While we were at Belsay Hall this week, Wendy and I were lucky enough to see this series of installations by Dr Ingrid Pollard MBE. There are twelve installations in the exhibition in all, from the large and arresting piece above—a large sandstone rock suspended on jute ropes—to printed acrylic panels filling in gaps where the original wallpaper has torn away.

Other works include printed voiles over windows, slate tiles carefully arranged in the library, and mirrors placed in the quarry garden.

Wendy and I both reflected on how challenging it must be for an artist to be commissioned to display work that responds to and exists within a Grade I listed building. We both thought that there were some interesting ideas in each of the installations, but none of them particularly connected with us, nor made us reflect differently on the space or our surroundings. Perhaps that was, in part, because this was our first visit, so we have no conception of how the artworks changed our response to the Hall.

We’ll have to visit again.

I’m not normally a big fan of historical fiction, preferring to read things set in the present day. However, Tom Crewe’s debut novel was so widely recommended that I thought I’d give it a go.

The novel is fiction, but it is inspired by the story of John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis jointly writing one of the first medical texts about human sexuality in the late Victorian era. Both of the male authors portrayed in The New Life are married, though each has particular sexual preferences: one has relationships with men, while the other is aroused by women urinating. Their medical text concerns homosexuality—or ‘inversion’ in the language of the period—and forms part of their wider view that world ought to embrace progressive social change. The arrest of Oscar Wilde reveals a greater level of establishment prejudice than they had perhaps anticipated, and indirectly threatens their work.

I enjoyed reading this, but I found the Victorian dialogue a bit wearing and the claustrophobic, stifling social norms hard work. I know that it could be argued that that’s the point, but I find it quite hard to empathise with people who are buttoned up to quite that extent… which is one reason I don’t really like historical fiction.

I did highlight a few passages:

We must live in the future we hope to make.

‘And you look very fine.’ She tugged playfully at his lapel. ‘A new suit! Is it horribly uncomfortable?’

‘Horribly. Freedom lost for freedom gained.’

‘And what are you? You are not so oblivious as to think there are only two of us. Is the law beyond scrutiny? It is a rotten, filthy law. That is the stain. The point of my conclusion, which you single out for scandal, is that there is a benefit, as you call it, in a proper comprehension of the past. The knowledge that what we punsih with hard labour — a crime for which men used to hang in our fathers’ time — was once praised, understood, practised, by the very men whose thought we teach our sons, whose heroics we pride ourselves on matching, whose marbles we line up for edification; may that knowledge not do some useful work in the world? How can it not?’

‘But Henry,’ she almost shouted, ‘you never did have me to yourself. It was on that basis that we married, that we thought up our marriage. No two people need be everything to each other.’

‘You have become everything.’

She stared at him defiantly. ‘I do not want to be, to anyone.’

Anguish locked in this throat. ‘You are. I am only loneliness without you.’

She stared at him still. ‘Then we should never have married,’ she said, quite plainly, putting down the plates.

A couple married for as long as they had been could know many things without ever talking about them. Sometimes it was the need to speak which signalled trouble.

It had mattered that his father was a doctor. As a child he liked the comings and goings at the house — the front door opening on a patient was like the beginning of a story — and he liked his father for being so wanted and necessary.

In 2009, I completed a geriatrics rotation, during which I helped with clinics on the Belsay Day Unit at what was then the Newcastle General Hospital.

It’s only taken 15 years to get around to visiting Belsay itself—and specifically, Belsay Hall.

Built a couple of hundred years ago, and recently restored, it was an unusual and rather interesting experience to visit an old hall which hasn’t been stuffed full of period furniture; it feels more like its decay has been arrested, rather than like it has been restored to a version of its former glory.

The handmade wallpaper may be peeling from the walls in places, but it felt like a hall with real character. The Grade I listed quarry gardens were also spectacular.

Wow. Wow. And for the avoidance of doubt: wow. Caleb Azumah Nelson writes astonishingly good prose.

It’s three years since I read his ‘stunning’ first novel, Open Water. I bought this second novel when it first came out, a year ago. I’ve been scared to read it because I didn’t think it could possibly live up to the promise of his first book, and I was braced for disappointment.

But wow.

Nelson writes prose that is also poetry. His turn of phrase, his toying with language, and his perfect elucidation of specific thoughts and feelings are incredible.

Despite that talent, the theme of this book is music and how it traverses the limits of language. It’s so lovely to read a recent novel that is sceptical of the power of language, that is not a peon to the written word. For it to be written in such beautiful language itself is a singular treat.

I can barely tell you the plot of the book because I was so taken with the writing that I almost didn’t notice. That narrator, a young black Londoner born to Ghanian parents comes of age, struggles with his relationship with his parents, and visits his extended family in Ghana. He revels in jazz, dancing—the solution of all of life’s problems—and playing the trumpet. I wasn’t as absorbed by the plot of this book as I was by Open Water, but I didn’t really mind.

The New York Times called Nelson’s writing in this book ‘overwrought or just bizarre’, so I’m more than willing to accept that this isn’t a book for everyone. But it was certainly for me, and I will wait with a combination of excitement and trepidation for whatever he writes next.

Last weekend, I read a brilliant article in the FT Weekend about a call centre which receives emergency calls from people trapped in lifts—the people who answer when you press the ‘alarm’ button.

It was written by Aidan Tulloch, who I’ve never come across before, but who is clearly a remarkably talented writer of lyrical and absorbing journalism. It’s a truly absorbing piece that’s worth reading for the quality of the writing alone.

I haven’t been able to get the article out of my head since I read it, and during a conversation with a colleague about something entirely different, I suddenly realised why.

In England, as in most countries around the world, doctors must notify health authorities if they suspect someone of one of the diseases set out in legislation. This allows other doctors—like me—to take action to protect the wider population from whatever threat that disease might pose.

From a process mapping perspective, this is straightforward: one doctor has information that another doctor needs. There are myriad routes to streamline or automate the communication of that message. A lot of the time, that would be enormously beneficial.

But my colleague and I were reflecting on how much more there is, sometimes, to those conversations than a simple passing over of information. There can be relationship building (‘how are you these days?’); education and clarification (‘that really doesn’t sound typical of disease X, are you sure that’s a likely diagnosis?’); reinforcement of the value of the notification (‘what do you do with these anyway?’); sharing of situational awareness (‘we’ve seen a lot of these lately’).

It might be massively more efficient for Stannah—the lift company in the FT Weekend article—to make buttons in lifts that just send an automated notification of a fault. But they’ve clearly understood that there’s much more to the interaction than that core notification.

The surrounding chat can be as important, and sometimes more important, than the actual message to be imparted.

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

Two weeks ago, the Conservative Prime Minister delivered a ‘major speech’ decrying Britain’s ‘sick note culture’ and promising punitive reforms to get people back to work. He expressed his profound disappointment that sick notes had become a ‘lifestyle choice’ for some.

Yesterday, the Conservatives had their first election victory in Newcastle in more than three decades, securing a single council seat. The newly installed Conservative councillor is a former GP, once suspended for falsifying a sick note to cover the holiday of an undercover Sunday Times journalist.

It’s a funny old world.

Earlier this week, I said—in essence—that I didn’t see the point of the film Civil War. Maybe I’m in a strange mood, because I felt the same after seeing Back to Black. Perhaps I just don’t understand cinema.

Back to Black is a biographical drama based on the life of Amy Winehouse, who is brilliantly played by Marisa Abela. It is an unremitting sympathetic portrayal of Winehouse and virtually everyone else in her life—to the point where it doesn’t really hang together as saying much of anything at all.

I suppose the first decision a biographer in any format must make is to decide on the questions they want to interrogate about the life they are covering. Even to me, someone who didn’t especially follow Amy Winehouse’s life or career, it seems as though it had a rich tapestry, as though she existed mostly in shades of grey rather than black or white.

It might have been interesting to interrogate the thought processes behind her compositions; but this film just repeatedly features her sitting alone and suddenly singing line upon line of perfect lyrics. There is no process.

It might have been interesting to interrogate the influence of her use of alcohol and cannabis on her songwriting; but in this film, alcohol and drugs are portrayed only in the negative.

It might have been interesting to interrogate how success and fame changed her approach to her art; but in this film, they bring only intrusive paparazzi.

Really, the film doesn’t ask any questions. It turns a short but storied life and a remarkable talent into a sympathetic melodrama featuring nothing but blandly ‘nice’ people.

It feels almost like the writer decided that the film should portray some of the life events that inspired the songs without realising that the songs’ emotional heft comes from being personal, opinionated, and true. Show them as based on a sanitised, black-and-white version of the truth comes off as inauthentic.

This is a middle-of-the-road, inoffensive film about a character who was neither of those things. In the end, that’s just a weird choice.

I saw this recently released film on the big screen this week. It follows a journalistic foursome as they travel across a present-day USA embroiled in civil war, attempting to reach and interview the President in the White House.

Our foursome comprises celebrated war photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), her aspiring protégé Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), Smith’s longtime writer collaborator Joel (Wagner Moura), and veteran New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson).

It seemed as if the film was going to be a tribute to the power of journalism, but it didn’t quite land: the central message ended up being about the futility of journalism, which was an odd choice, and I’m not convinced that it was what they were aiming for. I also didn’t really understand why they chose the US as a setting: it seemed to oddly hamstring the writers, who avoided any mention of issues which might divide the nation, which one might think would be the very issue journalists would want to examine. Some visual effects were jarringly ropey: a large group of helicopters seemingly caused no down-draft in one scene, which then immediately cut to the next scene beginning with the focus on a single helicopter’s down-draft causing dust to blow. There were a few deathly dull, protracted gunfight/battle scenes which could have been usefully cut.

And yet, for all that, I didn’t think the end result was too bad. It was a weird sort of road trip movie, and it was quite endearing to see the relationships of our foursome develop and to watch Jessie come of age. The soundtrack was not entirely successful, but was at least playful and unpredictable.

I don’t particularly want to see this again, but I wasn’t rolling my eyes and tapping my foot, waiting for the credits to roll.

It was… alright.

Oliver Burkeman shared the following riddle—which was new to me—in the latest edition of his newsletter, The Imperfectionist:

Imagine you’ve come into possession of a live goose, trapped in a large glass bottle. (Don’t ask how or why.) The animal has plenty of room in the bottle, and air to breathe, but the neck of the bottle is much too narrow for the goose to pass through. Your job is to remove the goose from the bottle without harming it, and without breaking any glass.

Perhaps you’ll laugh this off as obviously impossible. Or narrow your eyes and furrow your brow, as you try to figure out what you’re missing. In fact, the problem is neither impossible nor difficult. It’s easy. First, imagine the goose is outside the bottle.

Actually, there are no further steps. That’s it. You did it!

I know, I know: incredibly annoying. But I think the goose-in-the-bottle scenario encapsulates a crucial and liberating lesson about the way that a certain kind of person – me, and maybe you too – tends to overcomplicate things, when it comes to meaningful productivity or psychological growth.

A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into a friend who reminded me of a management and leadership course we took together twelve years ago. It was memorable because our impressions of the course were polar opposites: she had loved it, and I… hadn’t.

We spent a painful half-hour on that course working through an exercise sorting playing cards into a specific order in the fastest possible time. The ‘trick’ we were supposed to realise at some point during the exercise is that no-one instructed us to shuffle the cards between rounds, and so once we had sorted them, we could complete the next round of the ‘task’ instantly.¹

This was a long-winded, activity-based attempt to make the same point as the goose-in-the-bottle: We sometimes impose our own unstated, unquestioned rules, which can make life more difficult than it needs to be. We ought to be open-minded and actively question our assumptions.

The ‘goose-in-the-bottle’ allegory made me see this point entirely: it felt like a bit of an epiphany. The exercise with the playing cards left me mostly annoyed, and only with a background awareness of the point it was trying to make. Yet, I suspect for many people, including my friend, the opposite would be true: they’d find the goose-in-the-bottle annoying and the playing cards illuminating.

I’m occasionally guilty of inwardly rolling my eyes when people say things like ‘I’m a visual learner’—after all, we all learn in lots of different ways all the time. And yet, this example showed me the power of how different techniques can connect more directly with different people, and how getting the message across powerfully can depend on picking the right one.

1. In fact, in an illustration of why I did not enjoy this course, the tutor did, in fact, tell me that I had to shuffle the cards between rounds when I attempted this ‘trick’ too early in the exercise, completely undermining the point of the activity. ↩

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