I’ve a sneaking suspicion that most people don’t visit my blog for incisive football analysis, even though I have even been to a match at St James’ Park. But that’s not going to stop me.

Yesterday, in the FA Cup, Newcastle beat Sunderland. The match was held at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, and earlier this week, the plans for the day resulted in a controversy which caught my eye.

Some corporate guests who supported Newcastle United were to be hosted in a bar at the Stadium of Light, with the seats selling for £600. The bar—as one might expect—is usually decked out in Sunderland-supporting slogans and whatnot. Given the plan to use the space for rival supporters, these were temporarily covered with Newcastle-supporting alternatives.

This is exactly the decision I would have made in the drastically unlikely situation of being in charge of the decor for a football stadium bar on derby day. If I were flogging tickets for £600, I’d take it as read that the bar should be decorated for the supporters who are expected to be in it. It just seems polite: as a host, I’d want my guests to be relaxed. And, frankly, I’d expect severe complaints if I hosted a party in a space decorated for the rivals. Seriously, I don’t think I’d have given this a second thought.

It turns out, though, that I would be in mega-trouble. It’s the kind of thing that leads to a corporate statement referencing ‘a serious error of judgement’ and the board of directors requesting that ‘an immediate review is undertaken to determine how this process unfolded.’

Blimey. I know nothing about football, but the error and the scale of the controversy here make me feel like I’ve beamed down from a different planet.

Cultural and societal norms are tricky things. I’ve lived in the North East for decades but could have felt like a social pariah for making an error in basic sporting etiquette. It’s easy to forget how much of this stuff imbues our everyday lives. It must be near-impossible for those who live and work in places with entirely different cultures to feel comfortable, confident and accepted in their new homes. Trip wires lurk in the most unlikely places.

It’s a reminder that we should all be a little more patient, understanding and helpful when people get the basics wrong. There’s a line in Philippa Perry’s recent book:

Often we can fall into the trap of interpreting behaviour by what it would mean if we did whatever the other person is doing. Someone else’s behaviour has a different meaning from what it would mean if you did it.

A little understanding can go a long way.

The pictures in this post are from my own visit to the Stadium of Light in 2019. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

In the Financial Times earlier this week, Professor Margaret Heffernan made a startling claim:

I have yet to meet a chief executive who reads regularly.

She means, essentially, reading for pleasure—not reading reports and so forth as part of their role.

Many skip newspapers, and magazines are a stretch. They don’t have time, they say. It’s inefficient; they can get the information they need from those around them.

As well as citing lots of evidence around the benefits of reading, Heffernan observes that reading broadly provides perspective.

Fiction invites you to loiter unseen in the lives of others. We are living through a golden age of translation too, so you can go anywhere in time or place.

The idea that modern complexity is new is swiftly put to rest by the rich brew of voices, perspectives and disciplines that see human history through a spinning kaleidoscope.

Heffernan’s article made me reflect on several things.

Firstly, I disagree a little with her evangelism. I derive considerable benefit from reading, but a large part of that is because I enjoy it. Reading isn’t for everyone. There are other ways of seeking diverse voices and transporting our minds elsewhere.

That said, reading is an enjoyable and effective way to reach those goals. Many people who don’t think they enjoy reading just haven’t yet found their groove, often because they pick up the books they feel they ‘ought to’ read rather than ones they ‘want to’ read. The specifics of what people read are less important than the benefits that come from being swept up and transported to an entirely different view of the world.

Secondly, I’m surprised that so few chief executives read. There’s a surprising overlap between literature and medicine, and it’s common to hear casual book recommendations from senior people in their fields. I’m surprised that this doesn’t extend to the world of business.

Expertise in both medicine and business requires good pattern recognition. Books allow us to live through many more experiences than could be packed into a lifetime and to distil the patterns and lessons from them. I’m surprised to hear that this isn’t recognised in business.

Thirdly, my surprise is tempered by the reflection that the revelation feels true.

In one of the places I’ve worked, a corporate line seemed to catch on about it being a ‘huge organisation’. This wasn’t true: it was smaller than most in its field. I challenged this with executives so often that I ended up with a text file saved on my desktop full of numerically accurate comparisons I could quote whenever necessary.

I’ve worked for organisations whose senior leaders claimed them to be ‘world-beating’, and I’ve wondered which world they lived in.

Wendy and I have come to admire the journalist Sophy Ridge for her pluck, often remarking to political and business interviewees, ‘Come on, you don’t honestly believe that, do you?’

On reflection, all these are about the same thing: a lack of broad perspective. If all executives ever engage in is their tiny sliver of the world, then of course they will believe the unbelievable and of course they will misunderstand their organisation’s place in the world.

Reflecting on what I’ve seen about the lack of perspective many executives possess, I should have intuited that few of them read. Perhaps we ought to hope that things might change.

They say that reading history is the only way to understand the news. Someone recently, perhaps in a news article, suggested reading Conundrum as an essential text to understand the current hysteria over gender.

Morris died in 2020 at the age of 94: she was of my grandparents’ generation. She is best known as a journalist and travel writer, including the only journalist accompanying Edmund Hillary and colleagues on the first expedition to successfully ascend Mount Everest in 1953.

This book, published in 1974, documents her gender transition. She was born James Morris, the name she used until after her gender reassignment surgery in 1972. There is, by the way, plenty of background colour about her journalistic career, which I found fascinating.

Conundrum is of its time, and some descriptions and gender stereotypes would be considered ‘problematic’ today. It is, nevertheless, beautifully written, and I had no trouble turning the pages.

I’ve sometimes struggled to fully understand the motivation behind transitioning from one gender to another. I’m in the privileged position that it’s something I’ve never been driven to contemplate at any length. Perhaps I undervalue the impact of my gender on my life, and so I find it difficult to appreciate why it’s such a big deal to others. Morris helped me see this differently and understand that—for her—the change and associated surgery were ‘corrective’.

This is an idea I’ve come across before, but something in Morris’s explanation made it ‘click’ for me. I think I appreciated her comparison between the medical ethics of removing a healthy arm and a healthy penis, a perspective I hadn’t considered before. I found myself challenged and enlightened as a result.

I also found Morris’s discussion of the bureaucracy of her change insightful: whether she could remain married, still be a member of her male-only members’ clubs, and so forth. I was struck by how such things were dealt with in the 1970s, mostly with compassion, care and, perhaps above all, consideration for Morris’s feelings.

It feels worlds away from the unpleasant approach of those who seek to divide us in the 2020s. It’s both unimaginable and yet true that half a century later, Ministers of the Crown try to score rhetorical points in Parliament by discussing whether women can have penises. There is no compassion for any individual in suggesting, as a former Home Secretary did at the despatch box, that Sir Keir Starker may run as Labour’s first female Prime Minister.

This New Year’s Eve, perhaps we can hope for the future that our leaders will be better at learning from our past.

This is Ken Loach’s last film, and the first one I’ve seen. As a Newcastle resident, this admission is tantamount to a criminal offence, but you ought not be surprised. I have thought about going to see Ken Loach films in the past, particularly the almost unavoidable I, Daniel Blake, but I was a little put off by the earnestness of other people’s recommendations. It made me think that his work must be a bit worthy, a bit focused on social justice over critical thought, and who needs worthiness in life?

If it hadn’t been for my cinema-going experiment, I also wouldn’t have gone to see The Old Oak. I had seen trailers and thought they were advertising a pat film about some asylum seekers moving to a small town in County Durham, meeting initial resistance fuelled by a cultural clash, and everyone getting along swimmingly in the end.

My understanding of the set-up was correct, but Loach’s treatment was a good deal more thoughtful than I’d anticipated. There is no straightforward resolution, and there are plenty of subtle touches, though it’s fair to say that the film has a clear moral viewpoint which doesn’t leave much room for uncertainty and exploration. The plot was a little contrived. This is also the kind of film where people talk in full sentences stuffed with exposition, and where thoughts and feelings are voiced more than they are hinted at.

In acting terms, it felt like Ebla Mari (who played the female lead) carried the film: I’d like to see her in other roles, but some of the other performances were a bit less convincing, which I think is attributable to the writing style as much as to the acting.

But I was swept up into the world of the film, suspended my disbelief, and went with it. That’s an achievement. It didn’t change my world, but the film’s positivity did give me a little boost. I enjoyed it, and I think it’s probably worth seeing.

Wendy and I saw Past Lives advertised a little while ago, and were keen to see it at the cinema.

It is Celine Song’s debut film, starring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It follows two 12-year-old friends in South Korea who are parted when one of them emigrates. We catch up with them at age 24, and again at age 36, as they reflect on how their lives have changed, and on the paths not taken.

It’s hard to know what to say about the film. It was wonderfully acted, beautifully shot and the script was understated and emotionally powerful. It is one of those films which is as much about what is not said as what is said: there are several extraordinarily powerful moments without dialogue.

Both Wendy and I thought this was excellent, and thoroughly enjoyed seeing it. Yet, I think we’re perhaps less likely to remember it a year hence than, say, Tár, which I think made a bigger impression on us both.

I’m not into cars. I once owned a PlayStation 2, but I’ve never played the racing simulator game after which this film is named. I’m patently not the target audience for this recently released Neill Blomkamp film. If it weren’t for my ‘new approach’ to going to the cinema, there’s no way on Earth that I’d have seen this.

The film is based on a true story. The main character is Jann Mardenborough, a young lad who is very skilled at the Gran Turismo computer game and is thereby recruited and trained up to drive real racing cars. The tension in the film comes from whether someone from outside can make it in the highly competitive world of racing… though, of course, the existence of the film is its own spoiler.

I sort of enjoyed this. It was too long—two hours and 14 minutes—and I could have done without all the extended racing sequences. I’ll confess that I had a bit of a micro-snooze in many of them. They didn’t seem to be doing anything particularly cinematically clever, and they didn’t really advance the plot, as the outcome was often plain from the start. Yet, I was captivated by Archie Madekwe’s performance as Mardenborough, and did find myself rooting for him.

But there were issues.

Firstly, some of the characterisation was awful. Orlando Bloom could not have been less convincing as PR man Danny Moore if his dialogue had been replaced by silent-film-style interstitials. It was awful. His character had essentially no narrative arc, his drive appeared to come entirely from wanting to promote Nissan, and his whole schtick was morally questionable given the life-and-death stakes for other characters. The character was poorly written, and Bloom wasn’t able to overcome that.

I didn’t recognise Ginger Spice Geri Horner as Lesley Mardenborough—I’m not good with celebrities—but did find myself wondering what had gone wrong in the film-making process. The delivery of her lines was so detached from the situations in which they took place that I found myself wondering if there had been a sickness-driven last-minute substitution or similar. This didn’t interfere with my enjoyment in any major way, though, as the character was so minor.

Which brings us to… the almost total absence of substantive roles for women in this film. Of the first twenty credited actors, only two are women. I don’t understand why you’d make that creative choice. Sure, if this was intended to be biographically accurate, then you’re limited, but it has been widely criticised for straying quite far from the facts. So why not make the creative choice to re-cast Bloom’s character as female? That could even supply a nice narrative arc as a female PR agent battles stereotypes to establish her credentials in a male-dominated industry. It’d be more satisfying than the main motivation being to sell more Nissans. I should acknowledge Maeve Courtier-Lilley, who managed to give some depth to her role despite only being given, like, five lines.

This is also a film that patronises. There are many scenes which begin with establishing shots of well-known skylines, overlaid with both the city and the country in large letters. For example: here’s the Eiffel Tower, let’s just overlay this shot with “PARIS, FRANCE” to make sure the audience really gets it. I’m afraid this really hit my funny bone, and I found myself audibly sniggering each time it happened. Plot points are also telegraphed: there’s a section of the film where Mardenborough must come in fourth place or better to progress, and this point is hammered home so many times for the audience that it begins to hurt.

But mostly… I don’t understand why the team decided to make the racing the main point of tension in the film when the outcome is obvious. It strikes me as a really odd creative decision, but maybe that’s because I’m under-appreciating the popular appeal of the racing sequences. There’s an underplayed subplot about Mardenborough’s relationship with his dad, and I think that’s where I would have located the heart of the film. There are interesting stages to their relationship: frustration at Jaan’s preference for computer games over physical sport; a feeling of exclusion driven by the expensive, elite nature of the sport; fatherly concern at the dangers involved; and, ultimately, reflection on the lack of support he provided. There’s a lot in there that could have been unpacked through the racing, with reconciliation perhaps serving as a more rewarding ending.

Perhaps what this whole review really says is: I don’t particularly warm to racing movies, and would have liked this to be an entirely different kind of film. Who knows? This is a film I would never, under normal circumstances, have seen or had any opinion on. I’m glad I saw it, and feel like I learned a little more about my own film preferences as a result.

In an old LRB diary, Patrick McGuinness makes an observation about loquacious train announcements:

In Europe what you hear on trains is minimal and informative: you get told your destination and the stops as they approach. In Britain it’s a relentless patter of pseudo-information aimed at pseudo-customers by people running a pseudo-business. You don’t ‘read’ the safety instructions, you ‘take some time to familiarise yourself with’ them. Your belongings must always be ‘personal’, and in case you were wondering, as you neared your ‘station stop’, what to do with them, you are ‘advised to remember to take them with you’. The train is also the only place outside a Classics course where you’ll hear the word ‘vestibule’. That’s OK, it’s nice to hear it again, but they spoil it by saying ‘vestibule area’.

He’s wrong about ‘vestibule’: you can also occasionally hear it in our house, where Wendy and I sometimes playfully use the word to refer to our porch. It’s even what we call the porch in our smart home setup.

This is an anatomical joke: there are many vestibules in the body, which are generally small spaces leading to larger spaces. The anatomical features retain a metaphorical connection to the original Latin vestibulum, the small enclosed room at the entrance to a house… otherwise known today as a porch. But I’d never thought about it enough to realise that we were re-creating the metaphor in reverse.

You’re also possessed of a pair of vestibulocochlear nerves. We occasionally misappropriate the word as an adjective meaning ‘in the porch’—‘Who turned the vestibulocochlear light off?’ There ain’t no humour like anatomical humour, amirite?

Musing on this today, however, made me wonder about the connection between a ‘vestibule’ and a ‘vestry’ in a church. I first wondered if it was maybe a similar metaphorical thing, in that the ‘vestry’ is the area in which one prepares before entering a church. Or perhaps the connection is ‘vesting’, as in donning or doffing clothes.

So I fired up the OED.

As it turns out, they seem to be unrelated, or at least both existed in Latin. As I’ve mentioned, vestibule comes from vestibulum, which retains its meaning today. The history of ‘vestry’ is less certain. It seems to come from the ‘vestments’, from the Latin vestīmentum—clothes. However, it’s not clear if that’s a direct thing—because it’s where the garments are stored—or a metaphorical thing, ‘vesting’ in the sense of endowing someone with something, like ‘investment’.

A ‘vestry’ in the church sense is also sometimes called a ‘revestry’ or a ‘vestiary’—some sources suggest that ‘vestry’ is just a corruption of ‘vestiary’. Interestingly, Wikipedia seems to prefer ’sacristy’, which I would have said was specifically Catholic, but very much isn’t.

The OED provides a whole separate meaning of ‘vestry’: the rubbish associated with a mine, which I think I’d probably naturally refer to as ‘slag’. I would never have previously imagined featuring those two words in the same sentence.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Richard Smith recently shared this editorial he wrote more than thirty years ago, on the subject of preventing whistleblowing. It seems entirely relevant to the present day.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

Most organisations eventually have to take tough decisions. Difficult choices, particularly over allocating resources, have long been part of working in the NHS. The choices will become tougher, and there may be more losers than winners. The fear that the losers will tell all to the media is what leads managers to reach for their gags. They make a mistake. Instead, they need to create organisations-be they hospitals or health authorities -where employees feel enough part of the decision making process not to need to blow their whistles.

You begin by letting everybody know what is going on. If the rhetoric is glossy brochures full of the word “quality” and the reality is elderly patients with pressure sores in back wards with peeling paint, then staff will become cynical and demotivated. They need to be convinced that the available resources are used fairly, efficiently, and effectively. The surest way to convince them is to involve them in decision making. The decisions that are made must be clearly and honestly communicated. Staff must have a chance to come back on poor decisions, and managers should not be afraid to reverse decisions that are wrong.

If staff understand the true circumstances of the organisation and feel that their views have been given serious attention then they will accept tough decisions. But if seemingly arbitrary decisions appear from nowhere then staff will be unhappy and one or two will contact the press. Managers who try to create a climate of fear will neither stop whistle blowing nor run an effective health service.

That second paragraph is remarkable: it is common sense, it has been clearly articulated for more than thirty years, yet it is seldom followed.

The difficulty so often seems to come at the point of involving people in decision-making. Frequently, efforts to do this appear as cynical attempts to justify decisions that have already been taken. This isn’t solely a problem in the health service: we can see similar cynicism, for example, towards the ongoing consultation about closing railway ticket offices.

If we choose to be as uncynical as possible, then it strikes me that this often boils down to poor communication. Smith talks about ‘glossy brochures full of the word “quality”’—and I think he’s right. Starting a conversation about funding cuts with rhetoric around ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’ drives cynicism more than collaborative decision-making. Too frequently, managers fear being honest, and too often, managers choose not to be plain-spoken. You cannot have shared decisions if the people sharing in the decision have no idea what you’re talking about.

A couple of weeks ago, I made passing mention of the 1984 BBC drama Threads, the chilling one-off film that dramatised the aftermath of a thermonuclear explosion in the UK.

I know I’ve already recommended one article from the latest LRB, but Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s essay on Britain’s preparations for nuclear war during this period is well-worth a read.

The advice given to medical staff ran from the ridiculous to the sublime. Staff at ‘casualty collecting centres’ were told to siphon off patients whose deaths seemed inevitable to a holding area, though they mustn’t describe these patients as ‘moribund – expecting to die – but expectant, meaning expecting to get away to hospital as soon as possible’. A lecture on nursing after an attack warned: ‘There will be no place for grumblers.’ The government contemplated requisitioning ice cream vans, using their chiller cabinets to store blood and medicine.

I particularly liked the description of local Government push-back against national Government:

When the radicals on the South Yorkshire Fire and Civil Defence Authority were forced by the Thatcher government to make plans for nuclear war, they responded by publicising plans so detailed and lurid that they functioned as anti-nuclear propaganda. Protect and Survive advised readers, grimly enough, that ‘if anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room’, you should ‘move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.’ The South Yorkshire plan warned that ‘the bag should not be too tightly sealed, as pressure of the gases produced by a body decomposing is likely to rupture the bag and the resulting smell is likely to create unnecessary offence.’

Wither any national Government that forgets that local Government has democratic legitimacy, too.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Yesterday, I promised to share some more from the latest Monocle Companion, so here are some thoughts on a grab-bag of essays.

An article on sleep by Claudia Jacob has some admirably straightforward advice:

So how can we simplify our sleep? The science tells us that the signs are abundant and free to see. Do you depend on an alarm to wake you? Do you need naps during the day and crave caffeine? Have you fallen asleep while hearing about a colleague’s weekend plans? If so, it’s probably time to get an early night to replenish your reserves. While the science of sleep is galloping ahead, you don’t need an app to understand it.

If only all journalistic health advice was so clear-minded.

In her essay on blame, Sally O’Sullivan says

Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, sets up the mistaken idea that there is one right story, one truth. I’m sorry to say that this is never the case.

Every family member will see a situation differently and this multiplicity of truths is invariably complex. But no family is immune from these tussles. Indeed, the closer the relationship, the more likely it is that we will revert to blame.

This made me feel sorry for the Prince. I’ve seen so much vitriol directed at him for the phrase “my truth” often—wrongly, in my view—being taken to suggest that multiple truths are possible, rather than one singular truth. Here, he’s being criticised for exactly the opposite, based on exactly the same text.

The capacity of commentators to find fault may be infinite… this blogger included.

In an essay on reforming the modern approach to business, Josh Fehnert writes:

To conduct your business in good faith, in a way that’s transparent, rigorous and fairly managed, is a job in itself and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Remember that it is OK to forgive people. That said, distant targets, such as decarbonising by 2050 or improving the gender balance of your board within a decade, ring hollow. Isn’t it better to get going right away, even if that means making a few missteps, and reach your goal rather than kicking the can down the road?

Bravo. I’ve been involved in too many tedious arguments about long-term plans for organisations, which everyone knows no-one will stick to. This sometimes boils down to confusing strategy with implementation. It’s good to have a long-term strategy which guides an organisation’s approach. It’s also essential to have a separate plan for implementation with a much shorter time horizon and tangible staging posts. The vicissitudes of life will necessitate changes in implementations, which the strategy ought to float above.

I recently read a ten-year strategy for an organisation which—for sound reasons—no-one reasonably expects to exist ten years hence. So, apart from hubris, what was the point in giving the strategy a decade?

In an essay on the recycling symbol, Richard Spencer Powell suggests adding

a visible green circle on the front of all recyclable packaging. That means no ifs, buts, or claims of being “partially recyclable”; it either is or isn’t.

Alternatively, if your plastic packaging isn’t recyclable (or doing so involves very specific efforts from the consumer) then brands should be obliged to put a red dot on it.

I appreciate the problem Powell is trying to solve: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to fish crisp packets out of recycling bins, a problem excavated by claims on the packaging that it is recyclable… but only via a specific scheme.

But it’s evidence that Powell underestimates the challenge: even within the UK alone, the items which are recyclable in local council bins vary enormously, as do the conditions in which the recycling must be presented. It’s clearly not feasible to have regional packaging dots.

But quite apart from that, the byline makes clear that Powell oversaw the design of this very edition of Monocle Companion. The book not only omits any recycling guidance, but also is perhaps the only one I’ve read this year containing no information on the sustainability of its paper source.

Perhaps he ought to start closer to home?

Albert Read writes:

I believe that imagination is something you can work at. If we’re attentive to ours, we can find all sorts of potential within ourselves. We should pay attention to our imaginative health in the same way that we look after our physical health and emotional wellbeing. All the studies show that being imaginative and creative makes us happier and more fulfilled. It’s the root of being alive.

I’m not keen on the ‘medicalisation’ of the topic, and I’m turned-off by the phrase ‘all the studies show’. But I completely concur with the wider point. Imagination and creativity are undervalued assets in life.

I’m not sure what made me relate this essay to work—I’m starting to see a bit of a theme in this post. Yet, I think that a little less adherence to change theory or management models in some health organisations, and a little more deep creative thought and engagement, would go a long way.

In a fantastic essay on friendship, David Sax says, in the context of the workplace:

Humans remain a social species and trust is the only currency that matters.

I reflected a lot on this. It’s obviously true: if I have a tricky professional decision to make, I run it past people I trust, not necessarily people with particular titles. Similarly, my close colleagues will often ask, ‘Who’s a sensible person to ask about X?’—which is really a question about whom I would trust.

I think I’m often critical of others for trying to use hierarchy in place of trust. But this made me reflect that perhaps I have become a bit slack in fostering trust too. It’s easy to get frustrated with being asked to explain principles repeatedly to different people, but perhaps I don’t spend enough time considering that it’s only the first time I’m explaining it to the latest person. Using it as an opportunity to patiently foster trust is probably a better approach than getting frustrated.

In an essay on commuting, Lilian Fawcett writes:

It’s a liminal time between commitments that gives our minds space to wander.

I know I’m not alone in finding solace in liminal spaces: sitting on a train, in an airport departure lounge, in a hotel lobby. I find it uniquely relaxing to be anywhere where I have a right and necessity to be, but where there is no expectation on me.

I also thoroughly enjoy my walks into work, but I hadn’t really connected these two preferences until I read Fawcett’s essay. Now I see that they are essentially the same thing… albeit walking is a little more active.