This book, which was a birthday present from my parents, does an outstanding job of answering the question: what went wrong with the Boeing 737-MAX?

Robison takes a longitudinal view, giving a fast-paced account of the history of Boeing. The book notes how cost-cutting and the side-lining of expert engineers in favour of project managers led to a toxic workplace and, ultimately, a failure to prioritise safety over other considerations.

Robison, in concert with the inquiries into the plane crashes, makes the point that the failures in the design of the 737-MAX were not complex. The plane was loaded with software which brought the nose down, intended to avoid a stall by stopping the plane from climbing too steeply. However, this system relied on a single sensor to work out the angle of the climb. If the single sensor failed, the computer would put the plane into a dive. This system, which was new to the 787-MAX, was not described in the flight manual, and pilots were not made aware of its existence through training—so the plane would dive, and the pilots would have no way to understand what was going on, let alone avoid a crash.

Robison’s unemotional, journalistic style of writing sets all of this out plainly. The horror of the book comes from the sheer familiarity of the processes he describes: the prioritisation of delivering things ‘on time’ rather than making sure they were safe, the way that problems were obscured through corporate jargon, the siloed working that hindered cooperation and communication between teams, the inability of those with expert knowledge to influence decisions. You could draw endless parallels between the problems identified in this book and the problems identified in Module 1 of the UK COVID Inquiry.

There was one nugget that particularly stood out. During the implementation of a particular decision, regular ‘go / no go’ meetings were renamed ‘go / go’ meetings, as ‘not going’ was no longer an option, whatever the safety considerations. I recently heard of another organisation (not in aviation) rebranding equivalent meetings in exactly the same way with exactly the same rationale.

This kind of corporate failure is pervasive: this book is essential reading to understand and challenge it.

In 1987, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government set up the Teesside Development Corporation. It aimed to regenerate Teesside by using public funds to attract private investment, creating jobs and renewed prosperity in an area which had been somewhat left behind in modern Britain.

The Corporation was granted significant powers to make decisions about land use, development and infrastructure so that it could cut through the bureaucratic ‘red tape’ which so often prevented regeneration schemes from delivering timely tangible results. By sticking to a clear long-term strategic vision, the intention was that economic regeneration would surely follow.

It made some notable progress despite local protests about harming local heritage: Teesside Park and the Tees Barrage are both products of the Corporation.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with schemes that aim to cut bureaucracy and ‘red tape’, the governance perhaps wasn’t quite as tight as it ought to have been, and the Corporation fell into financial controversy following accusations that public money had not been used appropriately.

The Corporation was dissolved not long after Tony Blair’s Labour government came to power, but can’t be forgotten since these ugly and sometimes off-kilter right-skewed statues continue to litter the local landscape:

In 2015, David Cameron’s Conservative Government set up the South Tees Development Corporation. It aimed to regenerate Teesside by using public funds to attract private investment, creating jobs and renewed prosperity in an area which had been somewhat left behind in modern Britain.

The Corporation was granted significant powers to make decisions about land use, development and infrastructure so that it could cut through the bureaucratic ‘red tape’ which so often prevented regeneration schemes from delivering timely tangible results. By sticking to a clear long-term strategic vision, the intention was that economic regeneration would surely follow.

It made some notable progress despite local protests about harming local heritage: the demolition and clean-up of the Redcar Steelworks site and the expanding local ‘freeport’ are both products of the Corporation.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with schemes that aim to cut bureaucracy and ‘red tape’, the governance perhaps wasn’t quite as tight as it ought to have been, and the Corporation fell into financial controversy following accusations that public money had not been used appropriately.

Yet, despite losing almost a third of his vote, the Tees Valley Mayor who leads the Corporation kept his position in the 2024 election. Will that change how this story ends?

Good Lord, it’s the second post about a church in a row, I’ll need to hand this blog over to my brother if I’m not careful. Today’s visit is to St George’s Chapel, hidden away at what was once the centre of the Heathrow Airport site.

I’ve long known this existed, but I’d never visited. I’ve recently been reading Flying Blind by Peter Robison, and its mention of memorials to those killed in plane crashes spurred me to call in.

Except, one can’t call in. The church itself is open only for services. Opened in 1968, it was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who more famously designed Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and the Ulster Hospital. It is in a cave dug beneath Heathrow, stylistically similar to a crypt, the better to provide sound insulation from the noise above.

St George’s was designed with three apses, so that the Anglican, Catholic and Free Churches didn’t have to share. In the 1970s, the churches perhaps realised how petty and, dare I say it, unchristian that seemed, and so the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council banded together and rededicated one of the apses for shared used. They allowed the other two to be dedicated to use by non-Abrahamic religions, in a show of multi-faith… who am I kidding, this was the 1970s, of course they didn’t. They plonked a Bible in one of them, a font in the other, and carried on just as they were. Other faiths weren’t catered for until 1998, when a separate ground-floor multifaith prayer room was opened.

I couldn’t see any of this because the door was locked: as best as I can tell, it only opens at lunchtime four times per week these days, all of them for Catholic services. There was an A4 notice posted on the door with a number to call for urgent chaplaincy assistance… which was the same number one is advised to call if there is any ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the vicinity. I’m not sure whether the chaplain prays for divine intervention in unruly behaviour or whether the security guard comes down to take your confession.

I’m being snippier than I mean to be. You can be as atheist as me and still think that the Garden of Remembrance is quite lovely. The 16-foot oak cross is arresting, and the many and varied memorial plaques are moving. The enclosed nature of the garden makes it a surprisingly peaceful and quiet place to sit and contemplate.

There is something genuinely delightful about the fact that Heathrow has protected this space while everything around it has changed. It’s a glorious bit of human-focused inefficiency, a rare place in an airport where one can sit in peace without being expected to handover cash.

Long may it continue.

Twenty years ago, I used to walk across Stockton’s Trinity Green daily, shuttling between my rented student house and lectures at Durham University’s Queen’s Campus… though in those days, it wasn’t called Trinity Green; it was just a ruined church.

Twelve years ago, I got around to writing about the slightly grisly history of the ruined church that stands at its center—and the graveyard that has now become the Green itself.

Wandering across the Green again, I reflected on how lovely the space has become, mostly thanks to work that was done some years after I moved away from Stockton. It’s become a great bit of urban greenery, with the once frequently vandalized and graffitied ruined church now sensitively fenced off, adding a beautiful atmospheric centerpiece.

It’s easy to imagine an alternative history in which the ruined church was flattened and its churchyard redeveloped into a car park or something similar. Instead, Stockton Council had the foresight to create something really special.

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?