One of the most remarkable things about the 2024 General Election campaign was the complete absence of discussion regarding the processes by which the major parties choose their leaders.

The four most recent prime ministers at the time of the election—May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak—had all been appointed between elections through internal party processes. It’s therefore clear that the electorate was being asked to trust not only the leader in post at the time of the election but also each party’s process for selecting a successor.

There was good reason to worry that these processes might not be robust. Both Labour and the Conservative Party leadership selection processes had recently appointed leaders who the electorate at large would not have picked: Corbyn and Truss. With hindsight, we can add Sunak to that list as well.

And yet, somehow, in all the unavoidable wall-to-wall coverage, I saw this issue raised not once.

In the most recent edition of the London Review of Books, Tom Hickman sets out yet more reasons why these internal party processes are at odds with the UK’s constitutional settlement. This one, in particular, is so egregious that I’m surprised I didn’t clock it at the time:

As the Cabinet Manual states, the monarch shall appoint as prime minister ‘the person who appears most likely to be able to command the confidence of the House’. In this case, that person was Rishi Sunak, who won each round of votes by MPs. He was, as events subsequently showed, the person whom MPs, left to themselves, would have selected. Yet in the final head-to-head between Sunak and Truss, in which party members voted, Truss was elected. MPs were, in essence, bound by contract with party members to act as though their confidence was reposed in Truss when in fact she was not the person most likely to command the confidence of the Commons.

The veil drawn over the discussion of these issues strikes me as most peculiar. Even as someone who reads more about UK politics than the average person, I couldn’t tell you what the Labour system is: I remember that Starmer altered it as part of his reform of the party, but I couldn’t tell you how. I know the Conservative system only because we’ve collectively lived through far too many of their leadership elections in recent years, including the one currently ongoing, and they have bafflingly made not a single change to the system that brought us Liz Truss.

Hickman argues that we’ve learned how not to appoint a prime minister. I disagree: the fact that nothing has changed suggests to me that we haven’t learned a thing.

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

Until I saw this sign, I’d never heard of the ‘8 Bridges Way’, a walking and cycling path along the River Tees—despite having visited the Transporter Bridge many times, which is where this circular route begins and ends.

Having seen the sign and searched the web, it feels very much up my street: a twelve-mile river walk is just the sort of thing that Wendy and I might mosey along on any given weekend, especially given that we could easily catch a train down to Middlesbrough which would leave us a stone’s throw from the start.

I’ll have to add it to the list!

I streamed this 1995 Richard Linklater film after an online recommendation engine—I can’t remember which one—suggested it would be a good fit for me.

As you may know, it follows an American boy called Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French girl called Celine (Julie Delpy), both in their early 20s. They meet on a train, and spontaneously decide to alight together in Vienna, spending the night walking around the city and talking.

It was very warmly received in the 90s, and has been called one of the most romantic films of all time. My feelings were mixed.

This is a dialogue-heavy film: the whole thing is basically a single conversation between Jesse and Celine. This is exceptionally well-written and true-to-life, and the two actors have strong chemistry. I found it engrossing.

The problem—if it is a problem—is that the film doesn’t escape its confines. There’s a lot of naïve chat between the couple, the sort of cod philosophy of carefree wealthy twenty-somethings. Other than the viewer, there’s nothing within the film that’s at a remove from their perspective. This felt indulgent, and I vacillated between finding it charming and suffocating. I still don’t quite know whether I liked it or not: I wouldn’t describe it as romantic so much as a portrayal of a naïve idea of romance. It reminded me of Heather Rigdon’s Young & Naïve in sentiment, though the couple in the film—unlike the song—are the same age.

In the end, it’s hard to conclude that a film that had me glued to the screen and left me with lots to ponder is anything other than a success. Two sequels have also followed in the two decades since, and I plan to seek them out—which is surely an indication of recommendation.

It is, though, very much a film of its time. The gender politics have moments of real discomfort for one thing—so your mileage may vary.

Sixteen years ago, I completed one of my medical school rotations at the Tranwell Unit for psychiatric patients at the QE Hospital in Gateshead. I really enjoyed it, and very nearly applied to specialise in psychiatry a few years later as a result.

The front part of the unit is octagonal, with an enclosed octagonal courtyard in the middle. In this courtyard stands a 3.5 tonne granite sculpture which shows a staircase ascending through an archway leading to… well… nothing. Just a sheer drop.

I vividly remember a seminar in which one of the psychiatrists asked us what we thought of the sculpture, which he introduced as Inside Outside. Some people commented that a staircase to a sheer drop felt a little unnecessarily suicidal for a psychiatric unit. The psychiatrist helped us to reflect on the degree to which the answers reflected our preconceptions about psychiatry. I remember their suggestion that the staircase ascending through the archway symbolised people coming from being stuck in their inner world and rejoining the outside world, and ascending into happiness as they did so.

I hadn’t thought about that seminar in years. But yesterday, my eye was caught by the way that this sculpture at Northumbria University had been enhanced by the luscious planting surrounding it:

On searching the web, I learned that this has the slightly unimaginative title Book Stack, and was unveiled in 1992 to celebrate Newcastle Polytechnic’s transformation into Northumbria University. As it turns out, the artist, Fred Watson, is the same bloke who created that sculpture in the middle of the Tranwell Unit that I’d discussed all those years ago.

I was surprised that a sculpture as brazenly literal as Book Stack could be by the same artist as something as seemingly abstract and symbolic as Inside Outside… but perhaps I just don’t fully appreciate either of them!

In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened, ushering in the era of steam locomotion—though initially only for freight, as passenger coaches continued to be drawn by horses until 1833.

But that’s not all that happened in Stockton in 1825: the Shambles also opened. It is still going strong 199 years on, though these days it hosts all sorts of shops rather than just the butchers that traditionally occupied a shambles.

A year ago, I wrote about using Kagi as my search engine. I wrote:

Do you remember the feeling when you first tried Google instead of Alta Vista, Excite, or Yahoo? The pages were clean, clear, and amazingly fast to load. The results were uncannily accurate. It was just obviously better, by leaps and bounds. The alternatives felt like they belonged to a different era.

That’s the feeling I get with Kagi.

A year on, I’m still delighted with the experience. Using Kagi has become such a routine, ingrained default that I really don’t think about it much anymore. I certainly can’t remember the last time I had to re-run a query on a different search engine.

I use Kagi’s Orion browser on my personal devices and have Kagi set as my default search engine in Microsoft Edge at work.

Kagi features which I particularly enjoy include:

• The ability to ‘raise’ or ‘lower’ domains in search results (or even ‘block’ them). For example, Kagi up-rates anything on a gov.uk or nhs.uk domain for me, which usually helps the thing I’m looking for bubble up to the top of the results.
• The ability to use Kagi Assistant with ‘bangs’. I have this set up so that I can just type the letter ‘c’ followed by text to begin a chat with one of Kagi’s supported large language model AIs, and ‘r’ followed by text to use one of the large language models in ‘research’ mode.
• The ability to use ‘lenses’ to append custom search parameters to a query in a single click.
  

Most of all, though, I enjoy the fact that Kagi is ad-free: its results are ranked solely by their likelihood to be the correct answer to my query, not by how much anyone is bidding for a specific keyword.

Looking at my Kagi stats, I average around 750-1,000 searches per month. I’m clearly reliant on searching as part of my day-to-day personal and professional work. Perhaps if I searched less, I would balk at paying a subscription fee to search the web, but Kagi is such a huge quality-of-life improvement over any other search engine I have found, that I’m happy to pay for it.

I’ve also been a happy Fastmail customer for quite a number of years. It strikes me that the combination of these two customer-focused ad-free products, which are among my most-used web tools, results in a calm, sane, and humane web browsing experience. I could cope without them… but I’d really rather not.

Give them a go!

I’m not using any referral links here—this is just my personal reflection, and while your mileage may vary, I’m happy to share what works for me. Who knows, I might feel differently in five years (cough).

The picture at the top of the post is a cartoon of Kagi’s mascot ‘Doggo’—which is actually one of the few things I dislike about Kagi. It reminds me a bit of Lycos—who knew that was still going?

This book was a birthday present. Structural engineer Roma Agrawal, who has worked on huge buildings like The Shard, uses it to give an overview of her profession. I understand she has also presented programmes for the BBC, but this is the first time I have seen her work.

This book won me over very quickly. Agrawal’s first engineering project, and the first she discusses in the book, was a footbridge over Newcastle’s central motorway, which I traverse frequently. She writes with humour and humanity. I found her style engaging and endearing, and her passion for her topic shines through on every page.

Some reviews have described the book’s technical content as pitched at a high-school level, but most of it was new to me—maybe I’m just undereducated in the field!

I particularly enjoyed Agrawal’s discussion of engineering water supply and sanitation infrastructure in Singapore, which she used to illustrate how engineering will be important if we are to adapt to climate change. I also found her reflections on thriving as a woman in a heavily male-dominated profession insightful.

If I permit myself one gripe, it is that Agrawal’s contributions to the structures she discusses are not always clear. It would be easy to come away from this book with the assumption that the complete design of everything from the bridge to The Shard was Agrawal’s work alone, but that seems unlikely.

I wouldn’t necessarily expect a book about structural engineering to feel warm, but this one did: it was a really delightful read which kept me interested from the first page to the last.

This is Aeolian Motion by Phil Johnson, a sculpture that I could have sworn I’d posted about in the past. Located near the River Tees in Stockton. As its name implies, it’s ‘wands’ move in the wind.

It was plonked on its grassy verge in 2001. According to the plaque alongside it, it was ‘inspired by the rich history and industrial heritage of the Borough of Stockton on Tees, and the flowing movement of the river’.

It is very much not my kind of thing: I’d sooner have planted a tree.

When I went to give blood earlier this week, a nurse asked me to confirm my date of birth. I did so, and she commented on how I shared my birthday with the late Queen. She wasn’t wrong, but it was a slightly peculiar moment.

Wandering down Stockton High Street, I discovered via his memorial fountain that I also share a birthday with John Dodshon, a 19th-century Quaker philanthropist. And then I thought: surely I would have noticed such a prominent fountain with my birthday on it when I lived in Stockton?

And so I descended a watery rabbit hole.

Dodshon’s memorial drinking fountain was unveiled on Monday 26 August 1878. The Stockton Examiner described it as ‘a massive structure of stone’ with ‘a rather commanding appearance.’

But what did he do to deserve such a memorial? The newspaper considered it ‘unnecessary to say much here’, save that he ‘distinguished himself, and the many qualities of his nature fitted him for the different walks of life in which it was his delight to treat, and helped to make him a useful and esteemed townsman.’

But an anonymous letter to the Stockton Examiner a few weeks before the unveiling took a rather different, and rather more intemperate, view:

I have for some days been wondering what was about to be done in the middle of our much-boasted High-street, and now I learn that the site has been fixed upon to erect a memorial fountain in perpetuation of the memory of the late Mr John Dodshon. I confess I was astonished at this, and upon making inquiries I was informed it was a public monument! Really, what next, I wonder? Public monument! I pretend to know something about Stockton and what is going on, but I never heard of a public fountain to John Dodshon before.

What has Mr John Dodshon done for the town? Let’s know that first, and act when the question is answered. Verily, it seems our Town Council will allow Tom, Dick, and Harry, to erect monuments to their deceased chums if they only take it into their heads to do so. If those who are the prime movers in this scheme had only looked round, they might easily have found some more useful purpose for spending money—even to glorify the uneventful life of John Dodshon.

I have every respect and admiration for the late Mr Dodshon, but I cannot see that there is anything wise in sticking up a privately-provided fountain, the design of which has not been submitted to the public,m and of which everybody seems to be in ignorance about, in one of the finest streets of Great Britain. I hope the Town Council will reconsider this matter at their next meeting and come to some other conclusion upon it before the fountain is knocked down in disgust as a street obstruction.

‘Uneventful life’? ‘Street obstruction’? Blimey!

Clearly, there was something of a chorus of disapproval—so much, in fact, that it was mentioned in the local MP’s speech at the unveiling:

We regret to hear that some objections have been made to this monument occupying as it now does a portion of this magnificent High-street. No doubt it occupies a certain portion of space, and I am free to confess that I am one of those who hope that the time will come—and I must say I think it is not far distant—when all these hideous structures in our midst will be swept away, and this market place will be devoted to its more legitimate purpose—the accommodation of those who frequent our lively, rising, and increasing market.

When the time comes to which I have just referred, I am sure the Corporation will be as liberal as at present, and if we have to find a substitute site for this fountain that it will be really afforded.

‘Hideous structures?’ Crikey!

Over the next few weeks, there was also a bit of a spat in the letters column about the functioning of the horse troughs which were part of the fountain, with the architect himself writing in at one point. It has very 19th-century Facebook vibes.

Its fate didn’t improve: perhaps out of convenience, or perhaps out of protest, the local fishmongers started to store and clean their wares in the fountain, leaving it in a right state—and making the water rather unpalatable. Within 15 years, it had been shifted away from the High Street and down to Ropner Park.

But in 1995, the Council decided to restore it to the High Street, albeit in a different position, more or less outside M&S. I used to pop into M&S when I lived in Stockton—so absolutely nothing in this tale answers the question of why I never noticed a fountain with my birthday on it.

Since I left Stockton, it’s been moved again: in 2014, the Council relocated the fountain back to its original position in the High Street, completing a round trip that’s lasted more than a century. It no longer works as a drinking fountain, of course, and a great many of the original features such as the bronze lion heads that used to spout the water have long since been lost.

It’s strange to think that a monument which was so controversial in its day has become so beloved a century later as to be worthy of several expensive relocations despite becoming relatively dilapidated. I wonder if it will still be there a hundred years hence?

This is one of the 1,000 cast iron Millennium Mileposts placed along the National Cycle Network. In 2020, about a quarter of the National Cycle Network was axed, which means that many of the mileposts no longer tally up with routes, which seems a bit of a shame.

This one was designed by the Scottish sculptor Iain McColl. Like most of the mileposts, it used to be black and had a circular disk attached with a coded message. The disk is long-gone, but the remaining post got a bit of jazzy re-painting in June 2023.