understand why anyone would choose to leap into the shallow, fetid puddle we’ve collectively decided to pretend is an elite swimming pool.

Nine years ago this week, I shared this Radio Free Europe article about Facebook. I particularly drew attention to this point:

Characters revert to type on social media, but their attributes are turbo-charged. The annual family update (“Chloe has had an impressive first term at Brown and seems to enjoy the social life as much as the academic!”) has become the hourly update. The whiny friend we once met now and again outside the grocery store is now a daily occurrence. Of course, we can hide these people on our feeds, but this is information we love to hate. That is the dichotomy of Facebook.

I’ve not been on Facebook for years now, and so I feel a little more removed from the whole thing. But from hearing people talk about it, it strikes me that everything in that quote, and everything in the RFE article, is still substantially true. The problems highlighted seem to have deepened rather than being solved.

Even I watched a few minutes of football today.

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

With all the talk about “the lionesses” this week, and with more no doubt on the way next week, I can’t help but keep thinking of this bit from The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which I read years ago.

“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘nigger’”, I volunteered.

“Like what?”

“Like any word that ends in –ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”

This, from Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation which I’ve been reading this week, brought back happy memories of when Wendy and I visited Capri in 2014:

We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri. It was early April. A light cold rain misted over the sea. We took a funicular up from the dock and found ourselves the only tourists. You are early, the conductor said with a shrug. The streets smelled like lavender and for a long time neither of us noticed that there weren’t any cars. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again.

I went on a Met Office course relevant to my job this week. I’m pretty sure I’ve now been on it three times in six years. They always introduce it with a bit of background on how jet streams impact the weather, a topic I seem unable to retain in even the most cursory detail.

This time, I did manage to retain something about orographic rain, which—if I understood correctly—is the reason it rains every time I visit Leeds, yet rarely rains when I’m walking to work in Newcastle.

Wendy and I were talking this week about the mnemonic we were taught at school for remembering the order of the planets of the solar system.

I was taught, “Me Very Early Man Just Standing Under Nine Planets.”

Wendy was taught, “My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets”

And, by sheer coincidence, Offill also cites an example in her book:

My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles

Of course, the downgrading of Pluto has necessitated shorter mnemonics.

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

Corbeil Essonnes, France: Your package was cleared after the scheduled transport departure. We will reschedule for the next available departure.

Truly, the Brexit dividend keeps on giving.

This week, I’ve twice been subjected against my will in a public place to Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden. (I would argue that the peak of Theakston’s career was a brilliant but commercially unsuccessful game show.)

They frequently plug a competition in which the listener must text the station during songs by a given artist in exchange for cash. They are clear that only entries made during the duration of the song will count. And this led me to wonder how on Earth they would know: with the highly variable delays between FM, DAB and (most especially) online broadcasts, how can they accurately time this?

And so, I consulted the terms and conditions to see how they fudged this, and the answer is specifying certain ways of listening:

To enter the Promotion by SMS text message, you must text in when the sequence of one, two or three songs by the specified artists play, as heard on FM or DAB, following the instructions by the presenter(s) on-air

I have never once heard this restriction mentioned on air… but then, perhaps the internet steam is different, and perhaps I’m hearing an FM or DAB version.

Any which way, pondering this was much more engaging than their execrable ‘chat’.

I feel seen.

I believe that God fed the five thousand with the bread and the fish

Cah I seen mommy do some similar things

I’m pretty certain that if you listened to nothing but Dave and read nothing but Ali Smith, you’d have a better understanding of the state of politics in the UK than most Westminster correspondents.

The two are phenomenal writers, but I think this is also partly a timescale thing: politics moves slowly, but is forced into a daily news cycle (or a minute-by-minute news cycle on Twitter). I’m not sure that’s helpful or healthy.

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

A few days spent in Milan can be as reviving as weeks spent elsewhere, and seeing family in Northern Ireland is always fun.

It was nothing short of frightening to see the number of MPs who were willing to parrot the lie that the Prime Minister had a 14-million-strong personal mandate over recent months. Our entire Parliamentary system is constructed to avoid that particular individualist populist claim, yet it still gained traction.

Given the unwillingness of many to point out the lie—a key protection our system already has—I fear that our ultimate collective response to Boris Johnson’s disregard for democratic norms will be to attribute the problem to personality, rather than to make any attempt to modify the system.

Some would argue—fairly, I think—that the unwritten constitution worked, as evidence by the Prime Minister’s so-called “resignation.” But it’s also true that long-standing assumptions were undermined, novel questions were raised, and norms were overridden. Surely—surely—we ought to aim to learn and improve, not just unthinkingly conclude that the flexible system sufficiently flexed and everything is therefore fine.

For much of the covid pandemic, the cupboard in which sits behind my desk at work has been adorned with items referencing pandemic scandals. The notorious trip to Barnard Castle, the ridiculous assertion that a “bring your own booze” party was essential work, the issuing of fixed penalty notices, Operations Eagle and Moonshot and Whack-a-mole and more besides are represented, some obliquely and some more plainly. (And no, I’m not going to share pictures.)

Because of its position, the cupboard is the most prominent bit of background when I’m on video conferences, and occasionally provokes questions or knowing grins.

I was once asked in advance of a “VIP” touring the office whether I thought I should take it all down: I explained that if “VIPs” were touring the office, then the point was surely for them to see the day-to-day normality, and not for us to hide things from them. To my organisation’s credit, nothing has ever been said again.

As a result, on occasions when “the great and the good” descend unto us, the cupboard often catches their eye. Usually, they pay it some passing attention, express amusement and associate it with the gallows humour of healthcare work. And, in fairness, comic relief is certainly one of the cupboard’s main functions among my office colleagues and me.

But there is another side: it’s a literal representation of the metaphorical background against which we’re working. It’s the context in the mind of many when we’re giving advice that’s unpleasant for people to hear. It’s the public narrative of injustice and incompetence that sometimes undermines our work. It’s a physical representation of our pain and frustration and moral injury.

I’m never certain whether the non-humorous side comes through to our visitors. I like to imagine that it makes them laugh at the time but later makes them think, not least because it’s also the headwind against which many of them are flying. But perhaps I’m expecting too much of a cupboard.

I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories this week. There’s an incomparably Ali Smith section in which she lists the qualities of ’elsewhere,’ the place we always want to find and head towards. One sentence from this passage:

Elsewhere the words of the politicians are nourishing to the heart.

If only.

I downloaded TikTok a week or so ago. The algorithm is astonishingly good, learning rapidly which sorts of videos the user watches, and which are swiped past. It seems to be able to do this thematically, and I suppose the quantity of video content it serves combined with the forgettability of swiping past something utterly irrelevant means that it seems to give very serendipitous recommendations. It feels like something genuinely new and different compared to, say, Twitter or Instagram, where the user has to spend forever “curating” their feed and following the right people to build an interesting experience.

Almost from the off, I found TikTok engaging enough to mindlessly watch for prolonged periods of times—twenty minutes here, half an hour there—until eventually deciding that this really wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time.

I’ve deleted it now.

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

When I read Jeanette Winterson’s 12 Bytes in January, I was struck by “Winterson’s impassioned plea for science to involve writers. Precision, and perhaps even beauty, is essential in scientific communication, and is a dying art.”

This week, events have caused me to remember this. There is little more dangerous than imprecise language in situations where clarity is essential. I think people grasp this in acute short-lived emergency situations, but it feels like it’s often overlooked in longer-term fundamentals, like remits for organisations or lists of national priorities.

An active decision to use an imprecise fudged wording can be brilliant in some situations, and is often politically shrewd. On the other hand, unintentionally imprecise language leading different people to interpret fundamental statements differently can be disastrous.

I’m ever more convinced that when precision is needed, a talented writer is needed.

I keep hearing a radio ad for a security firm which says they have “personal identity restoration specialists.”

I imagine most of us could do with one of those after the last couple of years.

This week, the total number of Monkeypox cases ever diagnosed in the UK passed 1,000.

This week, the number of covid-19 patients admitted to hospital each day passed 1,000.

From the public attention paid to these developments, you’d almost think the two milestones were roughly equivalent, which is mind-boggling. To repeat: in the UK right now, more people are being admitted to hospital with covid every day as have ever been diagnosed with Monkeypox.

We shouldn’t downplay a growing outbreak of Monkeypox, but we also shouldn’t pretend covid no longer causes untold harm.

The beach Wendy and I visit most frequently is probably Sandhaven in South Shields… which has just been named The Sunday Times Beach of the Year.

This is from Lorna Arnold’s Windscale 1957, but replace “accident” with “pandemic” and I suspect this might accurately describe a mistake currently in train in many organisations:

The post-accident reorganisation was not entirely beneficial. The structure was cumbersome and overelaborate. Moreover, although the Authority had been seriously under-staffed, some people thought that the rapid expansion after 1957 went too far and left the Authority with major staff and organisation problems. Perhaps the Authority had not needed a massive increase in overall staff so much as a massive redeployment.

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

I went for a walk this week around some bits of Newcastle city centre that I don’t usually frequent. It reminded me how much Newcastle’s skyline has changed over recent years, and how change that seems gradual and unremarkable when observed daily can be enormously striking when seen only at wide intervals of time.

According to those irritating automated Microsoft Viva emails, in a typical week I spend 55 hours in meetings. I work 40 hours a week. I assume the system can’t smartly analyse a diary that is often double, triple or quadruple booked.

On an Internet forum I sometimes browse, a commenter said this week

The sort of thing you used to see on Club Reps or, dare I say it, the original Inbetweeners film, just don’t happen now because if you let yourself go in Kavos, Aiya Napa or Magaluf now, it’ll be all over the Internet within half an hour.

Despite everything I’ve read about things like China’s social credit system, or books like So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, I have never properly considered the idea that social media platforms could operate as a moderator for ‘real life’ behaviour.

I took a circular walk round York’s city walls this week. I haven’t been to York all that much over the years, and wouldn’t say it’s a city I know well, but walking the walls nevertheless gave me a wholly new perspective on it.

The Times had an article this week recommending the 100 best books for summer 2022. I didn’t read it, but lamented that I’d be so much more convinced by a smaller number. In a world of endless choice, curation is key.

It’s hard to piece together a rationale written thought about the appalling consequences of the US Supreme Court’s decision that access to abortion is not a constitutional right. Reading through the original Roe vs Wade decision this week, as well as the Supreme Court’s latest, I was struck by how plain it was that the original judgement was finely balanced.

It made me wonder how something so fundamental could be left to rest on such shaky foundations, and how the immediate response to the judgement wasn’t to work to firm up the legal footing. But then, just look at how many fundamentals of democracy in the UK are on based on shaky foundations, and how our response to a Government which openly attempts to knock them down hasn’t been to immediately work to strengthen them.

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

For at least 800 years, there has been a tradition of fairs being held on Newcastle’s Town Moor. For most of the last 140 years, The Hoppings has been an annual event, in recent years usually lasting nine days in early summer. Several hundred travelling attractions gather, creating Europe’s largest travelling funfair and attracting a million or more visitors. This year’s event opened this week, and Wendy and I went for our annual walk and gawp.

For the first time in years, I had a full day of face-to-face meetings outside the office this week. It made me feel oddly nervous: I’ve forgotten how to be out of the office, how to be unplugged from email, how to work without being constantly immediately available. I used to have days like this most weeks, and yet I’ve fallen out of practice.

Tech journalists have been falling over themselves to praise DALL-E, the impressive tool which uses artificial intelligence to generate images in response to prompts. TNW’s Neural newsletter transformed my view on this by pointing out that while these models triumph with complex imagery where many outputs are reasonable (such as “the sea at night”) they completely fail with simple, specific prompts (“two squares that are different colours”).

Of course, the models aren’t designed for the latter. Yet, as a casual observer, I suppose I unconsciously assumed that they’d work for it because—from a human linguistic perspective and from a “drawing” perspective—they seem far simpler.

On reflection, my built-in assumptions were obviously inapplicable to an absurd degree. The experience taught me that it’s easy to overestimate artificial intelligence by falsely ascribing methods to its work. It reminded me of examples I read about in New Dark Age.

I’ve been working on my annual revalidation appraisal paperwork lately, and it’s made me realise how poor my perception of time is these days. There are events that seemed to happen last week but actually were months ago. There are projects which feel like I worked on them years ago, but which I actually did in the last twelve months. There’s one bit of work which I was certain I did in November or December last year, and was frustrated by my inability to find some of the documents… I actually completed it in October 2019.

I think this is attributable to the formlessness of the last couple of years, the tedium of constant COVID, constant overwork and constant exhaustion. Dare I say that things are—hopefully—starting to look up?

I’ve mentioned Charlotte Ivers’s Sunday Times column before, but this week’s is especially brilliant.

All the normal rules of politics say he must go. All the experts say he must go. All the rules of the land, our traditions, our unwritten constitution, say he must go. Dammit, the rules of gravity say he must go. And Johnson will look at all these rules and think: what if I just … don’t?

And so he doesn’t. And nobody calls his bluff. Just as they haven’t, time and time again: over the wallpaper, the parties, the — oh, I don’t know, I’ve forgotten half the things we were furious about a few months ago, which I suppose means he has won. Again. Anyway, Johnson just does not go. And there aren’t any structures in place to remove him, because the structures were not built for people like Boris Johnson: people who simply ignore them.

I don’t use my car very much, which means I don’t often buy petrol. While I’m vaguely cognisant of fuel price rises, I was surprised to be charged the better part of £60 to fill up my small car.

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

It’s 14 years this week since I graduated. I know because this post popped up in my memories. Like much of this blog, I have no memory of writing it. I found myself nodding along and agreeing with myself as I read it.

Wendy and I enjoyed dinner at Newcastle city centre favourite Blackfriars this week. The restaurant is based in the friary’s original 11th-century refectory, making this nearly 800-year-old space (reputedly) the UK’s oldest purpose-built dining room in public use. It’s a mind-blowing length of time to contemplate, but the food was great.