Last month, I enjoyed a series of reflections on silence by the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge. Walking is the follow-up, published in 2020, in which Kagge shares reflections and observations about putting one foot in front of the other. He draws on all kinds of sources, from ancient philosophy, to his father’s death, to cutting-edge cockroach research.

Kagge’s overall message is that walking makes us human: the more one walks, the more human one becomes, and the more knowledge one absorbs about oneself and the world. He argues convincingly that if people walked more, the world would be a better place. And he suggests that walking is the ‘best medicine’, in terms of both physical and mental health.

Kagge also quotes an astonishing statistic, which I’ve since found comes from a 2016 survey, which says that 75% of 5-12 year olds in the UK spend less time outside each day than the average UK prisoner (one hour). I’m amazed that I’ve never come across that statistic before in my public health work.

I’m predisposed to like this book because I agree with most of its arguments. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Kagge discusses how our perception of time changes according to the speed of travel:

When you move fast to save time, time moves fast, too. I’m always struck by how little time you actually save by driving. When you walk, time stretches.

This rings true. I’m lucky enough to be able to walk to work each day, but on the rare occasions when my 45-minute stroll is compressed into a shorter bus or car journey, I feel like I have lost rather than gained time. The walk really does seem to stretch my experience of time. I think this applies beyond walking: Wendy and I recently reflected that a recent holiday was hampered by arriving too fast on a direct flight, rather than us having the luxury of slower travel.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short set of reflections, and I will recommend it to others.

While I’m not at all into cars, I have a vague policy-level interest in electric vehicles. I think they present fascinating dilemmas.

We desperately need to rapidly reduce the burning of fossil fuels if the planet is to remain habitable, and it seems inevitable that the adoption of electric vehicles will be an important staging post on the journey to a less carbon-intensive future.

Yet, it’s not an easy transition: there are all sorts of complicated policy problems, from the need to more rapidly develop the charging infrastructure, to developing better ways of tackling battery fires, to working out how best to manage life-expired battery-powered vehicles.

From an emergency planning perspective, allowing a controlled burn of a battery-powered vehicle isn’t a great solution if the vehicle is a battery-powered ambulance parked outside a hospital, or one of an entire fleet of fire engines parked next to one another. Decommissioning cars containing batteries which have simply expired is one thing, but safely transporting and managing vehicles whose cells have been compromised in major road traffic accidents is quite another. And so on and so forth… electric vehicles present 99 big problems in the service of solving the biggest planetary problem of all.

I therefore particularly enjoyed this article in the New York Times by Dionne Searcey, which profiles the introduction of an electric school bus in a US town. The ripples from that particular pebble were far-reaching. The one which surprised me most was, perhaps, the simplest:

The bus was so quiet that Mr. Nielson could hear his metal straw rattle in its travel mug as he navigated the brick streets downtown. And when he pulled up to some bus stops, where were the kids?

It turned out that children had been accustomed to running outside when they heard the loud diesel engine come roaring down the street. The new bus was almost too quiet.

“I told parents that, hey, you’re going to have to start looking because I don’t like to honk. It’s generally rude,” he said.

It’s well worth reading the full thing.

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

There are more guns than people in the USA. More than 100 US citizens are killed each day by gun violence, mostly poor young black men.

When ’black lives matter’ became a slogan, some complained that ‘all lives matter’. Of course they do, but seeing that as a counterargument to the original statement misunderstands the desperate cri du cœur for the poor young black men who are killed in massively disproportionate numbers.

The repudiation of political violence in the USA over the past 36 hours strikes me as similar. Of course political violence is abhorrent. But where is the force of anger, the outpouring of rage, the flood of statements condemning the gun violence that killed tens of young black men in the last 36 hours? How is it that US society condemns an old white man’s grazed ear with so much more fervour than the deaths of thousands of other citizens every week?

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.

Earth is the second (and latest) book in Boyne’s promised quartet of novels themed around the elements. I read the first in the series, Water, last month.

You may recall that Water focused on Willow Hale, a woman who moves to a remote Irish island as she spends time coming to terms with the collapse of her family life. Earth picks up a few years later, and is narrated by Evan Keogh, a young island resident who was a relatively minor character in Water.

At the start of Earth, Keogh is a professional footballer, on trial as an accessory to the rape of a young woman allegedly committed by one of his teammates. As with Water, we gradually come to learn more about Keogh’s life story and the abuse he has suffered in his past, including while coming to terms with his sexuality. We also, of course, follow the progress of the trial while learning about the truth of the events the trial considers. Many of the revelations about Keogh’s background hark back to events described in Water, in a way that makes me look forward to re-reading the whole of the quartet at some point in the future.

As is Boyne’s usual style, his characters are all damaged, complete and emotionally complex. Often, Boyne’s plots are ridiculously implausible (and that’s certainly the case here), but he’s an author for whom that doesn’t matter. In Boyne’s novels, the plot merely serves as a background to character development, it is not the focus of the work. It is a little like opera in that sense.

Earth felt like a more direct novel than Water. In Water, most of the abuse is at one remove from the main characters who are reacting to it. In Earth, the narrator himself is both a victim and a perpetrator. This makes it a slightly harder read in some senses, but overall, I found that I enjoyed it slightly more than the first novel in the series.

The themes explored in Water and Earth were very similar: the long-term effects of abuse, pricking consciences, and the difficulty of reconciling public perception with reality. Boyne’s storytelling ability made the stories feel completely different, but I’m nervous as to whether he can pull that off twice more.

I look forward to finding out: Fire, the next in the series, is due to be released in November.

On Tuesday, the incomparable Diamond Geezer compared Transport for London’s 2004 plans for their network to the 2024 reality. He concluded:

The map may not have happened in full but a goodly proportion of it eventually did, delivering better transport links for all.

I thought I’d undertake a similar exercise for my home region—North East England—and see how we fared.

In 2002, with much fanfare, the regional public transport executive Nexus published a £1.5bn ‘visionary’ public transport plan, dubbed Project Orpheus. This was to combine light rail expansion in the region with the re-introduction of trams and the construction of a cable car on Gateshead’s quayside. By 2018, the map was supposed to look like this:

So, how much of the 2002 ‘vision’ actually happened? How much fell by the wayside? How much of it happened later than planned?

I’d go through proposal-by-proposal in the style of Diamond Geezer, but it’s not worth it: none of the proposed extensions to the network happened; all of it fell by the wayside. As DG says, ‘all that really matters is what got built’—and none of it did.

Which isn’t to say we got nothing: we’ve had two new infill stations at Northumberland Park (2005) and Simonside (2008), refurbishment of many stations and rebuilding of Haymarket (2009), North Shields (2012), South Shields (2019) and Sunderland (2024). Several single line sections have been converted to dual running, the train shed has been completely rebuilt, and a new communications system has made live tracking available in an app.

We’re also due to get new Metrocars to trundle around the Metro track, maybe sometime later this year, only a decade-and-a-half after the end of the design life of the existing fleet (which is, erm, falling apart to such an extent that timetables have been cut to run the service with few working trains—and even with that mitigation, punctuality fell to its lowest ever level).

Unlike London, we might not have received even a fraction of what was promised, but we have had hundreds of millions of pounds of investment… and that’s an awful lot more than some other places have got.

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.

My sister bought this memoir for me, commenting that the tales of camping holidays in the UK and France in the 1970s would remind me of our childhood—though I must immediately clarify that, as the youngest sibling, the 1970s predate my arrival!

The book did, however, bring back memories. It was funny: there were anecdotes that made me laugh out loud, and also reminded me of situations in which we’d found ourselves.

Kennedy spins a good yarn: there aren’t many writers who can eke out pages of humour and tension from getting lost when driving in France, for example. She has real storytelling skill.

By the end, though, I began to struggle: it did feel a little strung out and perhaps a touch repetitive to me. To sustain its length, I would have preferred it to be a little more grounded in growth or self-reflection, or perhaps to have a little more variety of mood or depth of characterisation.

But I nevertheless enjoyed this. It was very nostalgic, and I would never have come across this book by other means, so that makes it a great present.

Here are three bridges crossing the Ouseburn.

Nearest to the camera is the Ouseburn Viaduct, which carries the East Coast Mainline. It was built of timber in 1839, and rebuilt in iron thirty years later. When I took a photo of it twelve years ago, it was undergoing an extensive restoration.

Furthest from the camera is the 1878 Byker Bridge, originally a toll bridge—though the charge was removed in 1895. It carries the road now designated the A193.

In the middle is the newest of the three, Arup’s much-celebrated 1970s curving concrete Byker Viaduct, with joints glued together. It carries the Tyne & Wear Metro between Manors and Byker.

Though people assume he was born in Denmark, Arup’s founder, Ove Arup, was in fact born a stone’s throw from the bridge in Heaton. He was born in 1895: closer in time to the construction of the two preceding bridges than the one his firm designed. He had retired by the time the firm took on the Byker Viaduct project.