Last year, I enjoyed Charlotte Wells’s film Aftersun.

I recently learned that Wells had made a previous 11-minute short film which was particularly well-regarded: Tuesday. The whole thing can be streamed for free on her website.

It’s a short film centred on a Scottish sixteen-year-old girl’s experience of grief, most of it—like most of the emotion in Aftersun—unexpressed and repressed.

I noticed that Tuesday felt like it was, emotionally, at a remove from the viewer. I felt like an observer, rather than someone involved in the central character’s emotional life. This was similar to my response to Aftersun, and it’s made me reevaluate it: perhaps that was, in fact, Wells’s intent in both films.

There is something interesting about casting the viewer as an observer, about keeping the characters at a distance. It’s also something that must be difficult to achieve when the emotions explored in both films are such strong, universal feelings.

You already know that I know nothing about cinema; this short film made me realise that I perhaps missed the point, the artistic intent, of that longer one.

Maybe I’m learning… though writing about ‘Tuesday’ on a Monday perhaps shows I could learn a little more about good blogging technique.

Yesterday, I mentioned the unprecedented pace of social change and its effect on Westminster politics. Today, I’m thinking about something similar, albeit on a very small scale.

A decade ago, Facebook boldly announced a ‘shift to video’, predicting that most posts on Facebook’s ‘newsfeed’ would be videos within five years.

Much of the technology commentariat was unconvinced. They argued that people don’t like using headphones—and wouldn’t put up with subtitles to watch silently. Perhaps they were right: video didn’t take off in the way that Facebook expected, and lawsuits followed.

Fast-forward a decade, and today you’ll find me sitting in a coffee shop, with headphones in: not because I’m watching videos, but to block out the noise from those who are. In just a few years, it seems to have become socially acceptable for people to watch videos without headphones in public places. Shorts have become acceptable in restaurants when they’re the YouTube version; the Reels on the bus go round and round; the prevailing sound on trains has become TikTok rather than clackety-clack.

I don’t especially begrudge this: social norms are in constant flux, and there’s little point being curmudgeonly. But blimey, it’s been a quick change from being unviable to being unavoidable.

The image at the top of the post was generated by Playground 2.5.

In an article published on the Financial Times website yesterday, with the fantastic headline ‘Sex and dogs and heads will roll’, Simon Kuper observes that:

One in 20 MPs elected in 2019 had left parliament, been suspended or had the party whip removed after misconduct allegations by December 2023.

It’s a jaw-dropping statistic which gives context to Kuper’s discussion of how scandals have changed over the years. Thanks to the unprecedented pace of social change, things which were resigning matters in the 1990s are not today—and vice versa. It’s astonishing to remember how recently homosexual relationships were considered scandalous, while overt racism was not.

A year on from watching the Royal Northern Sinfonia accompany Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Wendy and I returned to see them repeat the trick with Chaplin’s 1936 follow-up, Modern Times.

I don’t think I’ve seen Modern Times before. The programme for this performance leaned into a narrative around automation and drew a comparison with the current debate about the future of work in the context of artificial intelligence. I found this a bit reaching: I saw the film more as a commentary on capitalism and the Great Depression.

You may already know the plot: Chaplin’s Tramp is sacked from his job at a steel mill after the pace and repetitive nature of the work produces a nervous breakdown. He meets a girl, they plan a life together, but he bounces in and out of employment and prison. It’s a mostly-silent comedy romance, scored by Chaplin.

Not knowing the film, I was disappointed by the score, which seemed to draw heavily on the jazz standard Smile. You may chuckle knowingly: as I’ve since discovered, the score came first, and combined with lyrics inspired by the film, it became Smile only two decades or so later.

Modern Times was brilliant, particularly in its physical comedy, but I thought it lacked a bit of the warm innocence of City Lights. It also had less emotional range: Modern Times didn’t have the profound melancholy and longing of City Lights: it was an altogether lighter affair, despite its political message.

But the film was only half the experience. The Royal Northern Sinfonia performed as brilliantly as always, and as with last year’s example, really brought the film to life.

We had a great time.

Yesterday, in his press conference about the Government’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, Rishi Sunak said:

If Labour peers had not spent weeks holding up the bill in the House of Lords to try to block these flights altogether, we would have begun this process weeks ago.

There are 790 peers, of which 173 are Labour peers. Labour peers alone do not have the majority required to pass amendments and hold up the bill in the House of Lords.

Sunak also told us:

The only way to stop the boats is to eliminate the incentive to come by making it clear that if you are here illegally, you will not be able to stay. This policy does exactly that.

More than 6,000 asylum seekers have crossed the English Channel so far this year, a less-than five-month period. Rwanda has agreed to accept 1,000 asylum seekers over a five-year period… or about 83 per five-month period.

In his press conference yesterday, our Prime Minister claimed that:

the patience of the British people ‘is worn pretty thin by this point.’

I agree with him, though I think our patience is being worn through by him. I think that Ali Smith perhaps put it better in Autumn:

I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to anymore. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful.

If I had to name one genre that I struggle with more than any other, science fiction would be it. Kawaguchi’s series about a cafe called Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo is plainly science fiction, but it had been recommended so many times that I thought I’d give it a go.

This first in the series was a play in 2010, published as a novel in Japan in 2015, and an English translation by Geoffrey Trousselot was published in 2019.

The conceit is very silly. Funiculi Funicula has a particular seat whose occupants can time travel, though only once in their lifetime. They cannot move from the seat, and they return to the present once they finish their coffee—which they must do before it gets cold. Oh, and most crucially, nothing they do while time travelling can affect the present in any way. In this volume, four people make a journey through time.

For the most part, the tone of the book is warm and light: it has an awareness of the silliness of its premise, and there’s a weary humour about it within the dialogue. But there are passages that are deeply moving, events and moments of realisation that hit with surprising heaviness and melancholy.

This isn’t really a book about time travel: it’s a book about leaving the past behind, making the most of the present and embracing the future. It’s to no-one’s benefit to live in their past and thereby become a ghost in the present.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. There are three sequels which have already been published, and another due in September. I will look out for all of them.

Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust.

In 2008, Dame Carol Black said:

Replacing the sick note with a fit note would switch the focus to what people can do instead of what they cannot.

Gordon Brown’s government subsquently replaced the ‘sick note’ with a ‘fit note’ which put a new focus what people could do instead of what they could not.

Yesterday, Rishi Sunak said:

We need to change the sick note culture so the default becomes what work you can do – not what you can’t.

It might seem like money for old role, but nevertheless, let’s focus on what Sunak can do, not what he can’t.

In 2008, 2.4% of all working hours in the UK were lost to sickness absence. By 2022, this had ‘spiralled’—Sunak’s word—to 2.6%. For what it’s worth, at the demise of the last Tory government in 1997, it was 3%.

In 2008, 2.6 million people were waiting for NHS treatment. By 2023, that had almost tripled, from 2.6 million to 7.7 million.

Here’s what Sunak, and perhaps Sunak alone, can do: look at those figures and conclude that people are staying off work too readily, and that the welfare system needs to be—Sunak’s word—’tightened’.